NOR2O: a Library for Transforming Non-Ontological Resources to Ontologies

With the goal of speeding up the ontology development pro- cess, ontology engineers are starting to reuse and transform as much as possible available non-ontological resources, such as classication schemes, thesauri, lexicons, etc. Within the NeOn project we propose a method for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies. This method is based on the so-called re-engineering patterns. This paper presents the description of the software library, that implements the transformations suggested by the patterns

Mesoscopic structure and social aspects of human mobility

The individual movements of large numbers of people are important in many contexts, from urban planning to disease spreading. Datasets that capture human mobility are now available and many interesting features have been discovered, including the ultra-slow spatial growth of individual mobility. However, the detailed substructures and spatiotemporal flows of mobility - the sets and sequences of visited locations - have not been well studied. We show that individual mobility is dominated by small groups of frequently visited, dynamically close locations, forming primary "habitats" capturing typical daily activity, along with subsidiary habitats representing additional travel. These habitats do not correspond to typical contexts such as home or work. The temporal evolution of mobility within habitats, which constitutes most motion, is universal across habitats and exhibits scaling patterns both distinct from all previous observations and unpredicted by current models. The delay to enter subsidiary habitats is a primary factor in the spatiotemporal growth of human travel. Interestingly, habitats correlate with non-mobility dynamics such as communication activity, implying that habitats may influence processes such as information spreading and revealing new connections between human mobility and social networks.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures (main text); 11 pages, 9 figures, 1 table (supporting information

Easily retrievable objects among the NEO population

Asteroids and comets are of strategic importance for science in an effort to understand the formation, evolution and composition of the Solar System. Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are of particular interest because of their accessibility from Earth, but also because of their speculated wealth of material resources. The exploitation of these resources has long been discussed as a means to lower the cost of future space endeavours. In this paper, we consider the currently known NEO population and define a family of so-called Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs), objects that can be transported from accessible heliocentric orbits into the Earth’s neighbourhood at affordable costs. The asteroid retrieval transfers are sought from the continuum of low energy transfers enabled by the dynamics of invariant manifolds; specifically, the retrieval transfers target planar, vertical Lyapunov and halo orbit families associated with the collinear equilibrium points of the Sun-Earth Circular Restricted Three Body problem. The judicious use of these dynamical features provides the best opportunity to find extremely low energy Earth transfers for asteroid material. A catalogue of asteroid retrieval candidates is then presented. Despite the highly incomplete census of very small asteroids, the ERO catalogue can already be populated with 12 different objects retrievable with less than 500 m/s of Δv. Moreover, the approach proposed represents a robust search and ranking methodology for future retrieval candidates that can be automatically applied to the growing survey of NEOs

Diseño y evaluación de un programa para la mejora de la condición física en Educación Primaria: efecto sobre la autoestima y la intención de ser activo

The objective was to design a program to improve physical fitness and evaluate its effect on the intent to remain active and general self-esteem. An 8-week program of activities was designed to improve physical fitness in Physical Education, in addition to sports physical activity at recess. The quasi-experimental design included 70 schoolchildren (39 experimental group; 31 control group) from 6th grade of Primary Education. The high priority ALPHA-Fitness battery, the intentionality scale of being physically active in Primary Education, and the Multimedia and Multilingual Self-esteem Evaluation Questionnaire were used as measuring instruments. The effectiveness of the program was found in all the variables studied, especially in the improvement of cardiorespiratory capacity, jumping capacity and the socio-affective dimension of self-esteem. The importance of these programs in the improvement of the physical, psychological and social health of the students is highlighted.El objetivo fue diseñar un programa para mejorar la condición física y evaluar su efecto sobre la intencionalidad de seguir siendo activo y autoestima general. Se diseñó un programa de 8 semanas de actividades para mejorar la condición física en Educación Física, además de actividad física deportiva en los recreos. El diseño cuasiexperimental incluyó 70 escolares (39 grupo experimental; 31 grupo control) de 6º de Educación Primaria. Como instrumentos de medida se utilizaron la batería ALPHA-Fitness de alta prioridad, la Escala de intencionalidad de ser físicamente activo en Educación Primaria, y el Cuestionario Multimedia y Multilingüe de Evaluación de la Autoestima. Se encontró efectividad del programa en todas las variables estudiadas, en especial en la mejora de la capacidad cardiorrespiratoria, la capacidad de salto y la dimensión socioafectiva de la autoestima. Se destaca la importancia de estos programas en la mejora de la salud física, psicológica y social del alumnado

A Semantically Enabled Service Architecture for Mashups over Streaming and Stored Data

Sensing devices are increasingly being deployed to monitor the physical world around us. One class of application for which sensor data is pertinent is environmental decision support systems, e.g. good emergency response. However, in order to interpret the readings from the sensors, the data needs to be put in context through correlation with other sensor readings, sensor data histories, and stored data, as well as juxtaposing with maps and forecast models. In this paper we use a good emergency response planning application to identify requirements for a semantic sensor web. We propose a generic service architecture to satisfy the requirements that uses semantic annotations to support well-informed interactions between the services. We present the SemSor-Grid4Env realisation of the architecture and illustrate its capabilities in the context of the example application

Observational evidence for the accretion-disk origin for a radio jet in an active galaxy

Accretion of gas onto black holes is thought to power the relativistic jets of material ejected from active galactic nuclei (AGN) and the 'microquasars' located in our Galaxy(1-3). In microquasars, superluminal radio-emitting features appear and propagate along the jet shortly after sudden decreases in the Xray fluxes(1). This establishes a direct observational link between the black hole and the jet: the X-ray dip is probably caused by the disappearance of a section of the inner accretion disk(4) as it falls past the event horizon, while the remainder of the disk section is ejected into the jet, creating the appearance of a superluminal bright spot(5). No such connection has hitherto been established for AGN, because of insufficient multi-frequency data. Here we report the results of three years of monitoring the X-ray and radio emission of the galaxy 3C120. As has been observed for microquasars, we find that dips in the X-ray emission are followed by ejections of bright superluminal knots in the radio jet. The mean time between X-ray dips appears to scale roughly with the mass of the black hole, although there are at present only a few data points.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62888/1/nature00772.pd

Continuity for s-convex fuzzy processes

In a previous paper we introduced the concept of s-convex fuzzy mapping and established some properties. In this work we study the continuity for s-convex fuzzy processes

Innovative Crop Productions for Healthy Food: The Case of Chia (Salvia hispanica L.)

Chia (Salvia hispanica L.) is an ancient crop from Central America which has been recently rediscovered as a source of ω-3 and nutraceuticals in seeds. Besides traditional seed consumption, innovative uses of the plant seeds and leaves have been proposed based on the high protein content and the production of mucilage which lends itself to a range of applications. This chapter reviews research on the plant’s genetics and breeding, quality, and uses. Agronomic studies which have only recently started worldwide are also presented along with results from case studies in Basilicata

The influence of the team in conducting a systematic review

There is an increasing body of research documenting flaws in many published systematic reviews' methodological and reporting conduct. When good systematic review practice is questioned, attention is rarely turned to the composition of the team that conducted the systematic review. This commentary highlights a number of relevant articles indicating how the composition of the review team could jeopardise the integrity of the systematic review study and its conclusions. Key biases require closer attention such as sponsorship bias and researcher allegiance, but there may also be less obvious affiliations in teams conducting secondary evidence-syntheses. The importance of transparency and disclosure are now firmly on the agenda for clinical trials and primary research, but the meta-biases that systematic reviews may be at risk from now require further scrutiny