A Relation-Based Page Rank Algorithm for Semantic Web Search Engines

With the tremendous growth of information available to end users through the Web, search engines come to play ever a more critical role. Nevertheless, because of their general-purpose approach, it is always less uncommon that obtained result sets provide a burden of useless pages. The next-generation Web architecture, represented by the Semantic Web, provides the layered architecture possibly allowing overcoming this limitation. Several search engines have been proposed, which allow increasing information retrieval accuracy by exploiting a key content of Semantic Web resources, that is, relations. However, in order to rank results, most of the existing solutions need to work on the whole annotated knowledge base. In this paper, we propose a relation-based page rank algorithm to be used in conjunction with Semantic Web search engines that simply relies on information that could be extracted from user queries and on annotated resources. Relevance is measured as the probability that a retrieved resource actually contains those relations whose existence was assumed by the user at the time of query definitio

LO-MATCH: A semantic platform for matching migrants' competences with labour market's needs

Citizens' mobility and employability are receiving ever more attention by the European legislation. Various instruments have been defined to overcome lexical and semantic differences in the descriptions of qualifications, résumés and job profiles. However, the above differences still represent a significant constraint when abilities of non-European people have to be validated either for education and training or occupation purposes. In this work, a web platform that exploits semantic technologies to address such heterogeneity issues is presented. The platform allows migrants to annotate their knowledge, skills and competences in a shared format based on the European tools. The resulting knowledge base is then used to enable the automatic matchmaking of job seekers' abilities with companies' needs. The platform can additionally be used to support students and workers in the identification of their competence gap with respect to a given education or occupation opportunity, so that to personalize their further trainin

Mixed marker-based/marker-less visual odometry system for mobile robots

When moving in generic indoor environments, robotic platforms generally rely solely on information provided by onboard sensors to determine their position and orientation. However, the lack of absolute references often leads to the introduction of severe drifts in estimates computed, making autonomous operations really hard to accomplish. This paper proposes a solution to alleviate the impact of the above issues by combining two vision‐based pose estimation techniques working on relative and absolute coordinate systems, respectively. In particular, the unknown ground features in the images that are captured by the vertical camera of a mobile platform are processed by a vision‐based odometry algorithm, which is capable of estimating the relative frame‐to‐frame movements. Then, errors accumulated in the above step are corrected using artificial markers displaced at known positions in the environment. The markers are framed from time to time, which allows the robot to maintain the drifts bounded by additionally providing it with the navigation commands needed for autonomous flight. Accuracy and robustness of the designed technique are demonstrated using an off‐the‐shelf quadrotor via extensive experimental test

Immersive Virtual Reality-Based Interfaces for Character Animation

Virtual Reality (VR) has increasingly attracted the attention of the computer animation community in search of more intuitive and effective alternatives to the current sophisticated user interfaces. Previous works in the literature already demonstrated the higher affordances offered by VR interaction, as well as the enhanced spatial understanding that arises thanks to the strong sense of immersion guaranteed by virtual environments. These factors have the potential to improve the animators' job, which is tremendously skill-intensive and time-consuming. The present paper explores the opportunities provided by VR-based interfaces for the generation of 3D animations via armature deformation. To the best of the authors' knowledge, for the first time a tool is presented which allows users to manage a complete pipeline supporting the above animation method, by letting them execute key tasks such as rigging, skinning and posing within a well-known animation suite using a customizable interface. Moreover, it is the first work to validate, in both objective and subjective terms, character animation performance in the above tasks and under realistic work conditions involving different user categories. In our experiments, task completion time was reduced by 26%, on average, while maintaining almost the same levels of accuracy and precision for both novice and experienced users

National qualification systems integration using ontologies

This work presents the use of ontologies as a way to tackle the problem of integration of qualification systems in order to enable the transparency and mobility of students at European level. For this, qualification systems at post-secondary non-academic levels of nine EU countries have been formalized in terms of profile, activities, competences, learning outcomes, etc., first using UML for a human-readable model and then using OWL for a machine-processable one. In addition, concrete qualification profiles have been used as a case study to check the models’ correctness.Education for the 21 st century - impact of ICT and Digital Resources ConferenceRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

A mobile platform for collaborative urban freight transportation

Abstract In recent years, online shopping is increasing the flows that transit into the urban areas. An increase in demand corresponds to an increase in operational complexity for logistics operators and environmental issues. This paper presents the development of a mobile platform integrated with wearable features to foster the collaboration between different actors in urban freight logistics

Photo-induced pyridine substitution in cis-[Ru(bpy)(2)(py)(2)]Cl-2 : a snapshot by time-resolved X-ray solution scattering

Determination of transient structures in light-induced processes is a challenging goal for time-resolved techniques. Such techniques are becoming successful in detecting ultrafast structural changes in molecules and do not require the presence of probe-like groups. Here, we demonstrate that TR-WAXS (Time-Resolved Wide Angle X-ray Scattering) can be successfully employed to study the photochemistry of cis-[Ru(bpy)(2)(py)(2)]Cl-2, a mononuclear ruthenium complex of interest in the field of photoactivatable anticancer agents. TR-WAXS is able to detect the release of a pyridine ligand and the coordination of a solvent molecule on a faster timescale than 800 ns of laser excitation. The direct measurement of the photodissociation of pyridine is a major advance in the field of time-resolved techniques allowing detection, for the first time, of the release of a multiatomic ligand formed by low Z atoms. These data demonstrate that TR-WAXS is a powerful technique for studying rapid ligand substitution processes involving photoactive metal complexes of biological interest