Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Cities in transition : urban planning and property development in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, 1978-1997

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Volume building as competitive strategy

The competitive strategy and advantage of building contractors is examined. In Hong Kong, just a few contractors have dominated the market of public housing construction, where prefabrication is mandatory. Does prefabrication technology lead to business success? Based on quantitative analysis of a questionnaire survey and its validation with interviews, we find that prefabrication by itself is not regarded as a sustainable source of competitive advantage. Instead, market share is the most statistically significant factor related to business growth. The experience curve theory suggests that, upon acquiring a critical volume of business, contractors have the opportunity to exploit economies of scale, bargaining power and learning to reduce costs to get more business. Through this iterative process, some contractors would manage to innovate their building process to make their supply chain management more efficient and effective than others', thus attaining competitive advantage in cost leadership and getting more business in return to sustain their volume building strategy. The findings suggest that, to succeed in a mature industry such as building construction, it takes clever harnessing of the construction process rather than simply the mastery of prefabrication technology itself.Competitive advantage, strategy, prefabrication, Hong Kong,

An integrated approach to supporting land-use decisions in site redevelopment for urban renewal in Hong Kong

Urban renewal is a significant issue in developed urban areas, with a particular problem for urban planners being redevelopment of land to meet demand whilst ensuring compatibility with existing land use. This paper presents a geographic information systems (GIS)-based decision support tool (called LUDS) to quantitatively assess land-use suitability for site redevelopment in urban renewal areas. This consists of a model for the suitability analysis and an affiliated land-information database for residential, commercial, industrial, G/I/C (government/institution/community) and open space land uses. Development has occurred with support from interviews with industry experts, focus group meetings and an experimental trial, combined with several advanced techniques and tools, including GIS data processing and spatial analysis, multi-criterion analysis, as well as the AHP method for constructing the model and database. As demonstrated in the trial, LUDS assists planners in making land-use decisions and supports the planning process in assessing urban land-use suitability for site redevelopment. Moreover, it facilitates public consultation (participatory planning) by providing stakeholders with an explicit understanding of planners' views

Supplemental material for Assessing externality: Successive event studies on market impacts of new housing development on an old residential neighbourhood

<p>Supplemental material for Assessing externality: Successive event studies on market impacts of new housing development on an old residential neighbourhood by Bo-sin Tang and Kwan To Wong in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science</p

Institutions, Property Taxation and Local Government Finance in China

China's rapid urbanisation has prompted its government to explore new sustainable sources of public revenue to finance the continued demand for urban infrastructure and services. Property tax advocates have sought to take advantage of the real estate booms that have occurred since economic liberalisation by actively campaigning for a real property levy as an appropriate policy choice. Against this background, this study evaluates the prospect of implementing market-value-based property tax reforms in mainland China. Based on the new institutional economics perspective, it posits property tax as an institutional arrangement which requires complementary mechanisms in land registration, property appraisal, tax administration, social security and dispute resolution. Property tax reforms would not only necessitate technical changes, but would also have extensive social, political and legal repercussions for Chinese society.

Globalization and construction industry development: implications of recent developments in the construction sector in Asia

Recent developments in the construction sector in the Asian region demonstrate three trends: (1) larger private sector participation in infrastructure projects, (2) increasing vertical integration in the packaging of construction projects, and (3) increased foreign participation in domestic construction. This paper attributes the trends to the globalization and deregulation of markets necessitated by fiscal, technological and managerial constraints. Although these trends present intra-Asian opportunities, there are also areas of concern. The trends have helped polarize the financial and technical superiority of the developed countries and the corresponding inferiority of the developed countries in the region of the developing ones. In the long term, this gap could be filled through technology transfer. In the short term, however, there are concerns that imported construction services could grow at the expense of the indigenous sectors of the developing countries. This paper illustrates this dilemma with the case of Japan as a world leader in international construction services. Its dominance has apparently come through the orchestration of industrial and corporate policies, implemented in a highly regulated and protected domestic market. However, construction industries in other Asian economies (such as China) will have to leapfrog in technology, finance and management know-how (e.g. through joint ventures with developed countries' construction companies) before they can become formidable powers in an environment that has become much more global, more de-regulated, more open and more competitive than before.Construction, Asia, Globalization, Construction Industry Development,