1,929 research outputs found
Behavior change interventions: the potential of ontologies for advancing science and practice
A central goal of behavioral medicine is the creation of evidence-based interventions for promoting behavior change. Scientific knowledge about behavior change could be more effectively accumulated using "ontologies." In information science, an ontology is a systematic method for articulating a "controlled vocabulary" of agreed-upon terms and their inter-relationships. It involves three core elements: (1) a controlled vocabulary specifying and defining existing classes; (2) specification of the inter-relationships between classes; and (3) codification in a computer-readable format to enable knowledge generation, organization, reuse, integration, and analysis. This paper introduces ontologies, provides a review of current efforts to create ontologies related to behavior change interventions and suggests future work. This paper was written by behavioral medicine and information science experts and was developed in partnership between the Society of Behavioral Medicine's Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Theories and Techniques of Behavior Change Interventions SIG. In recent years significant progress has been made in the foundational work needed to develop ontologies of behavior change. Ontologies of behavior change could facilitate a transformation of behavioral science from a field in which data from different experiments are siloed into one in which data across experiments could be compared and/or integrated. This could facilitate new approaches to hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery in behavioral science
The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain
The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals
OWL-Miner: Concept Induction in OWL Knowledge Bases
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology
Language (OWL)
have been widely used in recent years, and automated methods for
the analysis of
data and knowledge directly within these formalisms are of
current interest. Concept
induction is a technique for discovering descriptions of data,
such as inducing OWL
class expressions to describe RDF data. These class expressions
capture patterns in
the data which can be used to characterise interesting clusters
or to act as classifica-
tion rules over unseen data. The semantics of OWL is underpinned
by Description
Logics (DLs), a family of expressive and decidable fragments of
first-order logic.
Recently, methods of concept induction which are well studied in
the field of
Inductive Logic Programming have been applied to the related
formalism of DLs.
These methods have been developed for a number of purposes
including unsuper-
vised clustering and supervised classification. Refinement-based
search is a concept
induction technique which structures the search space of DL
concept/OWL class
expressions and progressively generalises or specialises
candidate concepts to cover
example data as guided by quality criteria such as accuracy.
However, the current
state-of-the-art in this area is limited in that such methods:
were not primarily de-
signed to scale over large RDF/OWL knowledge bases; do not
support class lan-
guages as expressive as OWL2-DL; or, are limited to one purpose,
such as learning
OWL classes for integration into ontologies. Our work addresses
these limitations
by increasing the efficiency of these learning methods whilst
permitting a concept
language up to the expressivity of OWL2-DL classes. We describe
methods which
support both classification (predictive induction) and subgroup
discovery (descrip-
tive induction), which, in this context, are fundamentally
related.
We have implemented our methods as the system called OWL-Miner
and show
by evaluation that our methods outperform state-of-the-art
systems for DL learning
in both the quality of solutions found and the speed in which
they are computed.
Furthermore, we achieve the best ever ten-fold cross validation
accuracy results on
the long-standing benchmark problem of carcinogenesis. Finally,
we present a case
study on ongoing work in the application of OWL-Miner to a
real-world problem
directed at improving the efficiency of biological macromolecular
crystallisation
Service-oriented discovery of knowledge : foundations, implementations and applications
In this thesis we will investigate
how a popular new way of distributed computing called service
orientation can be used within the field of Knowledge Discovery. We
critically investigate its principles and present models for developing
withing this paradigm. We then apply this model to create a web service
caled Fantom, that mines subgroups in a ranked list of identifiers,
based on their score. The descriptions of these subgroups are done in
ontologies to provide the scientist a description in a standardized and
familiar language. Finally, Fantom is tested on two different data sets
from the field of life-sciences; one concerning gene data, the other
concerning SNP data.LEI Universiteit LeidenAlgorithm
Semantic technologies for supporting KDD processes
209 p.Achieving a comfortable thermal situation within buildings with an efficient use of energy remains still an open challenge for most buildings. In this regard, IoT (Internet of Things) and KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) processes may be combined to solve these problems, even though data analysts may feel overwhelmed by heterogeneity and volume of the data to be considered. Data analysts could benefit from an application assistant that supports them throughout the KDD process. This research work aims at supporting data analysts through the different KDD phases towards the achievement of energy efficiency and thermal comfort in tertiary buildings. To do so, the EEPSA (Energy Efficiency Prediction Semantic Assistant) is proposed, which aids data analysts discovering the most relevant variables for the matter at hand, and informs them about relationships among relevant data. This assistant leverages Semantic Technologies such as ontologies, ontology-driven rules and ontology-driven data access. More specifically, the EEPSA ontology is the cornerstone of the assistant. This ontology is developed on top of three ODPs (Ontology Design Patterns) and it is designed so that its customization to address similar problems in different types of buildings can be approached methodically
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