CLEF 2005: Ad Hoc track overview

We describe the objectives and organization of the CLEF 2005 ad hoc track and discuss the main characteristics of the tasks offered to test monolingual, bilingual and multilingual textual document retrieval. The performance achieved for each task is presented and a preliminary analysis of results is given. The paper focuses in particular on the multilingual tasks which reused the test collection created in CLEF 2003 in an attempt to see if an improvement in system performance over time could be measured, and also to examine the multilingual results merging problem

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Geographic information extraction from texts

A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

Design and Development of a Knowledge Modelling Approach to Govern the Use of Electronic Health Records for Research

There is now increasing commitment internationally to using electronic healthcare records collected during routine care delivery to conduct clinical research. This must be rigorously controlled by an extensive set of information governance requirements defining the legal, ethical and practical guidelines to respect the privacy rights of the people about whom the records are kept, uphold the clinical profession’s duty of confidentiality and protect the interests of participants, practitioners and researchers. The development of information security policies is a highly regarded method of meeting these requirements. This is hampered by the need to interpret a complex framework of legislation and guidelines, lack of clear advice and inconsistency in authoring, interpretation and understanding amongst the people whose behaviour they are expected to guide. By using the results of several UK and European research and information platform development projects in which the author has participated and by gathering requirements from stakeholders in the clinical and research communities, this thesis defines a knowledge management representation to specify policy requirements in a computable form. The work provides the first set of knowledge requirements for governing research uses of electronic healthcare records, and a knowledge model that describes information security policies and generates a web application tool. The tool allows policy control authoring that provides a consistent, clear and unambiguous view of governance requirements to researchers and service providers. The model and tool have been evaluated in a laboratory setting to explore their effects on behaviour and understanding of invited participants when authoring policy about handling healthcare records in research and making decisions about sharing information. The work has resulted in a validation of the model and demonstrated the potential positive effects of this new approach on practice. It makes recommendations about how it should be used in working practice and for educating people about information governance when performing clinical research to improve care provision