Executive Functions in the Schools: What Do Teachers Know About Executive Functions and How They Impact Student Progress?

The current study surveyed middle school teachers on their knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations regarding executive functions in relation to students’ academic success. The results of this study indicated that teachers perceived themselves as knowledgeable of executive functions. A disconnect was found between teacher responses to an open-ended question regarding abilities and skills required for academic success and their endorsements of specific questions regarding executive functions. Motivation, problem-solving, and basic academic skills were indicated as being most important for success, but two of these are considered capacities students possess intrinsically. When asked about specific executive functions however, they rated them as being important to success, indicated that they could be taught and indicated that that they were actually teaching them to students despite not having received training and not being familiar with executive function resources

CBR and MBR techniques: review for an application in the emergencies domain

The purpose of this document is to provide an in-depth analysis of current reasoning engine practice and the integration strategies of Case Based Reasoning and Model Based Reasoning that will be used in the design and development of the RIMSAT system. RIMSAT (Remote Intelligent Management Support and Training) is a European Commission funded project designed to: a.. Provide an innovative, 'intelligent', knowledge based solution aimed at improving the quality of critical decisions b.. Enhance the competencies and responsiveness of individuals and organisations involved in highly complex, safety critical incidents - irrespective of their location. In other words, RIMSAT aims to design and implement a decision support system that using Case Base Reasoning as well as Model Base Reasoning technology is applied in the management of emergency situations. This document is part of a deliverable for RIMSAT project, and although it has been done in close contact with the requirements of the project, it provides an overview wide enough for providing a state of the art in integration strategies between CBR and MBR technologies.Postprint (published version

Are the Fundamental Concepts of Information Systems Mostly About Work Systems?

Audience comments about a debate at ICIS200 [Alter et al., 2001] related to e-business and the fundamental concepts of information systems noted that the debate was undercut by the lack of agreement about what are the fundamental concepts. As a follow-on to that debate, this article proposes a set of fundamental concepts for information systems. While there is no bullet-proof way to prove that a particular set of concepts captures what is truly fundamental within a diverse and rapidly evolving field, the attempt to identify these concepts challenges the reader to ask If this isn\u27t the way to identify fundamental concepts, what is the way to do that? If these aren\u27t the fundamental concepts, what is a better set of fundamental concepts and why? This article\u27s overarching theme is that the fundamental concepts of information systems are mostly fundamental concepts of work systems in general. The article defines fundamental concept and discusses various considerations for identifying them. It then proposes a set of fundamental concepts organized in several layers. The first layer concentrates on the elements needed to summarize a work system. The second layer adds concepts that constitute a general vocabulary for describing, understanding, and evaluating work systems. Each concept in the second layer is related to a specific concept in the first layer. Since an information system is a special case of a work system, every fundamental concept of work systems should at least apply to information systems and might be a fundamental concept of information systems. Similarly for work system projects and information system projects, both of which are also special cases of work systems. The article argues that the fundamental concepts of work systems should be viewed as fundamental concepts for all three special cases and then concludes with a number of questions about that the reader might want to consider concerning the approach the article takes and the particular fundamental concepts that are identified

Storing the wisdom: chemical concepts and chemoinformatics

The purpose of the paper is to examine the nature of chemical concepts, and the ways in which they are applied in chemoinformatics systems. An account of concepts in philosophy and in the information sciences leads to an analysis of chemical concepts, and their representation. The way in which concepts are applied in systems for information retrieval and for structure–property correlation are reviewed, and some issues noted. Attention is focused on the basic concepts or substance, reaction and property, on the organising concepts of chemical structure, structural similarity, periodicity, and on more specific concepts, including two- and three-dimensional structural patterns, reaction types, and property concepts. It is concluded that chemical concepts, despite (or perhaps because of) their vague and mutable nature, have considerable and continuing value in chemoinformatics, and that an increased formal treatment of concepts may have value in the future

Bottom-up construction of ontologies

Presents a particular way of building ontologies that proceeds in a bottom-up fashion. Concepts are defined in a way that mirrors the way their instances are composed out of smaller objects. The smaller objects themselves may also be modeled as being composed. Bottom-up ontologies are flexible through the use of implicit and, hence, parsimonious part-whole and subconcept-superconcept relations. The bottom-up method complements current practice, where, as a rule, ontologies are built top-down. The design method is illustrated by an example involving ontologies of pure substances at several levels of detail. It is not claimed that bottom-up construction is a generally valid recipe; indeed, such recipes are deemed uninformative or impossible. Rather, the approach is intended to enrich the ontology developer's toolki

An XML-based schema definition for model sharing and reuse in a distributed environment

This research leverages the inherent synergy between structured modeling and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to facilitate model sharing and reuse in a distributed environment. This is accomplished by providing an XML-based schema definition and two alternative supporting architectures. The XML schema defines a new markup language referred to as the Structured Modeling Markup Language (SMML) for representing models. The schema is based on the structured modeling paradigm as a formalism for conceiving, representing and manipulating a wide variety of models. Overall, SMML and supporting architectures allow different types of models, developed in a variety of modeling platforms to be represented in a standardized format and shared in a distributed environment. The paper demonstrates the proposed SMML through two case studies

Storing the wisdom: chemical concepts and chemoinformatics

The purpose of the paper is to examine the nature of chemical concepts, and the ways in which they are applied in chemoinformatics systems. An account of concepts in philosophy and in the information sciences leads to an analysis of chemical concepts, and their representation. The way in which concepts are applied in systems for information retrieval and for structure–property correlation are reviewed, and some issues noted. Attention is focused on the basic concepts or substance, reaction and property, on the organising concepts of chemical structure, structural similarity, periodicity, and on more specific concepts, including two- and three-dimensional structural patterns, reaction types, and property concepts. It is concluded that chemical concepts, despite (or perhaps because of) their vague and mutable nature, have considerable and continuing value in chemoinformatics, and that an increased formal treatment of concepts may have value in the future

Encoding, Storing and Searching of Analytical Properties and Assigned Metabolite Structures

Informationen über Metabolite und andere kleine organische Moleküle sind von entscheidender Bedeutung in vielen verschiedenen Bereichen der Naturwissenschaften. Sie spielen z.B. eine entscheidende Rolle in metabolischen Netzwerken und das Wissen über ihre Eigenschaften, hilft komplexe biologische Prozesse und komplette biologische Systeme zu verstehen. Da in biologischen und chemischen Laboren täglich Daten anfallen, welche diese Moleküle beschreiben, existiert eine umfassende Datengrundlage, die sich kontinuierlich erweitert. Um Wissenschaftlern die Verarbeitung, den Austausch, die Archivierung und die Suche innerhalb dieser Informationen unter Erhaltung der semantischen Zusammenhänge zu ermöglichen, sind komplexe Softwaresysteme und Datenformate nötig. Das Ziel dieses Projektes bestand darin, Anwendungen und Algorithmen zu entwickeln, welche für die effiziente Kodierung, Sammlung, Normalisierung und Analyse molekularer Daten genutzt werden können. Diese sollen Wissenschaftler bei der Strukturaufklärung, der Dereplikation, der Analyse von molekularen Wechselwirkungen und bei der Veröffentlichung des so gewonnenen Wissens unterstützen. Da die direkte Beschreibung der Struktur und der Funktionsweise einer unbekannten Verbindung sehr schwierig und aufwändig ist, wird dies hauptsächlich indirekt, mit Hilfe beschreibender Eigenschaften erreicht. Diese werden dann zur Vorhersage struktureller und funktioneller Charakteristika genutzt. In diesem Zusammenhang wurden Programmmodule entwickelt, welche sowohl die Visualisierung von Struktur- und Spektroskopiedaten, die gegliederte Darstellung und Veränderung von Metadaten und Eigenschaften, als auch den Import und Export von verschiedenen Datenformaten erlauben. Diese wurden durch Methoden erweitert, welche es ermöglichen, die gewonnenen Informationen weitergehend zu analysieren und Struktur- und Spektroskopiedaten einander zuzuweisen. Außerdem wurde ein System zur strukturierten Archivierung und Verwaltung großer Mengen molekularer Daten und spektroskopischer Informationen, unter Beibehaltung der semantischen Zusammenhänge, sowohl im Dateisystem, als auch in Datenbanken, entwickelt. Um die verlustfreie Speicherung zu gewährleisten, wurde ein offenes und standardisiertes Datenformat definiert (CMLSpect). Dieses erweitert das existierende CML (Chemical Markup Language) Vokabular und erlaubt damit die einfache Handhabung von verknüpften Struktur- und Spektroskopiedaten. Die entwickelten Anwendungen wurden in das Bioclipse System für Bio- und Chemoinformatik eingebunden und bieten dem Nutzer damit eine hochqualitative Benutzeroberfläche und dem Entwickler eine leicht zu erweiternde modulare Programmarchitektur

Semantic Integration of Coastal Buoys Data using SPARQL

Currently, the data provided by the heterogeneous buoy sensors/networks (e.g. National Data Buoy center (NDBC), Gulf Of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMoos) etc. is not amenable to the development of integrated systems due to conflicts in the data representation at syntactic and structural levels. With the rapid increase in the amount of information, the integration of heterogeneous resources is an important issue and requires integrative technologies such as semantic web. In distributed data dissemination system, normally querying on single database will not provide relevant information and requires querying across interrelated data sources to retrieve holistic information. In this thesis we develop system for integrating two different Resource Description Framework (RDF) data sources through intelligent querying using Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL). We use Semantic Web application framework from AllegroGraph that provides functionality for developing triple store for the ontological representations, forming federated stores and querying it through SPARQL