Streaming the Web: Reasoning over dynamic data.

In the last few years a new research area, called stream reasoning, emerged to bridge the gap between reasoning and stream processing. While current reasoning approaches are designed to work on mainly static data, the Web is, on the other hand, extremely dynamic: information is frequently changed and updated, and new data is continuously generated from a huge number of sources, often at high rate. In other words, fresh information is constantly made available in the form of streams of new data and updates. Despite some promising investigations in the area, stream reasoning is still in its infancy, both from the perspective of models and theories development, and from the perspective of systems and tools design and implementation. The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) we identify the requirements coming from different application scenarios, and we isolate the problems they pose; (ii) we survey existing approaches and proposals in the area of stream reasoning, highlighting their strengths and limitations; (iii) we draw a research agenda to guide the future research and development of stream reasoning. In doing so, we also analyze related research fields to extract algorithms, models, techniques, and solutions that could be useful in the area of stream reasoning. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Thinking outside the graph: scholarly knowledge graph construction leveraging natural language processing

Despite improved digital access to scholarly knowledge in recent decades, scholarly communication remains exclusively document-based. The document-oriented workflows in science publication have reached the limits of adequacy as highlighted by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature, the deficiency of peer-review and the reproducibility crisis. In this form, scientific knowledge remains locked in representations that are inadequate for machine processing. As long as scholarly communication remains in this form, we cannot take advantage of all the advancements taking place in machine learning and natural language processing techniques. Such techniques would facilitate the transformation from pure text based into (semi-)structured semantic descriptions that are interlinked in a collection of big federated graphs. We are in dire need for a new age of semantically enabled infrastructure adept at storing, manipulating, and querying scholarly knowledge. Equally important is a suite of machine assistance tools designed to populate, curate, and explore the resulting scholarly knowledge graph. In this thesis, we address the issue of constructing a scholarly knowledge graph using natural language processing techniques. First, we tackle the issue of developing a scholarly knowledge graph for structured scholarly communication, that can be populated and constructed automatically. We co-design and co-implement the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), an infrastructure capable of modeling, storing, and automatically curating scholarly communications. Then, we propose a method to automatically extract information into knowledge graphs. With Plumber, we create a framework to dynamically compose open information extraction pipelines based on the input text. Such pipelines are composed from community-created information extraction components in an effort to consolidate individual research contributions under one umbrella. We further present MORTY as a more targeted approach that leverages automatic text summarization to create from the scholarly article's text structured summaries containing all required information. In contrast to the pipeline approach, MORTY only extracts the information it is instructed to, making it a more valuable tool for various curation and contribution use cases. Moreover, we study the problem of knowledge graph completion. exBERT is able to perform knowledge graph completion tasks such as relation and entity prediction tasks on scholarly knowledge graphs by means of textual triple classification. Lastly, we use the structured descriptions collected from manual and automated sources alike with a question answering approach that builds on the machine-actionable descriptions in the ORKG. We propose JarvisQA, a question answering interface operating on tabular views of scholarly knowledge graphs i.e., ORKG comparisons. JarvisQA is able to answer a variety of natural language questions, and retrieve complex answers on pre-selected sub-graphs. These contributions are key in the broader agenda of studying the feasibility of natural language processing methods on scholarly knowledge graphs, and lays the foundation of which methods can be used on which cases. Our work indicates what are the challenges and issues with automatically constructing scholarly knowledge graphs, and opens up future research directions

Affordances and limitations of algorithmic criticism

Humanities scholars currently have access to unprecedented quantities of machine-readable texts, and, at the same time, the tools and the methods with which we can analyse and visualise these texts are becoming more and more sophisticated. As has been shown in numerous studies, many of the new technical possibilities that emerge from fields such as text mining and natural language processing can have useful applications within literary research. Computational methods can help literary scholars to discover interesting trends and correlations within massive text collections, and they can enable a thoroughly systematic examination of the stylistic properties of literary works. While such computer-assisted forms of reading have proven invaluable for research in the field of literary history, relatively few studies have applied these technologies to expand or to transform the ways in which we can interpret literary texts. Based on a comparative analysis of digital scholarship and traditional scholarship, this thesis critically examines the possibilities and the limitations of a computer-based literary criticism. It argues that quantitative analyses of data about literary techniques can often reveal surprising qualities of works of literature, which can, in turn, lead to new interpretative readings

Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media. I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving. The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged. Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems. From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication. Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments. Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers. The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data. Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information. Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud). Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project

Atti del IX Convegno Annuale dell'Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD). La svolta inevitabile: sfide e prospettive per l'Informatica Umanistica

Proceedings of the IX edition of the annual AIUCD conferenc

Data-driven knowledge discovery in polycystic kidney disease

The use of data derived from genomics and transcriptomic to further develop our understanding of Polycystic Kidney Diseases and identify novel drugs for its treatment.LUMC / Geneeskund

From social tagging to polyrepresentation: a study of expert annotating behavior of moving images

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThis thesis investigates “nichesourcing” (De Boer, Hildebrand, et al., 2012), an emergent initiative of cultural heritage crowdsoucing in which niches of experts are involved in the annotating tasks. This initiative is studied in relation to moving image annotation, and in the context of audiovisual heritage, more specifically, within the sector of film archives. The work presents a case study of film and media scholars to investigate the types of annotations and attribute descriptions that they could eventually contribute, as well as the information needs, and seeking and searching behaviors of this group, in order to determine what the role of the different types of annotations in supporting their expert tasks would be. The study is composed of three independent but interconnected studies using a mixed methodology and an interpretive approach. It uses concepts from the information behavior discipline, and the "Integrated Information Seeking and Retrieval Framework" (IS&R) (Ingwersen and Järvelin, 2005) as guidance for the investigation. The findings show that there are several types of annotations that moving image experts could contribute to a nichesourcing initiative, of which time-based tags are only one of the possibilities. The findings also indicate that for the different foci in film and media research, in-depth indexing at the content level is only needed for supporting a specific research focus, for supporting research in other domains, or for engaging broader audiences. The main implications at the level of information infrastructure are the requirement for more varied annotating support, more interoperability among existing metadata standards and frameworks, and the need for guidelines about crowdsoucing and nichesourcing implementation in the audiovisual heritage sector. This research presents contributions to the studies of social tagging applied to moving images, to the discipline of information behavior, by proposing new concepts related to the area of use behavior, and to the concept of “polyrepresentation” (Ingwersen, 1992, 1996) applied to the humanities domain.Esta tesis investiga la iniciativa del nichesourcing (De Boer, Hildebrand, et al., 2012), como una forma de crowdsoucing en sector del patrimonio cultural, en la cuál grupos de expertos participan en las tareas de anotación de las colecciones. El ámbito de aplicación es la anotación de las imágenes en movimiento en el contexto del patrimonio audiovisual, más específicamente, en el caso de los archivos fílmicos. El trabajo presenta un estudio de caso aplicado a un dominio específico de expertos en el ámbito audiovisual: los académicos de cine y medios. El análisis se centra en dos aspectos específicos del problema: los tipos de anotaciones y atributos en las descripciones que podrían obtenerse de este nicho de expertos; y en las necesidades de información y el comportamiento informacional de dicho grupo, con el fin de determinar cuál es el rol de los diferentes tipos de anotaciones en sus tareas de investigación. La tesis se compone de tres estudios independientes e interconectados; se usa una metodología mixta e interpretativa. El marco teórico se compone de conceptos del área de estudios de comportamiento informacional (“information behavior”) y del “Marco integrado de búsqueda y recuperación de la información” ("Integrated Information Seeking and Retrieval Framework" (IS&R)) propuesto por Ingwersen y Järvelin (2005), que sirven de guía para la investigación. Los hallazgos indican que existen diversas formas de anotación de la imagen en movimiento que podrían generarse a partir de las contribuciones de expertos, de las cuáles las etiquetas a nivel de plano son sólo una de las posibilidades. Igualmente, se identificaron diversos focos de investigación en el área académica de cine y medios. La indexación detallada de contenidos sólo es requerida por uno de esos grupos y por investigadores de otras disciplinas, o como forma de involucrar audiencias más amplias. Las implicaciones más relevantes, a nivel de la infraestructura informacional, se refieren a los requisitos de soporte a formas más variadas de anotación, el requisito de mayor interoperabilidad de los estándares y marcos de metadatos, y la necesidad de publicación de guías de buenas prácticas sobre de cómo implementar iniciativas de crowdsoucing o nichesourcing en el sector del patrimonio audiovisual. Este trabajo presenta aportes a la investigación sobre el etiquetado social aplicado a las imágenes en movimiento, a la disciplina de estudios del comportamiento informacional, a la que se proponen nuevos conceptos relacionados con el área de uso de la información, y al concepto de “poli-representación” (Ingwersen, 1992, 1996) en las disciplinas humanísticas.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Documentación: Archivos y Bibliotecas en el Entorno DigitalPresidente: Peter Emil Rerup Ingwersen.- Secretario: Antonio Hernández Pérez.- Vocal: Nils Phar

Controversing Datafication through Media Architectures

In this chapter, we discuss a speculative and participatory “media architecture” installation that engages people with the potential impacts of data through speculative future images of the datafied city. The installation was originally conceived as a physical combination of digital media technologies and architectural form—a “media architecture”—that was to be situated in a particular urban setting. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was produced and tested for an online workshop. It is centered on “design frictions” (Forlano and Mathew, 2014) and processes of controversing (Baibarac-Duignan and de Lange, 2021). Instead of smoothing out tensions through “neutral” data visualizations, controversing centers on opening avenues for meaningful participation around frictions and controversies that arise from the datafication of urban life. The installation represents an instance of how processes of controversing may unfold through digital interfaces. Here, we explore its performative potential to “interface” abstract dimensions of datafication, “translate” them into collective issues of concern, and spark imagination around (un)desirable datafied urban futures