Data as a Service (DaaS) for sharing and processing of large data collections in the cloud

Data as a Service (DaaS) is among the latest kind of services being investigated in the Cloud computing community. The main aim of DaaS is to overcome limitations of state-of-the-art approaches in data technologies, according to which data is stored and accessed from repositories whose location is known and is relevant for sharing and processing. Besides limitations for the data sharing, current approaches also do not achieve to fully separate/decouple software services from data and thus impose limitations in inter-operability. In this paper we propose a DaaS approach for intelligent sharing and processing of large data collections with the aim of abstracting the data location (by making it relevant to the needs of sharing and accessing) and to fully decouple the data and its processing. The aim of our approach is to build a Cloud computing platform, offering DaaS to support large communities of users that need to share, access, and process the data for collectively building knowledge from data. We exemplify the approach from large data collections from health and biology domains.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Transcending Knowledge Management, Shaping Knowledge Governance

Reflecting a new normative push towards conceptual innovation, knowledge governance has emerged as a new paradigm to describe, understand, and analyze the expanding “knowledge domain” in a holistic and comprehensive way. Knowledge governance involves the design of structures and mechanisms to support the processes of sharing and creating knowledge in the (almost) exclusive frame of strategic management. In this chapter we try to draw the portrait of this pretender theory and practice with deep case studies

Exploring the evolution of research topics during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the research agendas of most scientific communities, resulting in an overwhelming production of research articles in a variety of domains, including medicine, virology, epidemiology, economy, psychology, and so on. Several open-access corpora and literature hubs were established; among them, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) has systematically gathered scientific contributions for 2.5 years, by collecting and indexing over one million articles. Here, we present the CORD-19 Topic Visualizer (CORToViz), a method and associated visualization tool for inspecting the CORD-19 textual corpus of scientific abstracts. Our method is based upon a careful selection of up-to-date technologies (including large language models), resulting in an architecture for clustering articles along orthogonal dimensions and extraction techniques for temporal topic mining. Topic inspection is supported by an interactive dashboard, providing fast, one-click visualization of topic contents as word clouds and topic trends as time series, equipped with easy-to-drive statistical testing for analyzing the significance of topic emergence along arbitrarily selected time windows. The processes of data preparation and results visualization are completely general and virtually applicable to any corpus of textual documents - thus suited for effective adaptation to other contexts.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

CREATING A BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY INDEXED SEARCH ENGINE TO IMPROVE THE SEMANTIC RELEVANCE OF RETREIVED MEDICAL TEXT

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a controlled vocabulary used by the National Library of Medicine to index medical articles, abstracts, and journals contained within the MEDLINE database. Although MeSH imposes uniformity and consistency in the indexing process, it has been proven that using MeSH indices only result in a small increase in precision over free-text indexing. Moreover, studies have shown that the use of controlled vocabularies in the indexing process is not an effective method to increase semantic relevance in information retrieval. To address the need for semantic relevance, we present an ontology-based information retrieval system for the MEDLINE collection that result in a 37.5% increase in precision when compared to free-text indexing systems. The presented system focuses on the ontology to: provide an alternative to text-representation for medical articles, finding relationships among co-occurring terms in abstracts, and to index terms that appear in text as well as discovered relationships. The presented system is then compared to existing MeSH and Free-Text information retrieval systems. This dissertation provides a proof-of-concept for an online retrieval system capable of providing increased semantic relevance when searching through medical abstracts in MEDLINE

User-centered semantic dataset retrieval

Finding relevant research data is an increasingly important but time-consuming task in daily research practice. Several studies report on difficulties in dataset search, e.g., scholars retrieve only partial pertinent data, and important information can not be displayed in the user interface. Overcoming these problems has motivated a number of research efforts in computer science, such as text mining and semantic search. In particular, the emergence of the Semantic Web opens a variety of novel research perspectives. Motivated by these challenges, the overall aim of this work is to analyze the current obstacles in dataset search and to propose and develop a novel semantic dataset search. The studied domain is biodiversity research, a domain that explores the diversity of life, habitats and ecosystems. This thesis has three main contributions: (1) We evaluate the current situation in dataset search in a user study, and we compare a semantic search with a classical keyword search to explore the suitability of semantic web technologies for dataset search. (2) We generate a question corpus and develop an information model to figure out on what scientific topics scholars in biodiversity research are interested in. Moreover, we also analyze the gap between current metadata and scholarly search interests, and we explore whether metadata and user interests match. (3) We propose and develop an improved dataset search based on three components: (A) a text mining pipeline, enriching metadata and queries with semantic categories and URIs, (B) a retrieval component with a semantic index over categories and URIs and (C) a user interface that enables a search within categories and a search including further hierarchical relations. Following user centered design principles, we ensure user involvement in various user studies during the development process

Proceedings of the First Karlsruhe Service Summit Workshop - Advances in Service Research, Karlsruhe, Germany, February 2015 (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7692)

Since April 2008 KSRI fosters interdisciplinary research in order to support and advance the progress in the service domain. KSRI brings together academia and industry while serving as a European research hub with respect to service science. For KSS2015 Research Workshop, we invited submissions of theoretical and empirical research dealing with the relevant topics in the context of services including energy, mobility, health care, social collaboration, and web technologies