Biomedical ontology alignment: An approach based on representation learning

While representation learning techniques have shown great promise in application to a number of different NLP tasks, they have had little impact on the problem of ontology matching. Unlike past work that has focused on feature engineering, we present a novel representation learning approach that is tailored to the ontology matching task. Our approach is based on embedding ontological terms in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. This embedding is derived on the basis of a novel phrase retrofitting strategy through which semantic similarity information becomes inscribed onto fields of pre-trained word vectors. The resulting framework also incorporates a novel outlier detection mechanism based on a denoising autoencoder that is shown to improve performance. An ontology matching system derived using the proposed framework achieved an F-score of 94% on an alignment scenario involving the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary and the Foundational Model of Anatomy ontology (FMA) as targets. This compares favorably with the best performing systems on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative anatomy challenge. We performed additional experiments on aligning FMA to NCI Thesaurus and to SNOMED CT based on a reference alignment extracted from the UMLS Metathesaurus. Our system obtained overall F-scores of 93.2% and 89.2% for these experiments, thus achieving state-of-the-art results

Smart City Ontologies and Their Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

The increasing interconnections of city services, the explosion of available urban data, and the need for multidisciplinary analysis and decision making for city sustainability require new technological solutions to cope with such complexity. Ontologies have become viable and effective tools to practitioners for developing applications requiring data and process interoperability, big data management, and automated reasoning on knowledge. We investigate how and to what extent ontologies have been used to support smart city services and we provide a comprehensive reference on what problems have been addressed and what has been achieved so far with ontology-based applications. To this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review finalized to presenting the ontologies, and the methods and technological systems where ontologies play a relevant role in shaping current smart cities. Based on the result of the review process, we also propose a classification of the sub-domains of the city addressed by the ontologies we found, and the research issues that have been considered so far by the scientific community. We highlight those for which semantic technologies have been mostly demonstrated to be effective to enhance the smart city concept and, finally, discuss in more details about some open problems

Efficient Load Balancing Using Active Replica Management in a Storage System

Many algorithms can uniformly distribute data to storage nodes in a storage system. However, it cannot avoid load imbalance because data has different popularity. To resolve this issue, we propose a novel dynamic replication scheme, namely, Active Replica Management (ARM). ARM actively establishes optimal number of copies for hotspot data according to data access behaviors and then efficiently distributes copies to other storage nodes based on current amount of copies related to hotspot data. To improve storage utilization, ARM automatically and gradually dereplicates the useless copies of hotspot data when they become nonhotspot data. ARM resolves load imbalance by allocating dynamic copies to adequate storage nodes, and hence it can prevent partial storage nodes from overburdening. Simulation results demonstrate that ARM is an efficient scheme with excellent performance on load balancing, significantly closer to Optimal Load Balancing (OLB). In addition, ARM’s performance outperforms both Static Load Balancing (SLB) and No Replica schemes

Usage Policies for Decentralised Information Processing

Owners impose usage restrictions on their information, which can be based e.g. on privacy laws, copyright law or social conventions. Often, information is processed in complex constellations without central control. In this work, we introduce technologies to formally express usage restrictions in a machine-interpretable way as so-called policies that enable the creation of decentralised systems that provide, consume and process distributed information in compliance with their usage restrictions

Architecture and the Built Environment:

This publication provides an overview of TU Delft’s most significant research achievements in the field of architecture and the built environment during the years 2010–2012. It is the first presentation of the joint research portfolio of the Faculty of Architecture and OTB Research Institute since their integration into the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. As such the portfolio holds a strong promise for the future. In a time when the economy seems to be finally picking up and in which such societal issues as energy, climate and ageing are more prominent than ever before, there are plenty of fields for us to explore in the next three years

Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers

Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers