Improving the Representation and Conversion of Mathematical Formulae by Considering their Textual Context

Mathematical formulae represent complex semantic information in a concise form. Especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, mathematical formulae are crucial to communicate information, e.g., in scientific papers, and to perform computations using computer algebra systems. Enabling computers to access the information encoded in mathematical formulae requires machine-readable formats that can represent both the presentation and content, i.e., the semantics, of formulae. Exchanging such information between systems additionally requires conversion methods for mathematical representation formats. We analyze how the semantic enrichment of formulae improves the format conversion process and show that considering the textual context of formulae reduces the error rate of such conversions. Our main contributions are: (1) providing an openly available benchmark dataset for the mathematical format conversion task consisting of a newly created test collection, an extensive, manually curated gold standard and task-specific evaluation metrics; (2) performing a quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art tools for mathematical format conversions; (3) presenting a new approach that considers the textual context of formulae to reduce the error rate for mathematical format conversions. Our benchmark dataset facilitates future research on mathematical format conversions as well as research on many problems in mathematical information retrieval. Because we annotated and linked all components of formulae, e.g., identifiers, operators and other entities, to Wikidata entries, the gold standard can, for instance, be used to train methods for formula concept discovery and recognition. Such methods can then be applied to improve mathematical information retrieval systems, e.g., for semantic formula search, recommendation of mathematical content, or detection of mathematical plagiarism.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Capturing and Exploiting Citation Knowledge for the Recommendation of Scientific Publications

With the continuous growth of scientific literature, it is becoming increasingly challenging to discover relevant scientific publications from the plethora of available academic digital libraries. Despite the current scale, important efforts have been achieved towards the research and development of academic search engines, reference management tools, review management platforms, scientometrics systems, and recommender systems that help finding a variety of relevant scientific items, such as publications, books, researchers, grants and events, among others. This thesis focuses on recommender systems for scientific publications. Existing systems do not always provide the most relevant scientific publications to users, despite they are present in the recommendation space. A common limitation is the lack of access to the full content of the publications when designing the recommendation methods. Solutions are largely based on the exploitation of metadata (e.g., titles, abstracts, lists of references, etc.), but rarely with the text of the publications. Another important limitation is the lack of time awareness. Existing works have not addressed the important scenario of recommending the most recent publications to users, due to the challenge of recommending items for which no ratings (i.e., user preferences) have been yet provided. The lack of evaluation benchmarks also limits the evolution and progress of the field. This thesis investigates the use of fine-grained forms of citation knowledge, extracted from the full textual content of scientific publications, to enhance recommendations: citation proximity, citation context, citation section, citation graph and citation intention. We design and develop new recommendation methods that incorporate such knowledge, individually and in combination. By conducting offline evaluations, as well as user studies, we show how the use of citation knowledge does help enhancing the performance of existing recommendation methods when addressing two key tasks: (i) recommending scientific publications for a given work, and (ii) recommending recent scientific publications to a user. Two novel evaluation benchmarks have also been generated and made available for the scientific community

THE ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY IN THE OPEN SCIENTIFIC ECOSYSTEM: A REFLECTION ON THE PRACTICE OF SML

Universitatea de Stat de Medicină şi Farmacie „Nicolae Testemiţanu”, Chişinău, Republica MoldovaIntroducere. Rolul bibliotecilor universitare în ecosistemul deschis a evoluat în dependență de prioritățile instituțiilor universitare, asigurând acces operativ și eficient la conținuturi digitale ale producției științifice instituționale. Scopul lucrării. Reflectarea practicii și determinarea rolului Bibliotecii Științifice Medicale în contextul dezvoltării ecosistemului de cercetare științifică deschisă. Material și metode. În vederea realizării studiului s-au aplicat metode de cercetare mixte: analiza și sinteza datelor colectate, interviu. Au fost analizate publicațiile științifice care abordează acest subiect, rapoartele de activitate ale Bibliotecii, conținutul produselor informaționale, rezultatele sondajelor organizate, analiza indicatorilor statistici. Rezultate. BȘM este participant activ în sistemul de cercetare științifică deschisă și un catalizator esențial în formarea culturii comunității științifice universitare privind ȘD. Bibliotecii îi revine responsabilitatea de a promova beneficiile AD, de a spori gradul de conștientizare privind cercetarea deschisă, de a oferi sprijin și asistență comunității științifice medicale privind deschiderea datelor de cercetare, de a identifica cele mai cotate reviste pentru publicarea rezultatelor științifice, de a asista cercetătorii în crearea și gestionarea profilurilor academice, de a dezvolta produse informaționale care susțin principiile ȘD, așa încât statutul acesteia să fie recunoscut de comunitatea științifică medicală. Concluzii. Ecosistemul de cercetare științifică deschisă conferă o nouă tentă de dezvoltare bibliotecilor universitare, care au un rol semnificativ în conservarea, diseminarea informațiilor pentru comunitatea academică și sunt orientate către o nouă paradigmă de acces la informațiile științifice și date de cercetare, sprijinind inițiativele științifice deschise.Introduction. The role of academic libraries in the open ecosystem has developed according to the priorities of academic institutions, providing operational and efficient access to digital content of institutional scholarly production. Objective of the study. To highlight practice and determine the role of the Scientific Medical Library in the context of the development of the open scientific research community ecosystem. Material and methods. In order to realize the study we applied mixed research methods: analysis and synthesis of collected data, interviews. The scientific publications dealing with this subject, the Library’s activity reports, the content of information materials, the results of surveys, and the analysis of statistical indicators were examined. Results. The Scientific Medical Library is an active participant in the open scientific research system and an essential facilitator in developing the culture of the university scientific community on OS. It is the responsibility of the Library to promote the benefits of OA, to increase awareness and disseminate knowledge of Open Research, to provide support and assistance to the medical scientific community regarding the openness of research data, to assist in identifying the most highly rated journals for publication of scientific results, to assist researchers in creating and managing academic profiles, to develop information products that support OS principles so that the medical scientific community recognizes its status. Conclusions. The open scientific research ecosystem gives a new developmental focus to academic libraries, which play a significant role in preservation, information dissemination for the academic community and knowledge sharing, and are oriented towards a new paradigm of access to scientific information and research data, supporting open science initiatives

Building Tremor Journal: Examining the Costs of Open Access Publishing

The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) was established in 2007 by the Columbia University Libraries/ Information Services (CUL/IS) to explore and provision new research support services for the university in all areas of scholarly communication, including online scholarly publishing. (Renfro and Neal, 2012) As the landscape for library publishing has continued to grow, CDRS has found an increasing level of demand for library-based support of publishing initiatives from within the University and beyond. Because of CDRS’ unique position as an organization housed within the existing CUL/IS infrastructure, the Center has access to a great deal of resources and support systems that have enabled it to provide a full suite of services in support of library-based publishing, including the publication of Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements (TOHM) journal (http://www.tremorjournal.org/), a fully open access scientific journal based on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software. Using CDRS' publication and support of TOHM as a case study, this presentation will examine the costs involved in publishing an open access journal, moving beyond the basic setup and execution of a journal website capable of incorporating a peer-review workflow to look in detail at the specific essential services CDRS provides, including: Software development, hosting, and maintenance: The Center continually works to develop on top of the OJS software to customize the web site to allow for full journal publication workflow, including the build of a plugin to work with third-party vendors. Indexing support: In an effort to uphold the journal’s contribution to the scientific community, CDRS has successfully undertaken application for indexing in PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/), and continues to maintain this relationship. Finance management: Through the Center’s relationship with the library finance office, CDRS manages the journal’s finances, including author fees, waivers, and the incorporation of third-party funding and grants to the journal. Research and Development: A constant aspect of CDRS’ support for open-access publication through TOHM is the task of keeping abreast of new opportunities for enhancing the scholarly content through new software tools and platforms; metadata optimization and SEO tools; and methods for integration with the broader scientific research community. The support of TOHM speaks to the Center’s strategy for securing paths for the open access to scholarly research. Additionally, as exemplified by the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) goal to “refine justification and positioning for library-based publishing activities,” (“LPC Project Deliverables”) it provides a useful mechanism for analysis of the opportunities the greater research library community has in the support of scholarly research publication

Theoretical foundations of the regional training program "Education in conflict" for teachers' professional development

The article is focused on the problem of helping instructors improve their professional abilities when dealing with conflict. The research's objectives are to support the theoretical underpinnings of the course and to create the content of a new training program for the professional advancement of Ukrainian teachers. The content of the professional development training program for teachers is based on a variety of scientific methods at many levels, including philosophic, general scientific, specifically scientific, and pedagogical approaches. This is where the scientific novelty of the research lies. We pay particular attention to the need of guaranteeing children's safety and their access to an education in times of war. The following modules make up the program's content: "Children's problems caused by armed conflict"; "Education in conflict: the essence, standards (on the information from UNISEF and UNESCO)"; and "Ways of implementation education in war in Ukraine." The study's recommendations for teaching strategies and the multidisciplinary nature of the regional training program "Education in Conflict" are what give it its practical value

Research Blogging: Indexing and Registering the Change in Science 2.0

Increasing public interest in science information in a digital and 2.0 science era promotes a dramatically, rapid and deep change in science itself. The emergence and expansion of new technologies and internet-based tools is leading to new means to improve scientific methodology and communication, assessment, promotion and certification. It allows methods of acquisition, manipulation and storage, generating vast quantities of data that can further facilitate the research process. It also improves access to scientific results through information sharing and discussion. Content previously restricted only to specialists is now available to a wider audience. This context requires new management systems to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useable, including new measures to evaluate the reach of scientific information. The new science and research quality measures are strongly related to the new online technologies and services based in social media. Tools such as blogs, social bookmarks and online reference managers, Twitter and others offer alternative, transparent and more comprehensive information about the active interest, usage and reach of scientific publications. Another of these new filters is the Research Blogging platform, which was created in 2007 and now has over 1,230 active blogs, with over 26,960 entries posted about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. This study takes a closer look at RB, in order to get insights into its contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of scientific communication

Combining VIVO and Google Scholar data as sources for CERIF linked data: a case in the agricultural domain

The needs of global science have fostered open access to the results and contextual information of research organizations at an international scale. This requires the use of standards or shared data models to exchange information preserving its semantics when transferred between systems. In that direction, standards as CERIF or projects as VIVO were developed to exchange or expose the scientific knowledge. Also, there are other sources of scientific information in the Web that are useful to complement institutional repositories and CRISes. The heterogeneity of data models behind each source in turn raises the need for mappings between them to ease interchange and aggregate information. In this paper, we present a tool that integrates three sources of research information and enables their aggregating and export into both VIVO and CERIF models. We present a case study in agriculture using OpenAGRIS, a bibliographic database linked to Web sources with more than 7 million records. Concretely, we describe the methods to combine Google Scholar data for the scholarly content indexed in OpenAGRIS and aggregating new information provided by the first one, using our tool. Finally the information is stored in a VIVO instance and then translated into CERIF using a conversion process mapping both data models. The case demonstrates the possibilities of mapping tools to aggregate and translate CRIS information

Enabling European Archaeological Research: The ARIADNE E-Infrastructure

In the last 20 years, e-infrastructures have become ever more important for the conduct and progress of research in all branches of scientific enterprise. Increasingly collaborative, distributed and data-intensive research requires the sharing of resources (data, tools, computing facilities) via e-infrastructure as well as support for effective co-operation among research groups (ESF 2011; ESFRI 2016). Moreover there is the expectation that with large datasets ('big data'), e-infrastructure and advanced computing techniques, new scientific questions can be tackled. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of various digital methods and tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. The provision of e-infrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and re-use for the heritage sector is, however, lagging behind other research fields, such as the natural and life sciences. The consequence is a high level of fragmentation of archaeological data and limited capability for collaborative research across institutional and national as well as disciplinary boundaries (Aspöck and Geser 2014). This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This e-infrastructure initiative is being promoted by a consortium of archaeological institutes, data archives and technology developers, and funded under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (ARIADNE 2014a; Niccolucci and Richards 2013). ARIADNE enables archaeological data providers, large and small, to register and connect their resources (datasets, collections) to the e-infrastructure, and a data portal provides search, access and other services across the integrated resources. The portal puts into operation a proof of concept exemplar first developed under the ARENA (Archaeological Records of Europe Networked Access) project (Kenny and Richards 2005; Kilbride 2004), itself inspired by a proposal made by Hansen (1993). ARIADNE integrates resource discovery metadata using various controlled vocabularies, e.g. the W3C Data Catalogue Vocabulary (adapted for describing archaeological datasets), subject thesauri, gazetteers, chronologies, and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). Based on this integration the data portal offers several ways to search and access resources made available by data providers located in different countries. ARIADNE thus acts as a broker between data providers and users and offers additional web services for products such as high-resolution images, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), 3D objects and landscapes. Employing such services in research projects or for content deposited in digital archives will greatly enhance the ability of researchers to publish, access and study archaeological content online. ARIADNE therefore represents a substantial advance for archaeology; in particular it provides a common platform where dispersed data resources can be uniformly described, discovered and accessed. It is also an essential step towards the even more ambitious goal of offering archaeologists integrated data, tools and computing resources for web-based research that creates new knowledge (e-archaeology). The next section describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE user surveys undertaken to match expectations and requirements for the e-infrastructure and data portal services are then presented. The main part of the article describes ARIADNE's overall architecture, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and other extant or experimental services. A further section presents the on-going evaluation of the data integration and set of services. Finally, the article summarises some lessons already learned in the integration of data resources and services, and considers the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in sharing data through the ARIADNE e-infrastructure and portal

Foreign and domestic experience in evaluating the effectiveness of scientific and pedagogical research

В роботі розглянуто використання інформаційно-цифрових технологій для оцінювання результативності науково-педагогічних досліджень. Впровадження у галузь освіти та науки нових інформаційно-цифрових технологій дозволяє якісно змінити зміст, методи й організаційні форми оцінювання результативності науково-педагогічних досліджень, створити додаткові можливості, наприклад: доступу до великого обсягу науково-педагогічної інформації; підтримки активних методів навчання; дозволяє тиражувати окремі складові частини інформаційної технології та ін.Актуальність і значущість цифровізації оцінювання якості та результативності науково-педагогічних досліджень викликана необхідністю адаптації галузі освіти і науки до запитів цифрової економіки та цифрового суспільства, становлення яких – глобальні тренди сучасної епохи.The paper considers the use of information and digital technologies to assess the effectiveness of scientific and pedagogical research. The introduction of new information and digital technologies in the field of education and science allows to qualitatively change the content, methods and organizational forms of evaluating the effectiveness of scientific and pedagogical research, to create additional opportunities, such as: access to a large amount of scientific and pedagogical information; support of active teaching methods; allows the replication of individual components of information technology, etc. The relevance and importance of digitalization of quality and effectiveness of scientific and pedagogical research is due to the need to adapt education and science to the demands of the digital economy and digital society, the formation of which - global trends