11,176 research outputs found
Bridging the biodiversity data gaps: Recommendations to meet users’ data needs
A strong case has been made for freely available, high quality data on species occurrence, in order to track changes in biodiversity. However, one of the main issues surrounding the provision of such data is that sources vary in quality, scope, and accuracy. Therefore publishers of such data must face the challenge of maximizing quality, utility and breadth of data coverage, in order to make such data useful to users. Here, we report a number of recommendations that stem from a content need assessment survey conducted by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Through this survey, we aimed to distil the main user needs regarding biodiversity data. We find a broad range of recommendations from the survey respondents, principally concerning issues such as data quality, bias, and coverage, and extending ease of access. We recommend a candidate set of actions for the GBIF that fall into three classes: 1) addressing data gaps, data volume, and data quality, 2) aggregating new kinds of data for new applications, and 3) promoting ease-of-use and providing incentives for wider use. Addressing the challenge of providing high quality primary biodiversity data can potentially serve the needs of many international biodiversity initiatives, including the new 2020 biodiversity targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the emerging global biodiversity observation network (GEO BON), and the new Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis
In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient
situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and
integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors
and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to
capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse
information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this
domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce
empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the
domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi
has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations
being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at
https://w3id.org/empathi/
Archiving Software Surrogates on the Web for Future Reference
Software has long been established as an essential aspect of the scientific
process in mathematics and other disciplines. However, reliably referencing
software in scientific publications is still challenging for various reasons. A
crucial factor is that software dynamics with temporal versions or states are
difficult to capture over time. We propose to archive and reference surrogates
instead, which can be found on the Web and reflect the actual software to a
remarkable extent. Our study shows that about a half of the webpages of
software are already archived with almost all of them including some kind of
documentation.Comment: TPDL 2016, Hannover, German
Rebuild Iowa Office Quarterly Performance Report 3rd Quarter, April 2009
As the anniversaries of 2008 tornado’s and floods approach, the Rebuild Iowa Office vision of a safer, stronger and smarter Iowa is coming into sharper focus. While much more remains to be done, hundreds of displaced Iowans and businesses are on the road to recovery and the building blocks for communities coming together. While recovery is a marathon and not a sprint, the work done so far couldn’t have been accomplished without an extensive recovery planning effort and an unprecedented level of cooperation among local, state and federal governments, private citizens, businesses and non-profit organizations, there is a rebirth and recovery underway in Iowa
Discovery and integration of Web 2.0 content into geospatial information infrastructures: a use case in wild fire monitoring
Efficient environment monitoring has become a major concern for society to guarantee sustainable development. For instance, forest fire detection and analysis is important to provide early warning systems and identify impact. In this environmental context, availability of up-to-date information is very important for reducing damages caused. Environmental applications are deployed on top of GeospatialInformation Infrastructures (GIIs) to manage information pertaining to our environment. Suchinfrastructures are traditionally top-down infrastructures that do not consider user participation. This provokes a bottleneck in content publication and therefore a lack of content availability. On the contrary mainstream IT systems and in particular the emerging Web 2.0 Services allow active user participation that is becoming a massive source of dynamic geospatial resources. In this paper, we present a webservice, that implements a standard interface, offers a unique entry point for spatial data discovery, both in GII services and web 2.0 services. We introduce a prototype as proof of concept in a forest fire scenario, where we illustrate how to leverage scientific data and web 2.0 conten
Geomagnetism review 2014
The Geomagnetism team measures, records, models and interprets
variations in the Earth’s magnetic field. Our data and research help to
develop scientific understanding of the evolution of the solid Earth and its
atmospheric, ocean and space environments, and help develop our
understanding of the geomagnetic hazard and its impact. We also provide
geomagnetic products and services to industry and academics and we use
our knowledge to inform the public, government and industry
TERRORIST GROUP BRANDS: UNDERSTANDING TERRORIST GROUP STRATEGIES THROUGH MEASURING BRAND AWARENESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State adopted commercial marketing principles and effectively communicated with the targeted audience through social media to enhance operational achievements on the ground. This thesis investigates the role of effective brand awareness management in achieving terrorist group aims. The researcher seeks to quantify the Islamic State’s brand awareness among the populations in Syria and Iraq by measuring references to the terrorist group among these populations in the content appearing on the social media platform Twitter, during the period of August 1, 2013, through July 31, 2014. This thesis contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms utilized by armed actors by providing an analysis of the conditions of success of Islamic State propaganda within the areas under its control. Such knowledge can help direct more attention to targeting communication links with targeted populations. The results show that Islamic State brand awareness was higher in areas with more developed communication infrastructure, lower population density, and higher levels of historical violence. The results of this thesis further confirm the hypothesis that terrorist groups can increase the population’s awareness of their brand through violence as a medium of communication with targeted populations.Lieutenant Colonel, Jordanian Armed ForcesApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited
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