The Research Object Suite of Ontologies: Sharing and Exchanging Research Data and Methods on the Open Web

Research in life sciences is increasingly being conducted in a digital and online environment. In particular, life scientists have been pioneers in embracing new computational tools to conduct their investigations. To support the sharing of digital objects produced during such research investigations, we have witnessed in the last few years the emergence of specialized repositories, e.g., DataVerse and FigShare. Such repositories provide users with the means to share and publish datasets that were used or generated in research investigations. While these repositories have proven their usefulness, interpreting and reusing evidence for most research results is a challenging task. Additional contextual descriptions are needed to understand how those results were generated and/or the circumstances under which they were concluded. Because of this, scientists are calling for models that go beyond the publication of datasets to systematically capture the life cycle of scientific investigations and provide a single entry point to access the information about the hypothesis investigated, the datasets used, the experiments carried out, the results of the experiments, the people involved in the research, etc. In this paper we present the Research Object (RO) suite of ontologies, which provide a structured container to encapsulate research data and methods along with essential metadata descriptions. Research Objects are portable units that enable the sharing, preservation, interpretation and reuse of research investigation results. The ontologies we present have been designed in the light of requirements that we gathered from life scientists. They have been built upon existing popular vocabularies to facilitate interoperability. Furthermore, we have developed tools to support the creation and sharing of Research Objects, thereby promoting and facilitating their adoption.Comment: 20 page

Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation

The Planets Project is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date

BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

Team to Market (T2M): Creating High Performance Teams in the Digital Age

1. Teams are the essential means of product or service delivery and the fundamental building blocks of modern organisations. An effective team can produce results far outperforming a collection of even the most talented individuals when team members coalesce and jell into a single, well-functioning, fully-aligned organism. This report advances the notion of “Team to Market” (T2M) to help business leaders and knowledge workers understand, create and lead high performance teams in the digital age