Managing a portal of digital web resources by content syndication

As users become more accustomed to continuous Internet access, they will have less patience with the offering of disparate resources. A new generation of portals is being designed that aids users in navigating resource space and in processing the data they retrieved. Such portals offer added value by means of content syndication: the effort to have multiple, federated? resources co-operate in order to profit optimally from their synergy. A portal that offers these advantages, however, can only be of lasting value if it is sustainable. We sketch a way to set up and run an organisation that can manage a content syndication portal in a sustainable way.\ud \u

Measuring children's search behaviour on a large scale

Children often experience problems during information-seeking using traditional search interfaces and search technologies, that are designed for adults. This is because children engage with the world in fundamentally different ways than adults. To design search technologies that support children in effective and enjoyable information-seeking, more research is needed to examine children’s specific skills and needs concerning information-seeking. Therefore, we developed an application that can monitor children’s search behaviour on a large scale. In this paper, we present the steps taken to develop this application. The basis of the application is UsaProxy, an existing system that is used to monitor the user’s usage of websites. We have increased the accuracy of UsaProxy and have developed an application that is able to extract useful information from UsaProxy’s log files

Integration of Biological Sources: Exploring the Case of Protein Homology

Data integration is a key issue in the domain of bioin- formatics, which deals with huge amounts of heteroge- neous biological data that grows and changes rapidly. This paper serves as an introduction in the field of bioinformatics and the biological concepts it deals with, and an exploration of the integration problems a bioinformatics scientist faces. We examine ProGMap, an integrated protein homology system used by bioin- formatics scientists at Wageningen University, and several use cases related to protein homology. A key issue we identify is the huge manual effort required to unify source databases into a single resource. Un- certain databases are able to contain several possi- ble worlds, and it has been proposed that they can be used to significantly reduce initial integration efforts. We propose several directions for future work where uncertain databases can be applied to bioinformatics, with the goal of furthering the cause of bioinformatics integration

The ESF Programme on ‘Integrated Approaches to Functional Genomics’. Workshop on ‘Ontology for Biology’

Describes the ESF Programme on Functional Genomics workshop on Ontology for Biolog