Towards Information Management System for Licensing in Higher Education: An Ontology-Based Approach

Higher education licensing, i.e. the process of granting permissions to provide certain educational services, is an important process of public administration. Government al bodies handle licensing requests submitted by education providers regularly. Such requests are supplemented with large amounts of information that demonstrates the actual situation in an education provider. At present this process is paper based and in volves a lot of manual labor. This situation is similar for other types of education, e. g. primary and secondary, as well as form any countries. We, therefore, aim to computerize this process by creating a universal licensing information system (LIS). We base our approach on a domain ontology that defines the main concepts in the licensing process. In this paper we show how licensing process works now and propose the ways to make it more efficient. Then, we envisage the usage models of LIS, identify its main business actors and use cases, and provide a high-level architecture of the system. Finally, we present a fragment of the domain ontology in higher education domain

Coordinating Higher Education as an e-Government Initiative

Government plays a key role in providing higher education. It supplies policies and regulations, information to the society, administers funds and licensing, develops standards, etc. In the context of total e-Governing Ministries of Education of many countries initiated the creation of supporting information systems. These systems in most cases are limited to providing information resources of different kinds to the society by web-portals. Administering and coordinating functions are left out for some reasons. In this paper we discover the typical structure of higher education, different stakeholders involved in the process of providing higher education services, information and data flows. We discuss the key functions that information systems must support. And finally we propose the e-Government higher education reference model to be addressed when developing such information systems

Simple, robust eddy correlation amplifier for aquatic dissolved oxygen and hydrogen sulfide flux measurements

The aquatic application of the eddy correlation (EC) technique is growing more popular and is gradually becoming a standard method for resolving benthic O2 fluxes. By including the effects of the local hydrodynamics, the EC technique provides greater insight into the nature of benthic O2 exchange than traditional methods (i.e., benthic chambers and lander microprofilers). The growing popularity of the EC technique has led to a greater demand for easily accessible and robust EC instrumentation. Currently, the EC instrumentation is limited to two commercially available systems that are still in the development stage. Here, we present a robust, open source EC picoamplifier that is simple in design and can be easily adapted to both new and existing acoustic Doppler velocimeters (ADV). The picoamplifier has a response time of < 0.1 ms and features galvanic isolation that ensures very low noise contamination of the signal. It can be adjusted to accommodate varying ranges of microelectrode sensitivity as well as other types of amperometric microelectrodes. We show that the extracted flux values are not sensitive to reduced microelectrode operational ranges (i.e., lower resolution) and that no signal loss results from using either a 16- or 14-bit analog-to-digital converter. Finally, we demonstrate the capabilities of the picoamplifier with field studies measuring both dissolved O2 and H2S EC fluxes. The picoamplifier presented here consistently acquires high-quality EC data and provides a simple solution for those who wish to obtain EC instrumentation. The schematic of the amplifier’s circuitry is given in the Web Appendix

Natural CO2 seeps offshore Panarea – A test site for subsea CO2 leak detection technology

During RV Poseidon cruise POS469 (May 2014), the distribution of pCO2 in the near field of submarine volcanic gas flares in shallow water depths down to 50 m below sea level was continuously monitored using three different and independent methodologies. In situ nondispersive infrared (NDIR) spectrometry, pH measurements, and onboard membrane inlet mass spectrometry (MIMS) were used to determine the fate of rising CO2 bubbles and the dissolved CO2 plume patterns in a 300 × 400-m working area. The in situ sensor carrier platform, a towed video-controlled water sampling rosette, equipped with CTD sensors, guaranteed excellent ground truthing of seafloor characteristics and bubble discharge. Sensor data and nearseafloor observations indicated that the gas bubbles (97 vol.% of CO2) dissolved very rapidly within the first 10 m above seafloor. Bottom water masses enriched with pCO2 (up to 1,100 μatm) show low pH values (up to 7.80) and tend to spread rather downslope west than following the measured weak current in SSE-SSW direction. The 3-D evaluation of pCO2 plume is a valuable tool to backtrace the origin of CO2 leakage when compared with local current regimes, water column CTD data, and seafloor bathymetry. Seep sites offshore Panarea can be used for studying CO2 leakage behavior and testing measuring strategies in shallow waters. Moreover, this area is a naturally designed laboratory to improve existing physicochemical and oceanographic transport models for subsea CO2 leakage

Long-Term Autonomic Thermoregulating Fabrics Based on Microencapsulated Phase Change Materials

[Image: see text] Microcapsules loaded with n-docosane as phase change material (mPCMs) for thermal energy storage with a phase change transition temperature in the range of 36–45 °C have been employed to impregnate cotton fabrics. Fabrics impregnated with 8 wt % of mPCMs provided 11 °C of temperature buffering effect during heating. On the cooling step, impregnated fabrics demonstrated 6 °C temperature increase for over 100 cycles of switching on/off of the heating source. Similar thermoregulating performance was observed for impregnated fabrics stored for 4 years (1500 days) at room temperature. Temperature buffering effect increased to 14 °C during heating cycle and temperature increase effect reached 9 °C during cooling cycle in the aged fabric composites. Both effects remained stable in aged fabrics for more than 100 heating/cooling cycles. Our study demonstrates high potential use of the microencapsulated n-docosane for thermal management applications, including high-technical textiles, footwear materials, and building thermoregulating covers and paints with high potential for commercial applications