Designing Web-enabled services to provide damage estimation maps caused by natural hazards

The availability of building stock inventory data and demographic information is an important requirement for risk assessment studies when attempting to predict and estimate losses due to natural hazards such as earthquakes, storms, floods or tsunamis. The better this information is provided, the more accurate are predictions on damage to structures and lifelines and the better can expected impacts on the population be estimated. When a disaster strikes, a map is often one of the first requirements for answering questions related to location, casualties and damage zones caused by the event. Maps of appropriate scale that represent relative and absolute damage distributions may be of great importance for rescuing lives and properties, and for providing relief. However, this type of maps is often difficult to obtain during the first hours or even days after the occurrence of a natural disaster. The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Services (OWS) Specifications enable access to datasets and services using shared, distributed and interoperable environments through web-enabled services. In this paper we propose the use of OWS in view of these advantages as a possible solution for issues related to suitable dataset acquisition for risk assessment studies. The design of web-enabled services was carried out using the municipality of Managua (Nicaragua) and the development of damage and loss estimation maps caused by earthquakes as a first case study. Four organizations located in different places are involved in this proposal and connected through web services, each one with a specific role

Services trade, regulation, and regional integration: Evidence from sectoral data

Regulatory measures constitute a significant barrier to cross-border services trade in sectors including transport, communications, business services, insurance, and recreation. However, regulation has weaker effects on trade in financial services, distribution, and construction. Entry barriers and conduct regulations have heterogeneous effects across sectors, as do particular measures such as licensing requirements, economic needs tests, restrictions on business form, and limitations on advertising. In addition, regional trade agreements (RTAs) are trade creating in communications, finance, and distribution, but have only weak effects in other sectors. Contrary to findings for goods markets, trade diversion is relatively limited for services RTAs.Trade in services; Non-tariff measures; Regional integration

Providing Multilingual Access to Health-Oriented Content

Finding health-related content is not an easy task. People have to know what to search for, which medical terms to use, and where to find accurate information. This task becomes even harder when people such as immigrants wish to find information in their country of residence and do not speak the national language very well. In this paper, we present a new health information system that allows users to search for health information using natural language queries composed of multiple languages. We present the technical details of the system and outline the results of a preliminary user study to demonstrate the usability of the system

Benchmarking Network Embedding Models for Link Prediction: Are We Making Progress?

Network embedding methods map a network's nodes to vectors in an embedding space, in such a way that these representations are useful for estimating some notion of similarity or proximity between pairs of nodes in the network. The quality of these node representations is then showcased through results of downstream prediction tasks. Commonly used benchmark tasks such as link prediction, however, present complex evaluation pipelines and an abundance of design choices. This, together with a lack of standardized evaluation setups can obscure the real progress in the field. In this paper, we aim to shed light on the state-of-the-art of network embedding methods for link prediction and show, using a consistent evaluation pipeline, that only thin progress has been made over the last years. The newly conducted benchmark that we present here, including 17 embedding methods, also shows that many approaches are outperformed even by simple heuristics. Finally, we argue that standardized evaluation tools can repair this situation and boost future progress in this field