The attention to the appropriate data treatment is fundamental to possible achieve all the potential to the open science

Since XVII century, the societies demand a grater opening and transparency for the academic activities. Considering that most of scientific founding come from government resources, it is natural that the society expects a better access to the elements that constitutes the scientific research, like data, experiments and results. This causes not only the society access to those results, but also that other scientists may reuse data and results of other researches in another different way and reach other conclusions. Therefore, a greater data reuse and results from a more opened scientific environment enables a more efficient and effective use of the resources invested

Agent-oriented approach to develop context-aware applications : a case study on communities of practice

This paper presents and discusses the use of an agent-oriented context-aware platform to support the interactions of the participating actors of communities of practice in the health care domain. Our work is based on a scenario where communities of practice are applied in a hospital to enhance the knowledge sharing among the hospital staff members who share interests and goals. An agent-oriented modeling language (AORML) is used to support the analysis of contextual information and interaction between participating actors in the context-aware services platform. The chosen supporting platform is a context-aware services platform that uses semantic web services and runs on top of 3G networks

GSO: Designing a Well-Founded Service Ontology to Support Dynamic Service Discovery and Composition

A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and outputs of user requests with the input and output requirements of registered service descriptions. This approach can be extended by using pre-conditions, effects and semantic annotations (meta-data) in an attempt to increase discovery accuracy. While on one hand these additions help improve discovery accuracy, on the other hand complexity is added as service users need to add more information elements to their service requests. In this paper we present an approach that aims at facilitating the representation of service requests by service users, without loss of accuracy. We introduce a Goal-Based Service Framework (GSF) that uses the concept of goal as an abstraction to represent service requests. This paper presents the core concepts and relations of the Goal-Based Service Ontology (GSO), which is a fundamental component of the GSF, and discusses how the framework supports semantic service discovery and composition. GSO provides a set of primitives and relations between goals, tasks and services. These primitives allow a user to represent its goals, and a supporting platform to discover or compose services that fulfil them

Ontological Representation of FAIR Principles: A Blueprint for FAIRer Data Sources

Guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of datasets, known as FAIR principles, were introduced in 2016 to enable machines to perform automatic actions on a variety of digital objects, including datasets. Since then, the principles have been widely adopted by data creators and users worldwide with the ‘FAIR’ acronym becoming a common part of the vocabulary of data scientists. However, there is still some controversy on how datasets should be interpreted since not all datasets that are claimed to be FAIR, necessarily follow the principles. In this research, we propose the OntoUML FAIR Principles Schema, as an ontological representation of FAIR principles for data practitioners. The work is based on OntoUML, an ontologically well-founded language for Ontology-driven Conceptual Modeling. OntoUML is a proxy for ontological analysis that has proven effective in supporting the explanation of complex domains. Our schema aims to disentangle the intricacies of the FAIR principles’ definition, by resolving aspects that are ambiguous, under-specified, recursively-specified, or implicit. The schema can be considered as a blueprint, or a template to follow when the FAIR classification strategy of a dataset must be designed. To demonstrate the usefulness of the schema, we present a practical example based on genomic data and discuss how the results provided by the OntoUML FAIR Principles Schema contribute to existing data guidelines

Personal Health Train Architecture with Dynamic Cloud Staging

Scientific advances, especially in the healthcare domain, can be accelerated by making data available for analysis. However, in traditional data analysis systems, data need to be moved to a central processing unit that performs analyses, which may be undesirable, e.g. due to privacy regulations in case these data contain personal information. This paper discusses the Personal Health Train (PHT) approach in which data processing is brought to the (personal health) data rather than the other way around, allowing (private) data accessed to be controlled, and to observe ethical and legal concerns. This paper introduces the PHT architecture and discusses the data staging solution that allows processing to be delegated to components spawned in a private cloud environment in case the (health) organisation hosting the data has limited resources to execute the required processing. This paper shows the feasibility and suitability of the solution with a relatively simple, yet representative, case study of data analysis of Covid-19 infections, which is performed by components that are created on demand and run in the Amazon Web Services platform. This paper also shows that the performance of our solution is acceptable, and that our solution is scalable. This paper demonstrates that the PHT approach enables data analysis with controlled access, preserving privacy and complying with regulations such as GDPR, while the solution is deployed in a private cloud environment