Servicing the federation : the case for metadata harvesting

The paper presents a comparative analysis of data harvesting and distributed computing as complementary models of service delivery within large-scale federated digital libraries. Informed by requirements of flexibility and scalability of federated services, the analysis focuses on the identification and assessment of model invariants. In particular, it abstracts over application domains, services, and protocol implementations. The analytical evidence produced shows that the harvesting model offers stronger guarantees of satisfying the identified requirements. In addition, it suggests a first characterisation of services based on their suitability to either model and thus indicates how they could be integrated in the context of a single federated digital library

IRRIGATION WITH SALINE WATER: PREDICTION OF SOIL SODICATION AND MANAGEMENT

Il lavoro svolto ha permesso di implementare un modello semplice con il quale prevedere possibili processi di accumulo sodico e salino utilizzando acque di scarsa qualità (reflue o saline). Si sono indagate anche possibili soluzioni del problema, e il leaching requirement si è valutato come una tecnica semplice utilizzabile per evitare di gestire l'accumulo salino- sodico nell'irrigazione.openSTA-2

What-if analysis: A visual analytics approach to Information Retrieval evaluation

This paper focuses on the innovative visual analytics approach realized by the Visual Analytics Tool for Experimental Evaluation (VATE2) system, which eases and makes more effective the experimental evaluation process by introducing the what-if analysis. The what-if analysis is aimed at estimating the possible effects of a modification to an Information Retrieval (IR) system, in order to select the most promising fixes before implementing them, thus saving a considerable amount of effort. VATE2 builds on an analytical framework which models the behavior of the systems in order to make estimations, and integrates this analytical framework into a visual part which, via proper interaction and animations, receives input and provides feedback to the user. We conducted an experimental evaluation to assess the numerical performances of the analytical model and a validation of the visual analytics prototype with domain experts. Both the numerical evaluation and the user validation have shown that VATE2 is effective, innovative, and useful

The CLAIRE visual analytics system for analysing IR evaluation data

In this paper, we describe Combinatorial visuaL Analytics system for Information Retrieval Evaluation (CLAIRE), a Visual Analytics (VA) system for exploring and making sense of the performances of a large amount of Information Retrieval (IR) systems, in order to quickly and intuitively grasp which system configurations are preferred, what are the contributions of the different components and how these components interact together

CLEF 2005: Ad Hoc track overview

We describe the objectives and organization of the CLEF 2005 ad hoc track and discuss the main characteristics of the tasks offered to test monolingual, bilingual and multilingual textual document retrieval. The performance achieved for each task is presented and a preliminary analysis of results is given. The paper focuses in particular on the multilingual tasks which reused the test collection created in CLEF 2003 in an attempt to see if an improvement in system performance over time could be measured, and also to examine the multilingual results merging problem

Environment, agro-system and quality of food production in Italy

In the context of increasing attention towards sustainable and high quality food products, Italy plays a key role in Europe due to its embedded territorial vocation for locally produced food and alternative agriculture systems helping biodiversity and landscape preservation. Here, we report an overview of Italian agriculture by analysing organic farming (OF) and geographical indication (GI) systems and their contribution to the national agriculture. Land use data highlight that OF and GI contribute around 10% to the utilised agriculture area (UAA), with relevant distinctions in terms of regional distribution. While GIs are mostly in the north-central regions (8.5%), OF products are most frequent in the south and on the islands (5.0% of UAA). This trend was observed on the one hand in Trentino-South Tirol, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (%UAA GI/%UAA OF>5.9), and on the other in Calabria, Basilicata and Sicily (%UAA GI/%UAA OF<0.1). Similarly, both systems are widespread in less-favoured areas in terms of agricultural intensification, providing support to preserve agro-systems and reduce land abandonment

Towards Meaningful Statements in IR Evaluation. Mapping Evaluation Measures to Interval Scales

Recently, it was shown that most popular IR measures are not interval-scaled, implying that decades of experimental IR research used potentially improper methods, which may have produced questionable results. However, it was unclear if and to what extent these findings apply to actual evaluations and this opened a debate in the community with researchers standing on opposite positions about whether this should be considered an issue (or not) and to what extent. In this paper, we first give an introduction to the representational measurement theory explaining why certain operations and significance tests are permissible only with scales of a certain level. For that, we introduce the notion of meaningfulness specifying the conditions under which the truth (or falsity) of a statement is invariant under permissible transformations of a scale. Furthermore, we show how the recall base and the length of the run may make comparison and aggregation across topics problematic. Then we propose a straightforward and powerful approach for turning an evaluation measure into an interval scale, and describe an experimental evaluation of the differences between using the original measures and the interval-scaled ones. For all the regarded measures - namely Precision, Recall, Average Precision, (Normalized) Discounted Cumulative Gain, Rank-Biased Precision and Reciprocal Rank - we observe substantial effects, both on the order of average values and on the outcome of significance tests. For the latter, previously significant differences turn out to be insignificant, while insignificant ones become significant. The effect varies remarkably between the tests considered but overall, on average, we observed a 25% change in the decision about which systems are significantly different and which are not

Sviluppo di un sistema aptico per applicazioni ecografiche

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