The devices, experimental scaffolds, and biomaterials ontology (DEB): a tool for mapping, annotation, and analysis of biomaterials' data

The size and complexity of the biomaterials literature makes systematic data analysis an excruciating manual task. A practical solution is creating databases and information resources. Implant design and biomaterials research can greatly benefit from an open database for systematic data retrieval. Ontologies are pivotal to knowledge base creation, serving to represent and organize domain knowledge. To name but two examples, GO, the gene ontology, and CheBI, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology and their associated databases are central resources to their respective research communities. The creation of the devices, experimental scaffolds, and biomaterials ontology (DEB), an open resource for organizing information about biomaterials, their design, manufacture, and biological testing, is described. It is developed using text analysis for identifying ontology terms from a biomaterials gold standard corpus, systematically curated to represent the domain's lexicon. Topics covered are validated by members of the biomaterials research community. The ontology may be used for searching terms, performing annotations for machine learning applications, standardized meta-data indexing, and other cross-disciplinary data exploitation. The input of the biomaterials community to this effort to create data-driven open-access research tools is encouraged and welcomed.Preprin

Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

Interests Diffusion in Social Networks

Understanding cultural phenomena on Social Networks (SNs) and exploiting the implicit knowledge about their members is attracting the interest of different research communities both from the academic and the business side. The community of complexity science is devoting significant efforts to define laws, models, and theories, which, based on acquired knowledge, are able to predict future observations (e.g. success of a product). In the mean time, the semantic web community aims at engineering a new generation of advanced services by defining constructs, models and methods, adding a semantic layer to SNs. In this context, a leapfrog is expected to come from a hybrid approach merging the disciplines above. Along this line, this work focuses on the propagation of individual interests in social networks. The proposed framework consists of the following main components: a method to gather information about the members of the social networks; methods to perform some semantic analysis of the Domain of Interest; a procedure to infer members' interests; and an interests evolution theory to predict how the interests propagate in the network. As a result, one achieves an analytic tool to measure individual features, such as members' susceptibilities and authorities. Although the approach applies to any type of social network, here it is has been tested against the computer science research community. The DBLP (Digital Bibliography and Library Project) database has been elected as test-case since it provides the most comprehensive list of scientific production in this field.Comment: 30 pages 13 figs 4 table

How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stake- holders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘parents’ of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise

Overview of the 2005 cross-language image retrieval track (ImageCLEF)

The purpose of this paper is to outline efforts from the 2005 CLEF crosslanguage image retrieval campaign (ImageCLEF). The aim of this CLEF track is to explore the use of both text and content-based retrieval methods for cross-language image retrieval. Four tasks were offered in the ImageCLEF track: a ad-hoc retrieval from an historic photographic collection, ad-hoc retrieval from a medical collection, an automatic image annotation task, and a user-centered (interactive) evaluation task that is explained in the iCLEF summary. 24 research groups from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities (14 countries) participated in ImageCLEF. In this paper we describe the ImageCLEF tasks, submissions from participating groups and summarise the main fndings

Sharing Semantic Resources

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information, so far created for human consumption, becomes machine readable, “enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. To turn into reality this vision several challenges are still open among which the most important is to share meaning formally represented with ontologies or more generally with semantic resources. This Semantic Web long-term goal has many convergences with the activities in the field of Human Language Technology and in particular in the development of Natural Language Processing applications where there is a great need of multilingual lexical resources. For instance, one of the most important lexical resources, WordNet, is also commonly regarded and used as an ontology. Nowadays, another important phenomenon is represented by the explosion of social collaboration, and Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, is object of research as an up to date omni comprehensive semantic resource. The main topic of this thesis is the management and exploitation of semantic resources in a collaborative way, trying to use the already available resources as Wikipedia and Wordnet. This work presents a general environment able to turn into reality the vision of shared and distributed semantic resources and describes a distributed three-layer architecture to enable a rapid prototyping of cooperative applications for developing semantic resources

Towards a Universal Wordnet by Learning from Combined Evidenc

Lexical databases are invaluable sources of knowledge about words and their meanings, with numerous applications in areas like NLP, IR, and AI. We propose a methodology for the automatic construction of a large-scale multilingual lexical database where words of many languages are hierarchically organized in terms of their meanings and their semantic relations to other words. This resource is bootstrapped from WordNet, a well-known English-language resource. Our approach extends WordNet with around 1.5 million meaning links for 800,000 words in over 200 languages, drawing on evidence extracted from a variety of resources including existing (monolingual) wordnets, (mostly bilingual) translation dictionaries, and parallel corpora. Graph-based scoring functions and statistical learning techniques are used to iteratively integrate this information and build an output graph. Experiments show that this wordnet has a high level of precision and coverage, and that it can be useful in applied tasks such as cross-lingual text classification