Search and Discovery Tools for Astronomical On-line Resources and Services

A growing number of astronomical resources and data or information services are made available through the Internet. However valuable information is frequently hidden in a deluge of non-pertinent or non up-to-date documents. At a first level, compilations of astronomical resources provide help for selecting relevant sites. Combining yellow-page services and meta-databases of active pointers may be an efficient solution to the data retrieval problem. Responses generated by submission of queries to a set of heterogeneous resources are difficult to merge or cross-match, because different data providers generally use different data formats: new endeavors are under way to tackle this problem. We review the technical challenges involved in trying to provide general search and discovery tools, and to integrate them through upper level interfaces.Comment: 7 pages, 2 Postscript figures; to be published in A&A

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Architecture

The powerful discovery capabilities available in the ADS bibliographic services are possible thanks to the design of a flexible search and retrieval system based on a relational database model. Bibliographic records are stored as a corpus of structured documents containing fielded data and metadata, while discipline-specific knowledge is segregated in a set of files independent of the bibliographic data itself. The creation and management of links to both internal and external resources associated with each bibliography in the database is made possible by representing them as a set of document properties and their attributes. To improve global access to the ADS data holdings, a number of mirror sites have been created by cloning the database contents and software on a variety of hardware and software platforms. The procedures used to create and manage the database and its mirrors have been written as a set of scripts that can be run in either an interactive or unsupervised fashion. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 3 table

Multiple Retrieval Models and Regression Models for Prior Art Search

This paper presents the system called PATATRAS (PATent and Article Tracking, Retrieval and AnalysiS) realized for the IP track of CLEF 2009. Our approach presents three main characteristics: 1. The usage of multiple retrieval models (KL, Okapi) and term index definitions (lemma, phrase, concept) for the three languages considered in the present track (English, French, German) producing ten different sets of ranked results. 2. The merging of the different results based on multiple regression models using an additional validation set created from the patent collection. 3. The exploitation of patent metadata and of the citation structures for creating restricted initial working sets of patents and for producing a final re-ranking regression model. As we exploit specific metadata of the patent documents and the citation relations only at the creation of initial working sets and during the final post ranking step, our architecture remains generic and easy to extend

Strategies for Searching the Internet for Orthopedic Surgeons: Tips and Tricks

Internet provides access to large amounts of information quickly, provides a flexible learning platform, and is easily accessible from anywhere, especially with new technologies. Web-based search engines and bibliographic databases, have already become part of a doctor\u27s everyday life. However, even well-published researchers often fail to appreciate the background knowledge required to conduct a good literature search on the internet. Using the right techniques can improve the ability to search for relevant information This chapter briefly outlines the internet as an information resources such as Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, Cochrane for orthopedic surgeons. Also the subsequent sections of the chapter offers combining search engines tips and tricks for a best search that orthopedic surgeons can use to improve their use of web-based information and learning resources

A literature-based approach to annotation and browsing of Web resources

The emerging Semantic Web technologies critically depend on the availability of shared knowledge representations called ontologies, which are intended to encode consensual knowledge about specific domains. Currently, the proposed processes for building and maintaining those ontologies entail the joint effort of groups of representative domain experts, which can be expensive in terms of co-ordination and in terms of time to reach consensus. In this paper, literature-based ontologies, which can be initially developed by a single expert and maintained continuously, are proposed as preliminary alternatives to group-generated domain ontologies, or as early versions of them. These ontologies encode domain knowledge in the form of terms and relations along with the (formal or informal) bibliographical resources that define or deal with them, which makes them specially useful for domains in which a common terminology or jargon is not soundly established. A general-purpose metamodelling framework for literature-based ontologies - which has been used in two concrete domains - is described, along with a proposed methodology and a specific resource annotation approach. In addition, the implementation of a RDF-based Web resource browser - that uses the ontologies to guide the user in the exploration of a corpus of digital resources- is presented as a proof of concept

Digital Mathematics Libraries: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The idea of a World digital mathematics library (DML) has been around since the turn of the 21th century. We feel that it is time to make it a reality, starting in a modest way from successful bricks that have already been built, but with an ambitious goal in mind. After a brief historical overview of publishing mathematics, an estimate of the size and a characterisation of the bulk of documents to be included in the DML, we turn to proposing a model for a Reference Digital Mathematics Library--a network of institutions where the digital documents would be physically archived. This pattern based rather on the bottom-up strategy seems to be more practicable and consistent with the digital nature of the DML. After describing the model we summarise what can and should be done in order to accomplish the vision. The current state of some of the local libraries that could contribute to the global views are described with more details

Management of Scientific Images: An approach to the extraction, annotation and retrieval of figures in the field of High Energy Physics

El entorno de la información en la primera década del siglo XXI no tiene precedentes. Las barreras físicas que han limitado el acceso al conocimiento están desapareciendo a medida que los métodos tradicionales de acceso a información se reemplazan o se mejoran gracias al uso de sistemas basados en computador. Los sistemas digitales son capaces de gestionar colecciones mucho más grandes de documentos, confrontando a los usuarios de información con la avalancha de documentos asociados a su tópico de interés. Esta nueva situación ha creado un incentivo para el desarrollo de técnicas de minería de datos y la creación de motores de búsqueda más eficientes y capaces de limitar los resultados de búsqueda a un subconjunto reducido de los más relevantes. Sin embargo, la mayoría de los motores de búsqueda en la actualidad trabajan con descripciones textuales. Estas descripciones se pueden extraer o bien del contenido o a través de fuentes externas. La recuperación basada en el contenido no textual de documentos es un tema de investigación continua. En particular, la recuperación de imágenes y el desentrañar la información contenida en ellas están suscitando un gran interés en la comunidad científica. Las bibliotecas digitales se sitúan en una posición especial dentro de los sistemas que facilitan el acceso al conocimiento. Actúan como repositorios de documentos que comparten algunas características comunes (por ejemplo, pertenecer a la misma área de conocimiento o ser publicados por la misma institución) y como tales contienen documentos considerados de interés para un grupo particular de usuarios. Además, facilitan funcionalidades de recuperación sobre las colecciones gestionadas. Normalmente, las publicaciones científicas son las unidades más pequeñas gestionadas por las bibliotecas digitales científicas. Sin embargo, en el proceso de creación científica hay diferentes tipos de artefactos, entre otros: figuras y conjuntos de datos. Las figuras juegan un papel particularmente importante en el proceso de publicación científica. Representan los datos en una forma gráfica que nos permite mostrar patrones sobre grandes conjuntos de datos y transmitir ideas complejas de un modo fácilmente entendible. Los sistemas existentes para bibliotecas digitales facilitan el acceso a figuras, pero solo como parte de los ficheros sobre los que se serializa la publicación entera. El objetivo de esta tesis es proponer un conjunto de métodos ytécnicas que permitan transformar las figuras en productos de primera clase dentro del proceso de publicación científica, permitiendo que los investigadores puedan obtener el máximo beneficio a la hora de realizar búsquedas y revisiones de bibliografía existente. Los métodos y técnicas propuestos están orientados a facilitar la adquisición, anotación semántica y búsqueda de figuras contenidas en publicaciones científicas. Para demostrar la completitud de la investigación se han ilustrado las teorías propuestas mediante ejemplos en el campo de la Física de Partículas (también conocido como Física de Altas Energías). Para aquellos casos en los que se han necesitadoo en las figuras que aparecen con más frecuencia en las publicaciones de Física de Partículas: los gráficos científicos denominados en inglés con el término plots. Los prototipos que propuestas más detalladas han desarrollado para esta tesis se han integrado parcialmente dentro del software Invenio (1) para bibliotecas digitales, así como dentro de INSPIRE, una de las mayores bibliotecas digitales en Física de Partículas mantenida gracias a la colaboración de grandes laboratorios y centros de investigación como son el CERN, SLAC, DESY y Fermilab. 1). http://invenio-software.org