Discovery and Selection of Certified Web Services Through Registry-Based Testing and Verification

Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection

Rivals for the crown: Reply to Opthof and Leydesdorff

We reply to the criticism of Opthof and Leydesdorff [arXiv:1002.2769] on the way in which our institute applies journal and field normalizations to citation counts. We point out why we believe most of the criticism is unjustified, but we also indicate where we think Opthof and Leydesdorff raise a valid point

Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations

The crown indicator is a well-known bibliometric indicator of research performance developed by our institute. The indicator aims to normalize citation counts for differences among fields. We critically examine the theoretical basis of the normalization mechanism applied in the crown indicator. We also make a comparison with an alternative normalization mechanism. The alternative mechanism turns out to have more satisfactory properties than the mechanism applied in the crown indicator. In particular, the alternative mechanism has a so-called consistency property. The mechanism applied in the crown indicator lacks this important property. As a consequence of our findings, we are currently moving towards a new crown indicator, which relies on the alternative normalization mechanism

Effect of smoke and clouds on the transmissivity of photosynthetically active radiation inside the canopy

Biomass burning activities emit high concentrations of aerosol particles to the atmosphere. Such particles can interact with solar radiation, decreasing the amount of light reaching the surface and increasing the fraction of diffuse radiation through scattering processes, and thus has implications for photosynthesis within plant canopies. This work reports results from photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and aerosol optical depth (AOD) measurements conducted simultaneously at Reserva Biológica do Jaru (Rondonia State, Brazil) during LBA/SMOCC (Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia/ Smoke, Aerosols, Clouds, Rainfall, and Climate) and RaCCI (Radiation, Cloud, and Climate Interactions in the Amazon during the Dry-to-Wet Transition Season) field experiments from 15 September to 15 November 2002. AOD values were retrieved from an AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) radiometer, MODIS (Moderate Resolution Spectroradiometer) and a portable sunphotometer from the United States Department of Agriculture – Forest Service. Significant reduction of PAR irradiance at the top of the canopy was observed due to the smoke aerosol particles layer. This radiation reduction affected turbulent fluxes of sensible and latent heats. The increase of AOD also enhanced the transmission of PAR inside the canopy. As a consequence, the availability of diffuse radiation was enhanced due to light scattering by the aerosol particles. A complex relationship was identified between light availability inside the canopy and net ecosystem exchange (NEE). The results showed that the increase of aerosol optical depth corresponded to an increase of CO₂ uptake by the vegetation. However, for even higher AOD values, the corresponding NEE was lower than for intermediate values. As expected, water vapor pressure deficit (VPD), retrieved at 28m height inside the canopy, can also affect photosynthesis. A decrease in NEE was observed as VPD increased. Further studies are needed to better understand these findings, which were reported for the first time for the Amazon region under smoky conditions

Monitoring evolved stars for binarity with the HERMES spectrograph

Binarity is often invoked to explain peculiarities that can not be explained by the standard theory of stellar evolution. Detecting orbital motion via the Doppler effect is the best method to test binarity when direct imaging is not possible. However, when the orbital period exceeds the duration of a typical observing run, monitoring often becomes problematic. Placing a high-throughput spectrograph on a small semi- robotic telescope allowed us to carry out a radial-velocity survey of various types of peculiar evolved stars. In this review we highlight some findings after the first four years of observations. Thus, we detect eccentric binaries among hot subdwarfs, barium, S stars, and post- AGB stars with disks, which are not predicted by the standard binary interaction theory. In disk objects, in addition, we find signs of the on- going mass transfer to the companion, and an intriguing line splitting, which we attribute to the scattered light of the primary.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the conference "Setting a new standard in the analysis of binary stars", A. Tkachenko (ed.), European Astron. Soc. Publ. Se

A Web application for creating and sharing visual bibliographies

The amount of information provided by peer-reviewed scientific literature citation indexes such as Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), CrossRef and OpenCitations is huge: it offers to the users a lot of metadata about publications, such as the list of papers written by a specific author, the editorial and content details of a paper, the list of references and citations. But, for a researcher could be interesting also to: extract in real-time these data in order to create bibliographies, for example, starting with a small set of significant papers or a restricted number of authors, and progressively enriching them by exploring cited/citing references; dispose of a graphical and aggregate representation for them; be able to easily share them with other interested researchers. With these main intents, we modelled and realized VisualBib, a Web application prototype, which enables the user to select sets of papers and/or authors in order to create customized bibliographies, and in real-time visualize them, aggregating data from different sources, in a comprehensive, holistic graphical view. The bibliographies are displayed using time-based visualizations, called narrative views, which contain explicit representations of the authorship and citing relations. These views may help users to: describe a research area; disseminate the research on a specific topic through the sharing of personal points of view; show in a fresh look the entire production of a researcher, or research groups, in order present or evaluate it

On the map: Nature and Science editorials

Bibliometric mapping of scientific articles based on keywords and technical terms in abstracts is now frequently used to chart scientific fields. In contrast, no significant mapping has been applied to the full texts of non-specialist documents. Editorials in Nature and Science are such non-specialist documents, reflecting the views of the two most read scientific journals on science, technology and policy issues. We use the VOSviewer mapping software to chart the topics of these editorials. A term map and a document map are constructed and clusters are distinguished in both of them. The validity of the document clustering is verified by a manual analysis of a sample of the editorials. This analysis confirms the homogeneity of the clusters obtained by mapping and augments the latter with further detail. As a result, the analysis provides reliable information on the distribution of the editorials over topics, and on differences between the journals. The most striking difference is that Nature devotes more attention to internal science policy issues and Science more to the political influence of scientists

The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012: Data collection, indicators, and interpretation

The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 is a ranking of universities based on bibliometric indicators of publication output, citation impact, and scientific collaboration. The ranking includes 500 major universities from 41 different countries. This paper provides an extensive discussion of the Leiden Ranking 2011/2012. The ranking is compared with other global university rankings, in particular the Academic Ranking of World Universities (commonly known as the Shanghai Ranking) and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Also, a detailed description is offered of the data collection methodology of the Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 and of the indicators used in the ranking. Various innovations in the Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 are presented. These innovations include (1) an indicator based on counting a university's highly cited publications, (2) indicators based on fractional rather than full counting of collaborative publications, (3) the possibility of excluding non-English language publications, and (4) the use of stability intervals. Finally, some comments are made on the interpretation of the ranking, and a number of limitations of the ranking are pointed out

A Critical Examination of Spatial Biases Between MODIS and MISR Aerosol Products - Application for Potential AERONET Deployment

AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) data are the primary benchmark for evaluating satellite-retrieved aerosol properties. However, despite its extensive coverage, the representativeness of the AERONET data is rarely discussed. Indeed, many studies have shown that satellite retrieval biases have a significant degree of spatial correlation that may be problematic for higher-level processes or inverse-emissions-modeling studies. To consider these issues and evaluate relative performance in regions of few surface observations, cross-comparisons between the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) products of operational MODIS Collection 5.1 Dark Target (DT) and operational MODIS Collection 5.1 Deep Blue (DB) with MISR version 22 were conducted. Through such comparisons, we can observe coherent spatial features of the AOD bias while side-stepping the full analysis required for determining when or where either retrieval is more correct. We identify regions where MODIS to MISR AOD ratios were found to be above 1.4 and below 0.7. Regions where lower boundary condition uncertainty is likely to be a dominant factor include portions of Western North America, the Andes mountains, Saharan Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central Asia. Similarly, microphysical biases may be an issue in South America, and specific parts of Southern Africa, India Asia, East Asia, and Indonesia. These results help identify high-priority locations for possible future deployments of both in situ and ground based remote sensing measurements. The Supplement includes a km1 file