PlanetOnto: from news publishing to integrated knowledge management support

Given a scenario in which members of an academic community collaboratively construct and share an archive of news items, several knowledge management challenges arise. The authors' integrated suite of tools, called PlanetOnto, supports a speedy but high quality publishing process, allows ontology-driven document formalization and augments standard browsing and search facilities with deductive knowledge retrieva

Collaborative semantic web browsing with Magpie

Web browsing is often a collaborative activity. Users involved in a joint information gathering exercise will wish to share knowledge about the web pages visited and the contents found. Magpie is a suite of tools supporting the interpretation of web pages and semantically enriched web browsing. By automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources, Magpie allows relevant services to be invoked as well as remotely triggered within a standard web browser. In this paper we describe how Magpie trigger services can provide semantic support to collaborative browsing activities

Visible seeds of socialism and metamorphoses of capitalism: socialism after Rosdolsky

Roman Rosdolsky suggests a method to deal with the transition towards socialism that integrates three issues: 1) the identification of dynamic features of capitalism; 2) the systematization of metamorphoses of capitalism; 3) the evaluation of how these metamorphoses reshape the elaboration of alternatives to capitalism. This evaluation is a precondition for the visualization, within the complex dynamics of capitalism, of seeds of a new society Ð institutions born out of political struggles and of emancipatory features of key social processes. These institutions reshape the nature of the metamorphoses of capitalism Ð and the possibility of establishing socialism and democracy.metamorphoses of capitalism; technology and finance; socialism and democracy.

Inadequacy of technology and innovation systems at the periphery: notes on Celso Furtado's contributions for a dialogue between evolutionists and structuralists

This paper focuses on "inadequacy of technology" as formulated by Celso Furtado. The concept of "inadequacy of technology" may be, on the one hand, an enlightening assessment of the technological condition of underdevelopment and, on the other hand, a helpful "focusing device" for an agenda on innovation systems at the periphery. Furtado's approach on inappropriate technology may uncover the social roots of the well know "low-growth trap" of less-developed economies. Celso Furtado explains how inadequacy of technology is related to the polarization "modernization-marginalization" that characterizes economies with immature systems of innovation, as the Brazilian economy. This concept also highlights how difficult it is to overcome the complex interplay among unequal income distribution, localized and blocked technical progress and unsustainable economic growth. To overcome the inadequacy of technology a dual institutional building seems to be necessary: the innovation systems might co-evolve with welfare systems.Celso Furtado, evolutionary theory, innovation systems, welfare systems, catching up process

Implementation of the Linear Method for the optimization of Jastrow-Feenberg and Backflow Correlations

We present a fully detailed and highly performing implementation of the Linear Method [J. Toulouse and C. J. Umrigar (2007)] to optimize Jastrow-Feenberg and Backflow Correlations in many-body wave-functions, which are widely used in condensed matter physics. We show that it is possible to implement such optimization scheme performing analytical derivatives of the wave-function with respect to the variational parameters achieving the best possible complexity O(N^3) in the number of particles N.Comment: submitted to the Comp. Phys. Com

Imaginary Time Correlations and the phaseless Auxiliary Field Quantum Monte Carlo

The phaseless Auxiliary Field Quantum Monte Carlo method provides a well established approximation scheme for accurate calculations of ground state energies of many-fermions systems. Here we apply the method to the calculation of imaginary time correlation functions. We give a detailed description of the technique and we test the quality of the results for static and dynamic properties against exact values for small systems.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; submitted to J. Chem. Phy

Radio-loudness in black hole transients: evidence for an inclination effect

Accreting stellar-mass black holes appear to populate two branches in a radio:X-ray luminosity plane. We have investigated the X-ray variability properties of a large number of black hole low-mass X-ray binaries, with the aim of unveiling the physical reasons underlying the radio-loud/radio-quiet nature of these sources, in the context of the known accretion-ejection connection. A reconsideration of the available radio and X-ray data from a sample of black hole X-ray binaries confirms that being radio-quiet is the more normal mode of behaviour for black hole binaries. In the light of this we chose to test, once more, the hypothesis that radio loudness could be a consequence of the inclination of the X-ray binary. We compared the slope of the `hard-line' (an approximately linear correlation between X-ray count rate and rms variability, visible in the hard states of active black holes), the orbital inclination, and the radio-nature of the sources of our sample. We found that high-inclination objects show steeper hard-lines than low-inclination objects, and tend to display a radio-quiet nature (with the only exception of V404 Cyg), as opposed to low-inclination objects, which appear to be radio-loud(er). While in need of further confirmation, our results suggest that - contrary to what has been believed for years - the radio-loud/quiet nature of black-hole low mass X-ray binaries might be an inclination effect, rather than an intrinsic source property. This would solve an important issue in the context of the inflow-outflow connection, thus providing significant constraints to the models for the launch of hard-state compact jets.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, accepted for pubblication on MNRA

Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison

Abstract. The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly constrained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions