Recommendations for the representation of hierarchical objects in Europeana

The issue of handling hierarchical objects has been always an important topic for Europeana’s network of projects and Data Providers. The implementation of solutions in the Europeana portal has been delayed for a long time mainly due to the fact that complex objects required the development of new functionalities that could not be supported by the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) model. Indeed the simplicity and the flatness of this model prevented Data Providers from supplying complex objects

Enhanced Publication Management System: a systemic approach towards modern scientific communication.

The impact of the digital revolution and the mass adoption of ICT affected only partially the scientific communication workflow. Scientists are today acquainted to scientific workflows, electronic data, software, e-science infrastructures for carrying out their daily research activities, but the dissemination of research results still relies on the bare scientific article, which simply shifted from being printed to digital. The scientific article alone, however, cannot support an effective assessment of research results or enable science reproducibility: to achieve this goal all products related to a research activity should be shared and disseminated. In the last decades, on the wave of Open Science, the scientific community has approached the problem of publishing research products different from the scientific article. One of the solutions is the paradigm of enhanced publications (EPs). EPs are digital objects that aggregate a digital scientific article and the other research products that have been used and produced during the research investigation described by the article and are useful to: (i) better interpret the article, (ii) enable more effective peer re- view, and (iii) facilitate or support reproducibility of science. Theory and practice of EPs is still not advanced and most Enhanced Publication Information Systems (EPISs) are custom implementations serving community specific needs. EPIS designers and developers have little or no technological support oriented to EPs. In fact, they realize EP-oriented software with a “from scratch” approach, addressing the peculiarities of the community to serve. Approach The aim of this thesis is to propose a systemic approach to the realisation of EPISs inspired by the lessons learned from the database domain. The state of the art of information systems and data models for EPs has been analyzed to identify the common features across different domains. Those common features have served as building blocks for the definition of a data model and functionalities for the representation and manipulation of EPs. The notion of Enhanced Publication Management System (EPMS) is introduced to denote information systems that provide EPIS designers and developers with EP-oriented tools for the setup, operation and maintenance of EPISs. The requirements of EPMSs have been identified and a reference software architecture that satisfies them is presented. Contributions The main contributions of this thesis relate to the fields of information science and scientific communication. The analysis of the state of the art about EPIS results in a terminology and a classification that can be useful as reference for the com- parison and discussion of such systems. A systemic approach, based on the novel notion of Enhanced Publication Management System (EPMS), is proposed as a more cost effective solution to the realization of EPIS, compared to the current “from scratch” strategy. A reference architecture for EPMSs and a general-purpose data model for EPs are pro- posed with the intent of contributing at building structured foundations of what is today becoming an area of research on its own

We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications

Since 2012, the “Open Researcher and Contributor ID” organisation (ORCID) has been successfully running a worldwide registry, with the aim of “providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities”. Any service in the scholarly communication ecosystem (e.g., publishers, repositories, CRIS systems, etc.) can contribute to a non-ambiguous scholarly record by including, during metadata deposition, referrals to iDs in the ORCID registry. The OpenAIRE Research Graph is a scholarly knowledge graph that aggregates both records from the ORCID registry and publication records with ORCID referrals from publishers and repositories worldwide to yield research impact monitoring and Open Science statistics. Graph data analytics revealed “anomalies” due to ORCID registry “misapplications”, caused by wrong ORCID referrals and misexploitation of the ORCID registry. Albeit these affect just a minority of ORCID records, they inevitably affect the quality of the ORCID infrastructure and may fuel the rise of detractors and scepticism about the service. In this paper, we classify and qualitatively document such misapplications, identifying five ORCID registrant-related and ORCID referral-related anomalies to raise awareness among ORCID users. We describe the current countermeasures taken by ORCID and, where applicable, provide recommendations. Finally, we elaborate on the importance of a community-steered Open Science infrastructure and the benefits this approach has brought and may bring to ORCID

Data management plans as linked open data

Open Science Graphs (OSGs) sont des graphiques de connaissances scientifiques représentant différentes entités du cycle de vie de la recherche (p. ex., projets, personnes, résultats de la recherche, établissements) et les relations entre eux

ARIADNEplus Data Aggregation Pipeline:User Guide (2.4)

The purpose of this User Guide is to provide a short introduction to the ARIADNEplus data aggregation pipeline. It defines, for the archaeological data providers, the process by which their data should be uploaded to the ARIADNE Content Cloud, so that it appears in the ARIADNEplus Catalogue, and can be searched via the ARIADNEplus Portal

Distinct Expression of Inflammatory Features in T Helper 17 Cells from Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (CNS). T helper (Th) 17 lymphocytes play a role in the pathogenesis of MS. Indeed, Th17 cells are abundant in the cerebrospinal fluid and peripheral blood of MS patients and promote pathogenesis in the mouse model of MS. To gain insight into the function of Th17 cells in MS, we tested whether Th17 cells polarized from naïve CD4 T cells of healthy donors and MS patients display different features. To this end, we analysed several parameters that typify the Th17 profile during the differentiation process of naïve CD4 T cells obtained from relapsing-remitting (RR)-MS patients (n = 31) and healthy donors (HD) (n = 28). Analysis of an array of cytokines produced by Th17 cells revealed that expression of interleukin (IL)-21, tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-β, IL-2 and IL-1R1 is significantly increased in Th17 cells derived from MS patients compared to healthy donor-derived cells. Interestingly, IL-1R1 expression is also increased in Th17 cells circulating in the blood of MS patients compared to healthy donors. Since IL-2, IL-21, TNF-β, and IL-1R1 play a crucial role in the activation of immune cells, our data indicate that high expression of these molecules in Th17 cells from MS patients could be related to their high inflammatory status

Villa Ceriani e il suo parco, nuove idee per il riuso conservativo

Nel corso della primavera 2021 Villa Ceriani e il parco sono stati oggetto delle analisi e dei progetti di conservazione e riuso del corso e laboratori di restauro del Politecnico di Milano, Polo territoriale di Lecco. L’efficace e fattiva collaborazione con il Comune e soprattutto con la direttrice del Museo archeologico di Erba ha permesso di mettere a fuoco le necessità e le aspettative delle amministrazioni pubbliche e dei cittadini riguardo una delle più prestigiose e ben conservate ville del territorio comunale. I laboratori di restauro hanno permesso agli studenti di approfondire la conoscenza del sito e dei manufatti grazie al metodo rigoroso della conservazione. I risultati sono stati molti e riguardano diversi aspetti. Innanzitutto, gli studenti hanno affrontato la complessità che l’intervento sul costruito storico implica negli aspetti applicativi. Inoltre, la richiesta di continuo adattamento alle modalità di lavoro, (in classe, a distanza, per piccoli gruppi, raramente sul posto, individualmente con momenti di discussione telematici, ecc.) ha necessariamente sviluppato la capacità di concentrazione sull’obiettivo e di saper sfruttare, in modo flessibile, tutte le risorse che venivano messe a disposizione o che occorreva ricercare. Infine, le modalità di comunicazione preferibilmente on line hanno richiesto di svilupparne l’efficacia favorendo forme espressive integrative (grafiche, fotografiche, di simulazione via software) che hanno potenziato le capacità trasversali alle discipline curriculari del corso di Ingegneria edile - architettura

The OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard: On blending scientific workflows and scientific publishing

First Online 30 August 2019Despite the hype, the effective implementation of Open Science is hindered by several cultural and technical barriers. Researchers embraced digital science, use “digital laboratories” (e.g. research infrastructures, thematic services) to conduct their research and publish research data, but practices and tools are still far from achieving the expectations of transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. The places where science is performed and the places where science is published are still regarded as different realms. Publishing is still a post-experimental, tedious, manual process, too often limited to articles, in some contexts semantically linked to datasets, rarely to software, generally disregarding digital representations of experiments. In this work we present the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard (RCD), designed to overcome some of these barriers for a given research community, minimizing the technical efforts and without renouncing any of the community services or practices. The RCD flanks digital laboratories of research communities with scholarly communication tools for discovering and publishing interlinked scientific products such as literature, datasets, and software. The benefits of the RCD are show-cased by means of two real-case scenarios: the European Marine Science community and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure.This work is partly funded by the OpenAIRE-Advance H2020 project (grant number: 777541; call: H2020-EINFRA-2017) and the OpenAIREConnect H2020 project (grant number: 731011; call: H2020-EINFRA-2016-1). Moreover, we would like to thank our colleagues Michele Manunta, Francesco Casu, and Claudio De Luca (Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, CNR, Italy) for their work on the EPOS infrastructure RCD; and Stephane Pesant (University of Bremen, Germany) his work on the European Marine Science RCD

Notulae to the Italian alien vascular flora: 12

In this contribution, new data concerning the distribution of vascular flora alien to Italy are presented. It includes new records, confirmations, exclusions, and status changes for Italy or for Italian administrative regions. Nomenclatural and distribution updates published elsewhere are provided as Suppl. material 1

Realizzazione della componente di Storage di un sistema per la gestione delle Digital Library basato su tipi

In questa tesi viene realizzato un Digital Library Management System (DLMS) che sperimenta nel mondo dei DLMS la nozione di tipo tradizionalmente adottata nei DBMS, al fine di supportare lo sviluppo efficiente e ottimizzato di applicazioni per le Digital Library