dictyBase update 2011: web 2.0 functionality and the initial steps towards a genome portal for the Amoebozoa

dictyBase (http://www.dictybase.org), the model organism database for Dictyostelium, aims to provide the broad biomedical research community with well integrated, high quality data and tools for Dictyostelium discoideum and related species. dictyBase houses the complete genome sequence, ESTs, and the entire body of literature relevant to Dictyostelium. This information is curated to provide accurate gene models and functional annotations, with the goal of fully annotating the genome to provide a ‘reference genome’ in the Amoebozoa clade. We highlight several new features in the present update: (i) new annotations; (ii) improved interface with web 2.0 functionality; (iii) the initial steps towards a genome portal for the Amoebozoa; (iv) ortholog display; and (v) the complete integration of the Dicty Stock Center with dictyBase

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Heart Failure Monitoring System Based on Wearable and Information Technologies

In Europe, Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD) are the leading source of death, causing 45% of all deceases. Besides, Heart Failure, the paradigm of CVD, mainly affects people older than 65. In the current aging society, the European MyHeart Project was created, whose mission is to empower citizens to fight CVD by leading a preventive lifestyle and being able to be diagnosed at an early stage. This paper presents the development of a Heart Failure Management System, based on daily monitoring of Vital Body Signals, with wearable and mobile technologies, for the continuous assessment of this chronic disease. The System makes use of the latest technologies for monitoring heart condition, both with wearable garments (e.g. for measuring ECG and Respiration); and portable devices (such as Weight Scale and Blood Pressure Cuff) both with Bluetooth capabilitie

Towards Cleaning-up Open Data Portals: A Metadata Reconciliation Approach

This paper presents an approach for metadata reconciliation, curation and linking for Open Governamental Data Portals (ODPs). ODPs have been lately the standard solution for governments willing to put their public data available for the society. Portal managers use several types of metadata to organize the datasets, one of the most important ones being the tags. However, the tagging process is subject to many problems, such as synonyms, ambiguity or incoherence, among others. As our empiric analysis of ODPs shows, these issues are currently prevalent in most ODPs and effectively hinders the reuse of Open Data. In order to address these problems, we develop and implement an approach for tag reconciliation in Open Data Portals, encompassing local actions related to individual portals, and global actions for adding a semantic metadata layer above individual portals. The local part aims to enhance the quality of tags in a single portal, and the global part is meant to interlink ODPs by establishing relations between tags.Comment: 8 pages,10 Figures - Under Revision for ICSC201

Online service delivery models : an international comparison in the public sector

Governments around the world are facing the challenge of responding to increased expectations by their customers with regard to public service delivery. Citizens, for example, expect governments to provide better and more efficient electronic services on the Web in an integrated way. Online portals have become the approach of choice in online service delivery to meet these requirements and become more customer-focussed. This study describes and analyses existing variants of online service delivery models based upon an empirical study and provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in government. For this study, we have conducted interviews with senior management representatives from five international governments. Based on our findings, we distinguish three different classes of service delivery models. We describe and characterise each of these models in detail and provide an in-depth discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches

Managing knowledge in the context of sustainable construction

The 21st century has been a growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability agenda. Moreover for construction, it has become increasingly important as clients are pushing for a more sustainable product to complement their organisations’ own strategic plans. Sustainable development can be defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainable construction is therefore seen as the application of sustainable practices to the activities of the construction sector. One of the key factors in making construction projects more sustainable is overcoming the obstacles of capturing and managing the knowledge required by project teams to effect such change. Managing this knowledge is key to the construction industry because of the unique characteristics of its projects, i.e. multi-disciplinary teams, dynamic participation of team members, heavy reliance on previous experiences/heuristics, the one-off nature of the projects, tight schedules, limited budget, etc. Initiatives within the industry and academic research are developing mechanisms and tools for managing knowledge in construction firms and projects. Such work has so far addressed the issues of capturing, storing, and transferring knowledge