Cross-concordances: terminology mapping and its effectiveness for information retrieval

The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative, which found its conclusion in 2007. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage 'cross-concordances' between controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. 64 crosswalks with more than 500,000 relations were established. In the final phase of the project, a major evaluation effort to test and measure the effectiveness of the vocabulary mappings in an information system environment was conducted. The paper reports on the cross-concordance work and evaluation results.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables, IFLA conference 200

Stable concordance of knots in 3-manifolds

Knots and links in 3-manifolds are studied by applying intersection invariants to singular concordances. The resulting link invariants generalize the Arf invariant, the mod 2 Sato-Levine invariants, and Milnor's triple linking numbers. Besides fitting into a general theory of Whitney towers, these invariants provide obstructions to the existence of a singular concordance which can be homotoped to an embedding after stabilization by connected sums with $S^2\times S^2$. Results include classifications of stably slice links in orientable 3-manifolds, stable knot concordance in products of an orientable surface with the circle, and stable link concordance for many links of null-homotopic knots in orientable 3-manifolds.Comment: 59 pages, 28 figure

Building a terminology network for search: the KoMoHe project

The paper reports about results on the GESIS-IZ project "Competence Center Modeling and Treatment of Semantic Heterogeneity" (KoMoHe). KoMoHe supervised a terminology mapping effort, in which 'cross-concordances' between major controlled vocabularies were organized, created and managed. In this paper we describe the establishment and implementation of cross-concordances for search in a digital library (DL).Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure, Dublin Core Conference 200

Higher Order Intersections in Low-Dimensional Topology

We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney trick in dimension 4 by constructing higher- order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on immersed disks in the 4-ball, we identify some of these new invariants with previously known link invariants like Milnor, Sato-Levine and Arf invariants. We also define higher- order Sato-Levine and Arf invariants and show that these invariants detect the obstructions to framing a twisted Whitney tower. Together with Milnor invariants, these higher-order invariants are shown to classify the existence of (twisted) Whitney towers of increasing order in the 4-ball. A conjecture regarding the non- triviality of the higher-order Arf invariants is formulated, and related implications for filtrations of string links and 3-dimensional homology cylinders are described. This article is an announcement and summary of results to be published in several forthcoming papers

Affective focus increases the concordance between implicit and explicit attitudes

Two attitude dichotomies - implicit versus explicit and affect versus cognition - are presumed to be related. Following a manipulation of attitudinal focus (affective or cognitive), participants completed two implicit measures (Implicit Association Test and the Sorting Paired Features task) and three explicit attitude measures toward cats/dogs (Study 1) and gay/straight people (Study 2). Based on confirmatory factor analysis, both studies showed that explicit attitudes were more related to implicit attitudes in an affective focus than in a cognitive focus. We suggest that, although explicit evaluations can be meaningfully parsed into affective and cognitive components, implicit evaluations are more related to affective than cognitive components of attitudes