Knowledge Graphs Evolution and Preservation -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2019

One of the grand challenges discussed during the Dagstuhl Seminar "Knowledge Graphs: New Directions for Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web" and described in its report is that of a: "Public FAIR Knowledge Graph of Everything: We increasingly see the creation of knowledge graphs that capture information about the entirety of a class of entities. [...] This grand challenge extends this further by asking if we can create a knowledge graph of "everything" ranging from common sense concepts to location based entities. This knowledge graph should be "open to the public" in a FAIR manner democratizing this mass amount of knowledge." Although linked open data (LOD) is one knowledge graph, it is the closest realisation (and probably the only one) to a public FAIR Knowledge Graph (KG) of everything. Surely, LOD provides a unique testbed for experimenting and evaluating research hypotheses on open and FAIR KG. One of the most neglected FAIR issues about KGs is their ongoing evolution and long term preservation. We want to investigate this problem, that is to understand what preserving and supporting the evolution of KGs means and how these problems can be addressed. Clearly, the problem can be approached from different perspectives and may require the development of different approaches, including new theories, ontologies, metrics, strategies, procedures, etc. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by 9 teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2019). Each team provides a different perspective to the problem of knowledge graph evolution substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. In addition, they provide their working definition for KG preservation and evolution

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Women\u27s Responses to the Challenges of Plains Living

Women settlers on the Great Plains frontier, as on other frontiers, carried the primary responsibility for home and family. Not only wives and mothers, but all plainswomen, young or old, single or married, white or black, employed outside the home or not, were expected to attend to, or help with, domestic duties. Thus, women living on their own, with storekeeper fathers, with farmer husbands, or in any other circumstances devoted a large part of their time and energy to providing their households with food, clothing, and other goods or services, to maintaining houses both as family homes and as women\u27s workplaces, and to promoting the general welfare of family members. In every one of these areas, plainswomen had to deal on a daily basis with the particular limitations imposed upon them by the harsh and demanding plains environment. This article discusses how the Plains affected women\u27s duties and concerns and how the majority of women triumphed over these exigencies.

Review of \u3ci\u3eA Harvest Yet to Reap: A History of Prairie Women\u3c/i\u3e Researched and compiled by Linda Rasmussen, Lorna Rasmussen, Candace Savage, and Anne wheeler

This striking collection of quotes by and pictures of Canadian prairie women resulted from several years of research by two of the authors for their film on pioneer women, Great Grand Mother. When that project successfully terminated, Anne wheeler and Lorna Rasmussen faced the prospect of seeing a myriad of unused photographs, diaries, and other documents return to oblivion. Instead, they joined with Linda Rasmussen and Candace Savage to arrange a selection of these sources in one volume. The result of their labors is a valuable, graphic view of the experiences of white women on the Canadian prairies between the 1890s and the 1920s. But while the compilers demonstrate a certain deftness in selecting and arranging the materials, they fall prey to generalization and superficiality in their brief attempts to analyze them. Their own sympathies for prairie women, combined with an apparent lack of utilization of recent scholarly work on frontierswomen, interferes with a sense of balance in their overall approach. As a result, the image they present is one of hard-pressed prairie women, the type to whom one wants to apply the word plight. While it would be inaccurate to claim that prairie women did not face difficult life situations, it is equally inaccurate to present their lives as highly unusual in difficulty. Prairie men, for example, also endured hard times; advantages they had over their women such as mobility and land ownership were accompanied by their own problems and responsibilities. And women in other locales also struggled against harsh conditions. Women factory workers, immigrant women toiling as pieceworkers in urban slums, rural southern women, and black slave women bore equal or greater burdens than prairie women without any of the hopes for the future that western settlement seemed to offer. Many of the trials that the authors lament as the lot of prairie women were in reality the lot of women in general. Inequalities in the marriage relationship, woes of childbirth, inferior education, and lack of economic opportunity faced women everywhere. Their view also overlooks the value attatched to women\u27s domestic manufacture in western regions and the not infrequent expressions of joy at conquering challenges that appear in the quotations and photos. The history of prairie women is only further obscured by unsupported statements that they complied with the back-home movement after World War I because the percentage of prairie women described as gainfully employed was very nearly the same in 1921 as it had been 10 years before (p. 89) or that because western settlement began in Manitoba, the women\u27s movement did too (p. 174). Without these cursory attempts at explanation, the book would have been a coup; as it stands, however, it is somewhat flawed