988 research outputs found
Users and Uses of a Global Union Catalogue: a Mixed-Methods Study of WorldCat.org
This paper presents the first large-scale investigation of the users and uses of WorldCat.org, the world’s largest
bibliographic database and global union catalogue. Using a mixed-methods approach involving focus group
interviews with 120 participants, an online survey with 2,918 responses, and an analysis of transaction logs of
approximately 15 million sessions from WorldCat.org, the study provides a new understanding of the context
for global union catalogue use. We find that WorldCat.org is accessed by diverse population, with the three
primary user groups being librarians, students and academics. Use of the system is found to fall within three
broad types of work-task (professional, academic, and leisure), and we also present an emergent taxonomy of
search tasks which encompass known-item, unknown-item, and institutional information searches. Our results
support the notion that union catalogues are primarily used for known-item searches, although the volume of
traffic to WorldCat.org means that unknown-item searches nonetheless represent an estimated 250,000
sessions per month. Search engine referrals account for almost half of all traffic, but whilst WorldCat.org
effectively connects users referred from institutional library catalogues to other libraries holding a sought
item, users arriving from a search engine are less likely to connect to a librar
Knowledge Graphs Evolution and Preservation -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2019
One of the grand challenges discussed during the Dagstuhl Seminar "Knowledge
Graphs: New Directions for Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web" and
described in its report is that of a: "Public FAIR Knowledge Graph of
Everything: We increasingly see the creation of knowledge graphs that capture
information about the entirety of a class of entities. [...] This grand
challenge extends this further by asking if we can create a knowledge graph of
"everything" ranging from common sense concepts to location based entities.
This knowledge graph should be "open to the public" in a FAIR manner
democratizing this mass amount of knowledge." Although linked open data (LOD)
is one knowledge graph, it is the closest realisation (and probably the only
one) to a public FAIR Knowledge Graph (KG) of everything. Surely, LOD provides
a unique testbed for experimenting and evaluating research hypotheses on open
and FAIR KG. One of the most neglected FAIR issues about KGs is their ongoing
evolution and long term preservation. We want to investigate this problem, that
is to understand what preserving and supporting the evolution of KGs means and
how these problems can be addressed. Clearly, the problem can be approached
from different perspectives and may require the development of different
approaches, including new theories, ontologies, metrics, strategies,
procedures, etc. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by 9
teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor,
attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2019). Each team
provides a different perspective to the problem of knowledge graph evolution
substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their
investigation. In addition, they provide their working definition for KG
preservation and evolution
The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain
The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals
CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap
After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in
multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year.
In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio-
economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown
of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on
requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the
community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our
Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as
National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core
technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research
challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal
challenges
CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines
Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective.
The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines.
From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research
Semantic and Syntactic Matching of Heterogeneous e-Catalogues
In e-procurement, companies use e-catalogues to exchange product infor-mation with business partners. Matching e-catalogues with product requests helps the suppliers to identify the best business opportunities in B2B e-Marketplaces. But various ways to specify products and the large variety of e-catalogue formats used by different business actors makes it difficult.
This Ph.D. thesis aims to discover potential syntactic and semantic rela-tionships among product data in procurement documents and exploit it to find similar e-catalogues. Using a Concept-based Vector Space Model, product data and its semantic interpretation is used to find the correlation of product data. In order to identify important terms in procurement documents, standard e-catalogues and e-tenders are used as a resource to train a Product Named Entity Recognizer to find B2B product mentions in e-catalogues.
The proposed approach makes it possible to use the benefits of all availa-ble semantic resources and schemas but not to be dependent on any specific as-sumption. The solution can serve as a B2B product search system in e-Procurement platforms and e-Marketplaces
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