Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the web of data

Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles

Active Ontology: An Information Integration Approach for Dynamic Information Sources

In this paper we describe an ontology-based information integration approach that is suitable for highly dynamic distributed information sources, such as those available in Grid systems. The main challenges addressed are: 1) information changes frequently and information requests have to be answered quickly in order to provide up-to-date information; and 2) the most suitable information sources have to be selected from a set of different distributed ones that can provide the information needed. To deal with the first challenge we use an information cache that works with an update-on-demand policy. To deal with the second we add an information source selection step to the usual architecture used for ontology-based information integration. To illustrate our approach, we have developed an information service that aggregates metadata available in hundreds of information services of the EGEE Grid infrastructure

Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US

1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases

The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability

Community standards for open cell migration data

Cell migration research has become a high-content field. However, the quantitative information encapsulated in these complex and high-dimensional datasets is not fully exploited owing to the diversity of experimental protocols and non-standardized output formats. In addition, typically the datasets are not open for reuse. Making the data open and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) will enable meta-analysis, data integration, and data mining. Standardized data formats and controlled vocabularies are essential for building a suitable infrastructure for that purpose but are not available in the cell migration domain. We here present standardization efforts by the Cell Migration Standardisation Organisation (CMSO), an open community-driven organization to facilitate the development of standards for cell migration data. This work will foster the development of improved algorithms and tools and enable secondary analysis of public datasets, ultimately unlocking new knowledge of the complex biological process of cell migration

Innovating the delivery of individual services within Flemish cities: inventory of ICT-driven heterogeneity

Flemish cities are setting up large scale reform trajectories to make their transactional service delivery more customer orientated, customer friendly and integrated. The implementation of new ICTs plays a key role in these innovation processes; there seems to be a great, technological deterministic, belief in the possibilities offered by for example mid office technologies. In this paper, we explore and compare such innovation trajectories within two Flemish cities. We describe the context, the object, the process and the evaluation of change. Based on this inductive analysis, we reflect upon the dependent and independent variables that structure the processes of change. We make use of a ‘neo-institutional theoretical lens’ to identify relevant internal and external institutional factors that shape the implementation context for the organizational changes. The analysis generates interesting findings. Whereas the external environment to a large degree functions as a stable variable, the heterogeneity between both cities is much more determined by the organizational ‘path’, i.e. the management model, capacities, subcultures, existing ICT-infrastructure, etc. Further research is needed as important questions remain unanswered. For example: does the mixed set of organizational, technological and cultural changes also actually produces the outcomes that were formulated in terms of both increased effectiveness and efficiency