83,096 research outputs found
Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers
Purpose – The study examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated.
Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey.
Findings – The study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists.
Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers
bdbms -- A Database Management System for Biological Data
Biologists are increasingly using databases for storing and managing their
data. Biological databases typically consist of a mixture of raw data,
metadata, sequences, annotations, and related data obtained from various
sources. Current database technology lacks several functionalities that are
needed by biological databases. In this paper, we introduce bdbms, an
extensible prototype database management system for supporting biological data.
bdbms extends the functionalities of current DBMSs to include: (1) Annotation
and provenance management including storage, indexing, manipulation, and
querying of annotation and provenance as first class objects in bdbms, (2)
Local dependency tracking to track the dependencies and derivations among data
items, (3) Update authorization to support data curation via content-based
authorization, in contrast to identity-based authorization, and (4) New access
methods and their supporting operators that support pattern matching on various
types of compressed biological data types. This paper presents the design of
bdbms along with the techniques proposed to support these functionalities
including an extension to SQL. We also outline some open issues in building
bdbms.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use
of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007.
3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January
710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US
Following the Mobile Student: Can We Develop the Capacity for a Comprehensive Database to Assess Student Progression?
Presents a study of state-level databases on postsecondary student retention and completion rates and the feasibility of tracking students across state lines. Outlines challenges and recommendations, including establishing a common reporting standard
Using Links to prototype a Database Wiki
Both relational databases and wikis have strengths that make them attractive for use in collaborative applications. In the last decade, database-backed Web applications have been used extensively to develop valuable shared biological references called curated databases. Databases offer many advantages such as scalability, query optimization and concurrency control, but are not easy to use and lack other features needed for collaboration. Wikis have become very popular for early-stage biocuration projects because they are easy to use, encourage sharing and collaboration, and provide built-in support for archiving, history-tracking and annotation. However, curation projects often outgrow the limited capabilities of wikis for structuring and efficiently querying data at scale, necessitating a painful phase transition to a database-backed Web application. We perceive a need for a new class of general-purpose system, which we call a Database Wiki, that combines flexible wiki-like support for collaboration with robust database-like capabilities for structuring and querying data. This paper presents DBWiki, a design prototype for such a system written in the Web programming language Links. We present the architecture, typical use, and wiki markup language design for DBWiki and discuss features of Links that provided unique advantages for rapid Web/database application prototyping
The future of social is personal: the potential of the personal data store
This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSes), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges
Heterogeneous Relational Databases for a Grid-enabled Analysis Environment
Grid based systems require a database access mechanism that can provide seamless homogeneous access to the requested data through a virtual data access system, i.e. a system which can take care of tracking the data that is stored in geographically distributed heterogeneous databases. This system should provide an integrated view of the data that is stored in the different repositories by using a virtual data access mechanism, i.e. a mechanism which can hide the heterogeneity of the backend databases from the client applications. This paper focuses on accessing data stored in disparate relational databases through a web service interface, and exploits the features of a Data Warehouse and Data Marts. We present a middleware that enables applications to access data stored in geographically distributed relational databases without being aware of their physical locations and underlying schema. A web service interface is provided to enable applications to access this middleware in a language and platform independent way. A prototype implementation was created based on Clarens [4], Unity [7] and POOL [8]. This ability to access the data stored in the distributed relational databases transparently is likely to be a very powerful one for Grid users, especially the scientific community wishing to collate and analyze data distributed over the Grid
When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things
With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost
wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT)
approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and
facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the
physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both
digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and
services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these
applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge
centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile
environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also
noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and
state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives,
including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event
processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management
are also discussed
- …