36,071 research outputs found
Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy
Taxonomic databases are perpetuating approaches to citing literature that may have been appropriate before the Internet, often being little more than digitised 5 × 3 index cards. Typically the original taxonomic literature is either not cited, or is represented in the form of a (typically abbreviated) text string. Hence much of the “deep data” of taxonomy, such as the original descriptions, revisions, and nomenclatural actions are largely hidden from all but the most resourceful users. At the same time there are burgeoning efforts to digitise the scientific literature, and much of this newly available content has been assigned globally unique identifiers such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which are also the identifier of choice for most modern publications. This represents an opportunity for taxonomic databases to engage with digitisation efforts. Mapping the taxonomic literature on to globally unique identifiers can be time consuming, but need be done only once. Furthermore, if we reuse existing identifiers, rather than mint our own, we can start to build the links between the diverse data that are needed to support the kinds of inference which biodiversity informatics aspires to support. Until this practice becomes widespread, the taxonomic literature will remain balkanized, and much of the knowledge that it contains will linger in obscurity
Automatic Concept Discovery from Parallel Text and Visual Corpora
Humans connect language and vision to perceive the world. How to build a
similar connection for computers? One possible way is via visual concepts,
which are text terms that relate to visually discriminative entities. We
propose an automatic visual concept discovery algorithm using parallel text and
visual corpora; it filters text terms based on the visual discriminative power
of the associated images, and groups them into concepts using visual and
semantic similarities. We illustrate the applications of the discovered
concepts using bidirectional image and sentence retrieval task and image
tagging task, and show that the discovered concepts not only outperform several
large sets of manually selected concepts significantly, but also achieves the
state-of-the-art performance in the retrieval task.Comment: To appear in ICCV 201
High-energy Astrophysics and the Virtual Observatory
The Virtual Observatory (VO) will revolutionise the way we do Astronomy by
allowing easy access to all astronomical data and by making the handling and
analysis of datasets at various locations across the globe much simpler and
faster. I report here on the need for the VO and its status in Europe,
concentrating on the recently started EURO-VO project, and then give two
specific applications of VO tools to high-energy astrophysics.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, invited talk at the Workshop ``Multifrequency
Behaviour of High Energy Cosmic Sources'', Vulcano, Italy, May 2005, F.
Giovannelli et al., in pres
Currents: Bad for Divers, Good for Corals
In this lesson students will investigate deep-sea currents such as density and barotropic currents, which can be significantly accelerated near the ocean bottom or near large solid objects like seamounts. This activity focuses on the effects of topography on currents, and how these effects may make some habitats more favorable for certain species such as precious coral communities. As a result of this activity, students will be able to describe, compare, and contrast major forces that drive ocean currents and discuss the general effects of topography on current velocity. They will also be able to discuss how velocity affects the ability of a current to transport sand and explain why deep-sea precious corals are more frequently found in areas having strong currents. Educational levels: High school
- …