Spatial Data Infrastructures for environmental e-government services: The case of water abstractions authorisations

Environment-related authorisations are a relevant issue for environmental management. They require a considerable effort by the authorities, and this might result in substantial delays for the citizens. Implementing those authorisation processes by means of e-government services would improve efficiency and, consequently, citizen satisfaction. Environment-related authorisations usually require a variety of geospatial information, and have to deal with administrative areas which do not match physical and ecological ones. They also have to integrate heterogeneous information in different formats, data models and languages, and provided by distinct organisations, even from different countries. This paper discusses how Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) can deal with these problems in the environmental domain, while improving the level of service provision in terms of e-government applications. This is even more relevant within the European Union where there is a legal mandate to establish an SDI to support environmental policies and activities with an impact on the environment. As a proof-of-concept, an application to request and manage water abstraction authorisations, based on an SDI, is demonstrated. This application is part of SDIGER, a cross-border inter-administration SDI to support the water framework directive information access for the Adour–Garonne and Ebro River basins, that was a pilot project for the EU INSPIRE Directive. The introduction of this transactional e-government service modifies the administrative process of granting authorisations: it allows to re-use the effort in data capture made by the applicants in their requests, facilitates the submission of more feasible applications and reduces the workload of the office staff

Improving the geospatial consistency of digital libraries metadata

Consistency is an essential aspect of the quality of metadata. Inconsistent metadata records are harmful: given a themed query, the set of retrieved metadata records would contain descriptions of unrelated or irrelevant resources, and may even not contain some resources considered obvious. This is even worse when the description of the location is inconsistent. Inconsistent spatial descriptions may yield invisible or hidden geographical resources that cannot be retrieved by means of spatially themed queries. Therefore, ensuring spatial consistency should be a primary goal when reusing, sharing and developing georeferenced digital collections. We present a methodology able to detect geospatial inconsistencies in metadata collections based on the combination of spatial ranking, reverse geocoding, geographic knowledge organization systems and information-retrieval techniques. This methodology has been applied to a collection of metadata records describing maps and atlases belonging to the Library of Congress. The proposed approach was able to automatically identify inconsistent metadata records (870 out of 10,575) and propose fixes to most of them (91.5%) These results support the ability of the proposed methodology to assess the impact of spatial inconsistency in the retrievability and visibility of metadata records and improve their spatial consistency

Autenticidad y aprendizaje basado en proyectos en una asignatura sobre diseño de software

Este artículo presenta un estudio sobre los aspectos relacionados con la autenticidad en el aprendizaje basado en proyectos aplicado al diseño de software, especialmente en los aspectos de dominio de problema de este diseño. Para proporcionar un problema relevante para los estudiantes, el dominio del proyecto es sobre sistemas de información geográfica aplicados a un campus universitario. Los estudiantes llevan a cabo sus proyectos siguiendo la metodología ágil Scrum. Los estudiantes aprenden sobre diseño dirigido por el dominio, que es un conjunto de principios y prácticas para diseñar software con modelos de dominio ricos. Para valorar el grado de éxito sobre la autenticidad proporcionada y otros resultados positivos esperados en entornos de aprendizaje basado en proyectos, se analizan encuestas rellenadas por los estudiantes tres años consecutivos. Este análisis ha permitido aprender algunas lecciones que pueden ser útiles para diseñar entornos de aprendizaje similares. Estas lecciones pueden resumirse en la necesidad de equilibrar autenticidad y trabajo de los estudiantes, la importancia de facilitar la competición entre equipos, el difícil equilibrio entre aprender sobre un dominio y aprender sobre ingeniería del software, y en el papel que las prácticas de laboratorio tienen en el aprendizaje basado en proyectos.This paper presents a study on the authenticity-related aspects of project-based learning applied to software design, especially on the problem domain aspects of this design. To provide a relevant problem for the students, the project domain is about geographic information systems applied to a University campus. The student teams carry out their projects following the agile methodology Scrum. The students learn Domain- Driven Design, which is a set of principles and practices to design software with rich domain models. To assess the degree of success in providing authenticity and other positive outcomes that are expected in project-based learning environments, the answers to a questionnaire filled in by the students in three consecutive years are analyzed. This has allowed to extract several lessons that may be helpful to design similar courses. These lessons can be summarized in the necessity to balance the authenticity with the expected student work, the importance of facilitating the competition among the teams, the difficult balance between learning about a domain versus learning new software engineering techniques and the role that laboratory assignments have in project-based learning

A review of the implementation of OGC Web Services across Europe

This paper presents the results of an investigation conducted in the spring of 2010 to review the availability across Europe of public Web services conforming to the standard specifications issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium. The descriptive and statistical analysis of 6,544 geospatial network services might provide insight into the current level of implementation of these services in Europe. These services were discovered with the help of a focused crawler able to discover access points to public geospatial network services. This crawler relies on general-purpose search engines for finding seed URLs related with geospatial network services from which begin crawling. The work also identifies potential limitations and data biases derived from the methodology. Nevertheless, this kind of strategy might open up new opportunities to complement SDI implementation assessments when exhaustive, periodic and up to date monitoring is required

A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects

New polymorph of InVO4: A high-pressure structure with six-coordinated vanadium

This document is the unedited Author’s version of a Submitted Work that was subsequently accepted for publication in Inorganic Chemestry, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic402043xA new wolframite-type polymorph of InVO4 is identified under compression near 7 GPa by in situ high-pressure (HP) X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectroscopic investigations on the stable orthorhombic InVO4. The structural transition is accompanied by a large volume collapse (Delta V/V = -14%) and a drastic increase in bulk modulus (from 69 to 168 GPa). Both techniques also show the existence of a third phase coexisting with the low- and high-pressure phases in a limited pressure range close to the transition pressure. XRD studies revealed a highly anisotropic compression in orthorhombic InVO4. In addition, the compressibility becomes nonlinear in the HP polymorph. The volume collapse in the lattice is related to an increase of the polyhedral coordination around the vanadium atoms. The transformation is not fully reversible. The drastic change in the polyhedral arrangement observed at the transition is indicative of a reconstructive phase transformation. The HP phase here found is the only modification of InVO4 reported to date with 6-fold coordinated vanadium atoms. Finally, Raman frequencies and pressure coefficients in the low- and high-pressure phases of InVO4 are reported.This research supported by the Spanish government MINECO under Grant Nos. MAT2010-21270-C04-01/04 and CSD2007-00045. O.G. acknowledges support from Vicerrectorado de Investigacion y Desarrollo of UPV (Grant No. UPV2011-0914 PAID-05-11 and UPV2011-0966 PAID-06-11). S.N.A. acknowledges support provided by Universitat de Valencia during his visit to it. B.G.-D. acknowledges the financial support from MINECO through the FPI program.Errandonea, D.; Gomis Hilario, O.; García-Domene, B.; Pellicer Porres, J.; Katari, V.; Achary, SN.; Tyagi, AK.... (2013). New polymorph of InVO4: A high-pressure structure with six-coordinated vanadium. Inorganic Chemistry. 52(21):12790-12798. https://doi.org/10.1021/ic402043xS1279012798522

Association between loop diuretic dose changes and outcomes in chronic heart failure: observations from the ESC-EORP Heart Failure Long-Term Registry

[Abstract] Aims. Guidelines recommend down-titration of loop diuretics (LD) once euvolaemia is achieved. In outpatients with heart failure (HF), we investigated LD dose changes in daily cardiology practice, agreement with guideline recommendations, predictors of successful LD down-titration and association between dose changes and outcomes. Methods and results. We included 8130 HF patients from the ESC-EORP Heart Failure Long-Term Registry. Among patients who had dose decreased, successful decrease was defined as the decrease not followed by death, HF hospitalization, New York Heart Association class deterioration, or subsequent increase in LD dose. Mean age was 66±13 years, 71% men, 62% HF with reduced ejection fraction, 19% HF with mid-range ejection fraction, 19% HF with preserved ejection fraction. Median [interquartile range (IQR)] LD dose was 40 (25–80) mg. LD dose was increased in 16%, decreased in 8.3% and unchanged in 76%. Median (IQR) follow-up was 372 (363–419) days. Diuretic dose increase (vs. no change) was associated with HF death [hazard ratio (HR) 1.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.12–2.08; P = 0.008] and nominally with cardiovascular death (HR 1.25, 95% CI 0.96–1.63; P = 0.103). Decrease of diuretic dose (vs. no change) was associated with nominally lower HF (HR 0.59, 95% CI 0.33–1.07; P = 0.083) and cardiovascular mortality (HR 0.62 95% CI 0.38–1.00; P = 0.052). Among patients who had LD dose decreased, systolic blood pressure [odds ratio (OR) 1.11 per 10 mmHg increase, 95% CI 1.01–1.22; P = 0.032], and absence of (i) sleep apnoea (OR 0.24, 95% CI 0.09–0.69; P = 0.008), (ii) peripheral congestion (OR 0.48, 95% CI 0.29–0.80; P = 0.005), and (iii) moderate/severe mitral regurgitation (OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.37–0.87; P = 0.008) were independently associated with successful decrease. Conclusion. Diuretic dose was unchanged in 76% and decreased in 8.3% of outpatients with chronic HF. LD dose increase was associated with worse outcomes, while the LD dose decrease group showed a trend for better outcomes compared with the no-change group. Higher systolic blood pressure, and absence of (i) sleep apnoea, (ii) peripheral congestion, and (iii) moderate/severe mitral regurgitation were independently associated with successful dose decrease

CIBERER : Spanish national network for research on rare diseases: A highly productive collaborative initiative

Altres ajuts: Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII); Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.CIBER (Center for Biomedical Network Research; Centro de Investigación Biomédica En Red) is a public national consortium created in 2006 under the umbrella of the Spanish National Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII). This innovative research structure comprises 11 different specific areas dedicated to the main public health priorities in the National Health System. CIBERER, the thematic area of CIBER focused on rare diseases (RDs) currently consists of 75 research groups belonging to universities, research centers, and hospitals of the entire country. CIBERER's mission is to be a center prioritizing and favoring collaboration and cooperation between biomedical and clinical research groups, with special emphasis on the aspects of genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cellular research of RDs. This research is the basis for providing new tools for the diagnosis and therapy of low-prevalence diseases, in line with the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) objectives, thus favoring translational research between the scientific environment of the laboratory and the clinical setting of health centers. In this article, we intend to review CIBERER's 15-year journey and summarize the main results obtained in terms of internationalization, scientific production, contributions toward the discovery of new therapies and novel genes associated to diseases, cooperation with patients' associations and many other topics related to RD research