64 research outputs found
Automatic Metadata Generation using Associative Networks
In spite of its tremendous value, metadata is generally sparse and
incomplete, thereby hampering the effectiveness of digital information
services. Many of the existing mechanisms for the automated creation of
metadata rely primarily on content analysis which can be costly and
inefficient. The automatic metadata generation system proposed in this article
leverages resource relationships generated from existing metadata as a medium
for propagation from metadata-rich to metadata-poor resources. Because of its
independence from content analysis, it can be applied to a wide variety of
resource media types and is shown to be computationally inexpensive. The
proposed method operates through two distinct phases. Occurrence and
co-occurrence algorithms first generate an associative network of repository
resources leveraging existing repository metadata. Second, using the
associative network as a substrate, metadata associated with metadata-rich
resources is propagated to metadata-poor resources by means of a discrete-form
spreading activation algorithm. This article discusses the general framework
for building associative networks, an algorithm for disseminating metadata
through such networks, and the results of an experiment and validation of the
proposed method using a standard bibliographic dataset
Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories
In the emerging eScience environment, repositories of papers, datasets,
software, etc., should be the foundation of a global and natively-digital
scholarly communications system. The current infrastructure falls far short of
this goal. Cross-repository interoperability must be augmented to support the
many workflows and value-chains involved in scholarly communication. This will
not be achieved through the promotion of single repository architecture or
content representation, but instead requires an interoperability framework to
connect the many heterogeneous systems that will exist.
We present a simple data model and service architecture that augments
repository interoperability to enable scholarly value-chains to be implemented.
We describe an experiment that demonstrates how the proposed infrastructure can
be deployed to implement the workflow involved in the creation of an overlay
journal over several different repository systems (Fedora, aDORe, DSpace and
arXiv).Comment: 18 pages. Accepted for International Journal on Digital Libraries
special issue on Digital Libraries and eScienc
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot
The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject. We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced. We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project
Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?
A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation
as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this
commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the
mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three
decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence
intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be
corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications
that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal
procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive
certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate
procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table
The importance of parameter choice in modelling dynamics of the eye lens
The lens provides refractive power to the eye and is capable of altering ocular focus in response to visual demand. This capacity diminishes with age. Current biomedical technologies, which seek to design an implant lens capable of replicating the function of the biological lens, are unable as yet to provide such an implant with the requisite optical quality or ability to change the focussing power of the eye. This is because the mechanism of altering focus, termed accommodation, is not fully understood and seemingly conflicting theories require experimental support which is difficult to obtain from the living eye. This investigation presents finite element models of the eye lens based on data from human lenses aged 16 and 35 years that consider the influence of various modelling parameters, including material properties, a wide range of angles of force application and capsular thickness. Results from axisymmetric models show that the anterior and posterior zonules may have a greater impact on shape change than the equatorial zonule and that choice of capsular thickness values can influence the results from modelled simulations
- …