Systematizing FAIR research data management in biomedical research projects: a data life cycle approach

Biomedical researchers are facing data management challenges brought by a new generation of data driven by the advent of translational medicine research. These challenges are further complicated by the recent calls for data re-use and long-term stewardship spearheaded by the FAIR principles initiative. As a result, there is an increasingly wide-spread recognition that advancing biomedical science is becoming dependent on the application of data science to manage and utilize highly diverse and complex data in ways that give it context, meaning, and longevity beyond its initial purpose. However, current methods and practices in biomedical informatics remain to adopt a traditional linear view of the informatics process (collect, store and analyse); focusing primarily on the challenges in data integration and analysis, which are challenges only pertaining to a part of the overall life cycle of research data. The aim of this research is to facilitate the adoption and integration of data management practices into the research life cycle of biomedical projects, thus improving their capabilities into solving data management-related challenges that they face throughout the course of their research work. To achieve this aim, this thesis takes a data life cycle approach to define and develop a systematic methodology and framework towards the systematization of FAIR data management in biomedical research projects. The overarching contribution of this research is the provision of a data-state life cycle model for research data management in Biomedical Translational Research Projects. This model provides insight into the dynamics between 1) the purpose of a research-driven data use case, 2) the data requirements that renders data in a state fit for purpose, 3) the data management functions that prepare and act upon data and 4) the resulting state of data that is _t to serve the use case. This insight led to the development of a FAIR data management framework, which is another contribution of this thesis. This framework provides data managers the groundwork, including the data models, resources and capabilities, needed to build a FAIR data management environment to manage data during the operational stages of a biomedical research project. An exemplary implementation of this architecture (PlatformTM) was developed and validated by real-world research datasets produced by collaborative research programs funded by the Innovative Medicine Initiative (IMI) BioVacSafe 1 , eTRIKS 2 and FAIRplus 3.Open Acces

Explorando el ciclo urbano hidrosocial en entornos turísticos

This contribution attempts to examine first how different theoretical and methodological perspectives from Geography and environmental sciences explore water flows and their physical and social dimensions in the city, as well as their changes in response to the emerging urban complexities and challenges. Using in particular the framework provided by Urban Political Ecology, I look at how the physical and social dimensions of water flows unfold and influence the urbanization process and, in turn, are influenced by urbanization. In the second part, attention is paid to urban coastal areas of the Mediterranean as candidate laboratories of analysis under urban political ecology since they are subject to rapid processes of social environmental change in which water plays a fundamental part. Case studies included to examine physical and social dimensions of water flows include heritage towns (Venice) and mass tourism resorts (Benidorm).Esta contribución intenta examinar primero cómo diferentes perspectivas teóricas y metodológicas de la geografía y las ciencias ambientales exploran los flujos de agua en sus dimensiones física y social en la ciudad, así como sus modificaciones, en respuesta a las complejidades y desafíos urbanos emergentes. A través del marco establecido por la disciplina de la Ecología Política Urbana, miro cómo las dimensiones físicas y sociales de los flujos de agua se desarrollan e influyen en el proceso de urbanización y, a su vez, se ven influenciada por la urbanización. En la segunda parte, se presta atención a las zonas urbanas costeras del Mediterráneo como laboratorios candidatos de análisis en el marco de ecología política urbana, ya que están sujetas a rápidos procesos de cambio social y ambiental en el que el agua juega un papel fundamental. Los estudios de caso incluidos para examinar las dimensiones físicas y sociales de los flujos de agua incluyen la ciudad cultural de Venecia y el destino turístico de masas de Benidorm.This work is the result of a preliminary research conducted for the preparation of a PhD’s thesis in Geography, Spatial Planning and Public Policies; supported by the PhD scholarship, number FI_B 00773, of the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants of Catalonia (AGAUR), the Comisionado para Universidades e Investigación (CUR), the Departamento de Innovación, Universidades y Empresa (DIUE) and the European Social Fund

Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Data Challenges for Agricultural Research and Development

This open access book provides the first systematic overview of existing challenges and opportunities for responsible data linkage, and a cutting-edge assessment of which steps need to be taken to ensure that plant data are ethically shared and used for the benefit of ensuring global food security – one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The volume focuses on the contemporary contours of such challenges through sustained engagement with current and historical initiatives and discussion of best practices and prospective future directions for ensuring responsible plant data linkage. The volume is divided into four sections that include case studies of plant data use and linkage in the context of particular research projects, breeding programs, and historical research. It address technical challenges of data linkage in developing key tools, standards and infrastructures, and examines governance challenges of data linkage in relation to socioeconomic and environmental research and data collection. Finally, the last section addresses issues raised by new data production and linkage methods for the inclusion of agriculture’s diverse stakeholders. This book brings together leading experts in data curation, data governance and data studies from a variety of fields, including data science, plant science, agricultural research, science policy, data ethics and the philosophy, history and social studies of plant science

Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Data Challenges for Agricultural Research and Development

This open access book provides the first systematic overview of existing challenges and opportunities for responsible data linkage, and a cutting-edge assessment of which steps need to be taken to ensure that plant data are ethically shared and used for the benefit of ensuring global food security – one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The volume focuses on the contemporary contours of such challenges through sustained engagement with current and historical initiatives and discussion of best practices and prospective future directions for ensuring responsible plant data linkage. The volume is divided into four sections that include case studies of plant data use and linkage in the context of particular research projects, breeding programs, and historical research. It address technical challenges of data linkage in developing key tools, standards and infrastructures, and examines governance challenges of data linkage in relation to socioeconomic and environmental research and data collection. Finally, the last section addresses issues raised by new data production and linkage methods for the inclusion of agriculture’s diverse stakeholders. This book brings together leading experts in data curation, data governance and data studies from a variety of fields, including data science, plant science, agricultural research, science policy, data ethics and the philosophy, history and social studies of plant science

Service composition based on SIP peer-to-peer networks

Today the telecommunication market is faced with the situation that customers are requesting for new telecommunication services, especially value added services. The concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) seems to be a solution for this, so this concept finds its way into the telecommunication area. These customer expectations have emerged in the context of NGN and the associated migration of the telecommunication networks from traditional circuit-switched towards packet-switched networks. One fundamental aspect of the NGN concept is to outsource the intelligence of services from the switching plane onto separated Service Delivery Platforms using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to provide the required signalling functionality. Caused by this migration process towards NGN SIP has appeared as the major signalling protocol for IP (Internet Protocol) based NGN. This will lead in contrast to ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and IN (Intelligent Network) to significantly lower dependences among the network and services and enables to implement new services much easier and faster. In addition, further concepts from the IT (Information Technology) namely SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have largely influenced the telecommunication sector forced by amalgamation of IT and telecommunications. The benefit of applying SOA in telecommunication services is the acceleration of service creation and delivery. Main features of the SOA are that services are reusable, discoverable combinable and independently accessible from any location. Integration of those features offers a broader flexibility and efficiency for varying demands on services. This thesis proposes a novel framework for service provisioning and composition in SIP-based peer-to-peer networks applying the principles of SOA. One key contribution of the framework is the approach to enable the provisioning and composition of services which is performed by applying SIP. Based on this, the framework provides a flexible and fast way to request the creation for composite services. Furthermore the framework enables to request and combine multimodal value-added services, which means that they are no longer limited regarding media types such as audio, video and text. The proposed framework has been validated by a prototype implementation

European Language Grid

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 – to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects

European Language Grid

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 – to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects

Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Data Challenges for Agricultural Research and Development

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer via the DOI in this recordThis open access book provides the first systematic overview of existing challenges and opportunities for responsible data linkage, and a cutting-edge assessment of which steps need to be taken to ensure that plant data are ethically shared and used for the benefit of ensuring global food security – one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The volume focuses on the contemporary contours of such challenges through sustained engagement with current and historical initiatives and discussion of best practices and prospective future directions for ensuring responsible plant data linkage. The volume is divided into four sections that include case studies of plant data use and linkage in the context of particular research projects, breeding programs, and historical research. It address technical challenges of data linkage in developing key tools, standards and infrastructures, and examines governance challenges of data linkage in relation to socioeconomic and environmental research and data collection. Finally, the last section addresses issues raised by new data production and linkage methods for the inclusion of agriculture’s diverse stakeholders. This book brings together leading experts in data curation, data governance and data studies from a variety of fields, including data science, plant science, agricultural research, science policy, data ethics and the philosophy, history and social studies of plant science.Alan Turing InstituteEuropean Research Council (ERC

A Strategic Approach to Enhancing Sustainable Practices in Public Building Projects :a Case Study of Indonesian Local Authorities

In the last few decades, there has been well documented evidence that the performance of the public building projects in local authorities in Indonesia does not fully meet the expectation of the stakeholders involved and demonstrates sustainable practices. This mediocre performance impacts on the competitiveness of building industry, and therefore would require the development of a strategic approach to address these fundamental structural and cultural issues. The strategic approach, which facilitates sustainable practices, to a large extent, depends on the local priorities, goals and success criteria, which are dynamic and influenced by the expectations of various stakeholders involved in the procurement of public buildings. This research aims to develop a conceptual framework that will help local authorities to enhance sustainable practices of public building management. The empirical research work adopted case study strategy involving interviews with 24 public building practitioners and investigation of building defects on 34 projects. This research proposes LACU model, which represents a triangular relationship between contractors, local authorities and building end-users to illustrate the interactions between parties when undertaking their tasks throughout the project lifecycle. A framework of Sustainable-Dynamic Capabilities was developed and applied to enhance understanding of sustainability provisions in public building development. Based on this framework and stakeholders’ mapping illustrated by LACU model, this research has enhanced understanding on strategies of local authority to implement sustainable practices on public building projects. A template analysis through interview transcripts has been adopted to identify strategic approaches of local authority to deliver successful project by determining the roles of stakeholder at three different levels, provincial, regency or city and special authority. This research provides a novel empirically-based guidance for the local authorities to undertake sustainable public building procurement throughout project life cycle by adopting strategic approaches, such as employing innovative construction method, appropriate policy intervention by local leader, and changing business orientation