From Paper to Digital Trail: Collections on the Semantic Web

Historical research on World War II and the impact of large-scale violence largely depends on the availability of source materials: diaries, newspapers, eyewitness accounts, archival documents, photographs and videos, etc. Currently, these resources are held by a large number of memory institutions, often in analogue formats. For scholars, it can be challenging to find out which collections are relevant for their research and also what information can be found in these collections. In this article it is argued that Semantic Web technologies, together with new digital tooling to automatically open up collections and interlink their contents, have the potential to revolutionize future access and use. By making the contents of collections machine-readable and enriching them with links to reference data, a shift can be made from a "web of documents" to a "web of data." By publishing all contents as linked open data, domain experts in research infrastructures (RIs) and thematic aggregators (TAs) are enabled to add their own "thematic" layers to the data, thus empowering themselves and others to explore the data in new, more sophisticated ways. Since we are only at the start of this development, the author advocates a close cooperation between archives, libraries, and museums (ALMs) and domain experts

Van 'oud' geheugen naar digitaal brein: Massadigitalisering in praktijk

Edwin Klijn From ‘old’ memory to digital brain. Practice of Massa Digitizing Digitization of Dutch cultural heritage collections is speeding up. Yet, still only a small portion of all analogue collections can be consulted online in digital format. Often digital collections remain hidden from use and cannot be searched through properly. Current research on user behaviour of students – important consumers for the future – shows that they mainly collect their information from the Internet. Non-digital collections disappear out of sight.How can heritage institutes meet these changing circumstances? Foremost, more and higher quality digitization is required. Standardisation is an absolute necessity, to present the mate-rial consistently online, to connect to other collections and to preserve the digitized assets over time. Joint cooperation and coordination are crucial determinators in this process. In order to play an important role in the future, heritage institutions have to reinvent themselves. Authenticity, durability, quality and reliability are key factors that are becoming ever more important in the constantly growing digital domain. Exactly here heritage institutes can play a major role

Accounting for Multisectoral Dynamics in Supporting Equitable Adaptation Planning: A Case Study on the Rice Agriculture in the Vietnam Mekong Delta

The need for explicitly considering equity in climate change adaptation planning is increasingly being recognized. However, evaluations of adaptation often adopt an aggregated perspective, while disaggregation of results is important to learn about who benefits when and where. A typical example is adaptation of rice agriculture in the Vietnam Mekong Delta (VMD). Efforts focused on flood protection have mainly benefitted large-scale farmers while harming small-scale farmers. To investigate the distributional consequences of adaptation policies in the VMD, we assess both aggregate total output and equity indicators, as well as disaggregated impacts in terms of district-level farming profitability. Doing so requires an adequate representation of the multisectoral dynamics between the human and biophysical systems which influence farming profitability. We develop a spatially explicit integrated assessment model that couples inundation, sedimentation, soil fertility and nutrient dynamics, and behavioral land-use change and farming profitability calculation. We find that inter-district inequality responds in a non-linear way to climatic and socio-economic changes and choices of adaptation policies. The patterns of who wins and who loses could change substantially when a different policy is implemented or if a slightly different uncertain future materializes. We also find that there is no simple ranking of alternative adaptation policies, so one should make trade-offs based on agreed preferences. Accounting for equity implies exploring the distribution of outcomes over different groups over a range of uncertain futures. Only by accounting for multisectoral dynamics can planners anticipate the equity consequences of adaptation and prepare additional measures to aid the worse-off actors.Policy Analysi

Decreased functional connectivity and disturbed directionality of information flow in the electroencephalography of intensive care unit patients with delirium after cardiac surgery

BACKGROUND: In this article, the authors explore functional connectivity and network topology in electroencephalography recordings of patients with delirium after cardiac surgery, aiming to improve the understanding of the pathophysiology and phenomenology of delirium. The authors hypothesize that disturbances in attention and consciousness in delirium may be related to alterations in functional neural interactions. METHODS: Electroencephalography recordings were obtained in postcardiac surgery patients with delirium (N = 25) and without delirium (N = 24). The authors analyzed unbiased functional connectivity of electroencephalography time series using the phase lag index, directed phase lag index, and functional brain network topology using graph analysis. RESULTS: The mean phase lag index was lower in the α band (8 to 13 Hz) in patients with delirium (median, 0.120; interquartile range, 0.113 to 0.138) than in patients without delirium (median, 0.140; interquartile range, 0.129 to 0.168; P < 0.01). Network topology in delirium patients was characterized by lower normalized weighted shortest path lengths in the α band (t = -2.65; P = 0.01). δ Band-directed phase lag index was lower in anterior regions and higher in central regions in delirium patients than in nondelirium patients (F = 4.53; P = 0.04, and F = 7.65; P < 0.01, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Loss of α band functional connectivity, decreased path length, and increased δ band connectivity directed to frontal regions characterize the electroencephalography during delirium after cardiac surgery. These findings may explain why information processing is disturbed in delirium

High-throughput semiquantitative analysis of insertional mutations in heterogeneous tumors

Retroviral and transposon-based insertional mutagenesis (IM) screens are widely used for cancer gene discovery in mice. Exploiting the full potential of IM screens requires methods for high-throughput sequencing and mapping of transposon and retroviral insertion sites. Current protocols are based on ligation-mediated PCR amplification of junction fragments from restriction endonuclease-digested genomic DNA, resulting in amplification biases due to uneven genomic distribution of restriction enzyme recognition sites. Consequently, sequence coverage cannot be used to assess the clonality of individual insertions. We have developed a novel method, called shear-splink, for the semiquantitative high-throughput analysis of insertional mutations. Shear-splink employs random fragmentation of genomic DNA, which reduces unwanted amplification biases. Additionally, shear-splink enables us to assess clonality of individual insertions by determining the number of unique ligation points (LPs) between the adapter and genomic DNA. This parameter serves as a semiquantitative measure of the relative clonality of individual insertions within heterogeneous tumors. Mixing experiments with clonal cell lines derived from mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV)-induced tumors showed that shear-splink enables the semiquantitative assessment of the clonality of MMTV insertions. Further, shear-splink analysis of 16 MMTV- and 127 Sleeping Beauty (SB)–induced tumors showed enrichment for cancer-relevant insertions by exclusion of irrelevant background insertions marked by single LPs, thereby facilitating the discovery of candidate cancer genes. To fully exploit the use of the shear-splink method, we set up the Insertional Mutagenesis Database (iMDB), offering a publicly available web-based application to analyze both retroviral- and transposon-based insertional mutagenesis data