Active fault databases: building a bridge between earthquake geologists and seismic hazard practitioners, the case of the QAFI v.3 database

Active fault databases are a very powerful and useful tool in seismic hazard assessment, particularly when singular faults are considered seismogenic sources. Active fault databases are also a very relevant source of information for earth scientists, earthquake engineers and even teachers or journalists. Hence, active fault databases should be updated and thoroughly reviewed on a regular basis in order to keep a standard quality and uniformed criteria. Desirably, active fault databases should somehow indicate the quality of the geological data and, particularly, the reliability attributed to crucial fault-seismic parameters, such as maximum magnitude and recurrence interval. In this paper we explain how we tackled these issues during the process of updating and reviewing the Quaternary Active Fault Database of Iberia (QAFI) to its current version 3. We devote particular attention to describing the scheme devised for classifying the quality and representativeness of the geological evidence of Quaternary activity and the accuracy of the slip rate estimation in the database. Subsequently, we use this information as input for a straightforward rating of the level of reliability of maximum magnitude and recurrence interval fault seismic parameters. We conclude that QAFI v.3 is a much better database than version 2 either for proper use in seismic hazard applications or as an informative source for non-specialized users. However, we already envision new improvements for a future update

The Digital Puglia Project: An Active Digital Library of Remote Sensing Data

The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data

The true story behind the annotation of a pathway

On 2010 we worked on the annotation of the N-Glycosylation pathway in the Reactome database. During this process, we found some unclear points and errors in other databases, and we reported and helped fix them. After we finished, we realized that the work of reporting errors to a database is basically not acknowledged by the scientific community: this is unfortunate because if only this process would be a bit more recognized and transparent, we could have better data in the databases and a more active community. Moreover, the fact that many databases tend to keep error reporting private creates great issues to the reproducibility of a work.

Another way to look at this talk is: if you dedicate 6 months of your PhD thesis to annotate carefully a set of genes, in this case a pathway I have been studying, how many errors do you expect to find in other databases, or what should you be careful at

A Review of integrity constraint maintenance and view updating techniques

Two interrelated problems may arise when updating a database. On one hand, when an update is applied to the database, integrity constraints may become violated. In such case, the integrity constraint maintenance approach tries to obtain additional updates to keep integrity constraints satisfied. On the other hand, when updates of derived or view facts are requested, a view updating mechanism must be applied to translate the update request into correct updates of the underlying base facts. This survey reviews the research performed on integrity constraint maintenance and view updating. It is proposed a general framework to classify and to compare methods that tackle integrity constraint maintenance and/or view updating. Then, we analyze some of these methods in more detail to identify their actual contribution and the main limitations they may present.Postprint (published version

State-of-the-art on evolution and reactivity

This report starts by, in Chapter 1, outlining aspects of querying and updating resources on the Web and on the Semantic Web, including the development of query and update languages to be carried out within the Rewerse project. From this outline, it becomes clear that several existing research areas and topics are of interest for this work in Rewerse. In the remainder of this report we further present state of the art surveys in a selection of such areas and topics. More precisely: in Chapter 2 we give an overview of logics for reasoning about state change and updates; Chapter 3 is devoted to briefly describing existing update languages for the Web, and also for updating logic programs; in Chapter 4 event-condition-action rules, both in the context of active database systems and in the context of semistructured data, are surveyed; in Chapter 5 we give an overview of some relevant rule-based agents frameworks

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Structuring the process of integrity maintenance (extended version)

Two different approaches have been traditionally considered for dealing with the process of integrity constraints enforcement: integrity checking and integrity maintenance. However, while previous research in the first approach has mainly addressed efficiency issues, research in the second approach has been mainly concentrated in being able to generate all possible repairs that falsify an integrity constraint violation. In this paper we address efficiency issues during the process of integrity maintenance. In this sense, we propose a technique which improves efficiency of existing methods by defining the order in which maintenance of integrity constraints should be performed. Moreover, we use also this technique for being able to handle in an integrated way the integrity constraintsPostprint (published version

Online Resources for Identifying Evidence-Based, Out-of-School Time Programs: A User's Guide

Summarizes general information, select program outcomes, and evidence levels of searchable databases, interactive summaries, and documents online on evidence-based intervention programs. Outlines considerations and assessments for selecting programs