Tagging time in prolog : the temporality effect project

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted

Bibliometric Perspectives on Medical Innovation using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of PubMed

Multiple perspectives on the nonlinear processes of medical innovations can be distinguished and combined using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of the Medline database. Focusing on three main branches-"diseases," "drugs and chemicals," and "techniques and equipment"-we use base maps and overlay techniques to investigate the translations and interactions and thus to gain a bibliometric perspective on the dynamics of medical innovations. To this end, we first analyze the Medline database, the MeSH index tree, and the various options for a static mapping from different perspectives and at different levels of aggregation. Following a specific innovation (RNA interference) over time, the notion of a trajectory which leaves a signature in the database is elaborated. Can the detailed index terms describing the dynamics of research be used to predict the diffusion dynamics of research results? Possibilities are specified for further integration between the Medline database, on the one hand, and the Science Citation Index and Scopus (containing citation information), on the other.Comment: forthcoming in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technolog

Software systems through complex networks science: Review, analysis and applications

Complex software systems are among most sophisticated human-made systems, yet only little is known about the actual structure of 'good' software. We here study different software systems developed in Java from the perspective of network science. The study reveals that network theory can provide a prominent set of techniques for the exploratory analysis of large complex software system. We further identify several applications in software engineering, and propose different network-based quality indicators that address software design, efficiency, reusability, vulnerability, controllability and other. We also highlight various interesting findings, e.g., software systems are highly vulnerable to processes like bug propagation, however, they are not easily controllable

Virtual Astronomy, Information Technology, and the New Scientific Methodology

All sciences, including astronomy, are now entering the era of information abundance. The exponentially increasing volume and complexity of modern data sets promises to transform the scientific practice, but also poses a number of common technological challenges. The Virtual Observatory concept is the astronomical community's response to these challenges: it aims to harness the progress in information technology in the service of astronomy, and at the same time provide a valuable testbed for information technology and applied computer science. Challenges broadly fall into two categories: data handling (or "data farming"), including issues such as archives, intelligent storage, databases, interoperability, fast networks, etc., and data mining, data understanding, and knowledge discovery, which include issues such as automated clustering and classification, multivariate correlation searches, pattern recognition, visualization in highly hyperdimensional parameter spaces, etc., as well as various applications of machine learning in these contexts. Such techniques are forming a methodological foundation for science with massive and complex data sets in general, and are likely to have a much broather impact on the modern society, commerce, information economy, security, etc. There is a powerful emerging synergy between the computationally enabled science and the science-driven computing, which will drive the progress in science, scholarship, and many other venues in the 21st century

ANNIS: a linguistic database for exploring information structure

In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing