InterMine: extensive web services for modern biology.

InterMine (www.intermine.org) is a biological data warehousing system providing extensive automatically generated and configurable RESTful web services that underpin the web interface and can be re-used in many other applications: to find and filter data; export it in a flexible and structured way; to upload, use, manipulate and analyze lists; to provide services for flexible retrieval of sequence segments, and for other statistical and analysis tools. Here we describe these features and discuss how they can be used separately or in combinations to support integrative and comparative analysis

Harvest: An Integrated Set of Tools for a Digital Library

This paper discusses the problems in organization and retrieval due proliferation resources in digital format over the web. It presents the harvest systems which tackles the problems through a set of customizable tools for gathering information from diverse repositories, building topic specific content indexes, flexibly searching indexes, widely replicating them, and caching objects as they are retrieved across the Internet. Harvest permits flexible construction of information services that use both the network and information servers efficiently. It is easily configurable system and can be deployed to automatically collect and summarize related objects from around the Internet into digital library collections

Business Process Retrieval Based on Behavioral Semantics

This paper develops a framework for retrieving business processes considering search requirements based on behavioral semantics properties; it presents a framework called "BeMantics" for retrieving business processes based on structural, linguistics, and behavioral semantics properties. The relevance of the framework is evaluated retrieving business processes from a repository, and collecting a set of relevant business processes manually issued by human judges. The "BeMantics" framework scored high precision values (0.717) but low recall values (0.558), which implies that even when the framework avoided false negatives, it prone to false positives. The highest pre- cision value was scored in the linguistic criterion showing that using semantic inference in the tasks comparison allowed to reduce around 23.6 % the number of false positives. Using semantic inference to compare tasks of business processes can improve the precision; but if the ontologies are from narrow and specific domains, they limit the semantic expressiveness obtained with ontologies from more general domains. Regarding the perform- ance, it can be improved by using a filter phase which indexes business processes taking into account behavioral semantics propertie

Developing strategic learning alliances: partnerships for the provision of global education and training solutions

The paper describes a comprehensive model for the development of strategic alliances between education and corporate sectors, which is required to ensure effective provision of education and training programmes for a global market. Global economic forces, combined with recent advances in information and communication technologies, have provided unprecedented opportunities for education providers to broaden the provision of their programmes both on an international scale and across new sectors. Lifelong learning strategies are becoming increasingly recognized as an essential characteristic of a successful organization and therefore large organizations have shown a preparedness to invest in staff training and development. The demands for lifelong learning span a wide range of training and educational levels from school-level and vocational courses to graduate-level training for senior executive

Developing information architecture through records management classification techniques

Purpose – This work aims to draw attention to information retrieval philosophies and techniques allied to the records management profession, advocating a wider professional consideration of a functional approach to information management, in this instance in the development of information architecture. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from a hypothesis originally presented by the author that advocated a viewpoint whereby the application of records management techniques, traditionally applied to develop business classification schemes, was offered as an additional solution to organising information resources and services (within a university intranet), where earlier approaches, notably subject- and administrative-based arrangements, were found to be lacking. The hypothesis was tested via work-based action learning and is presented here as an extended case study. The paper also draws on evidence submitted to the Joint Information Systems Committee in support of the Abertay University's application for consideration for the JISC award for innovation in records and information management. Findings – The original hypothesis has been tested in the workplace. Information retrieval techniques, allied to records management (functional classification), were the main influence in the development of pre- and post-coordinate information retrieval systems to support a wider information architecture, where the subject approach was found to be lacking. Their use within the workplace has since been extended. Originality/value – The paper advocates that the development of information retrieval as a discipline should include a wider consideration of functional classification, as this alternative to the subject approach is largely ignored in mainstream IR works

The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid

Thesauri on the Web: current developments and trends

This article provides an overview of recent developments relating to the application of thesauri in information organisation and retrieval on the World Wide Web. It describes some recent thesaurus projects undertaken to facilitate resource description and discovery and access to wide-ranging information resources on the Internet. Types of thesauri available on the Web, thesauri integrated in databases and information retrieval systems, and multiple-thesaurus systems for cross-database searching are also discussed. Collective efforts and events in addressing the standardisation and novel applications of thesauri are briefly reviewed