A common ontology for multi-dimensional shapes

In recent years, digital shapes have become more and more widespread and have been made available in a plethora of online repositories. A systematic and formal approach for capturing and representing shape-related information is needed to facilitate its reuse and enable the demonstration of useful cross-domain usage scenarios. In this paper we present an ontology for digital shapes, called the Common Shape Ontology (CSO). We discuss the rationale, the requirements and the scope of this ontology, we present in detail its structure and describe the most relevant choices related to its development. Finally, we show how the CSO conceptualization is used in domain-specific application scenarios

NEMO-SN1 Abyssal Cabled Observatory in the Western Ionian Sea

The NEutrinoMediterranean Observatory—Submarine Network 1 (NEMO-SN1) seafloor observatory is located in the central Mediterranean Sea, Western Ionian Sea, off Eastern Sicily (Southern Italy) at 2100-m water depth, 25 km from the harbor of the city of Catania. It is a prototype of a cabled deep-sea multiparameter observatory and the first one operating with real-time data transmission in Europe since 2005. NEMO-SN1 is also the first-established node of the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor Observatory (EMSO), one of the incoming European large-scale research infrastructures included in the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) since 2006. EMSO will specifically address long-term monitoring of environmental processes related to marine ecosystems, marine mammals, climate change, and geohazards

Delphi Initiative for Early-Onset Colorectal Cancer (DIRECt) International Management Guidelines

Background & aims: Patients with early-onset colorectal cancer (eoCRC) are managed according to guidelines that are not age-specific. A multidisciplinary international group (DIRECt), composed of 69 experts, was convened to develop the first evidence-based consensus recommendations for eoCRC. Methods: After reviewing the published literature, a Delphi methodology was used to draft and respond to clinically relevant questions. Each statement underwent 3 rounds of voting and reached a consensus level of agreement of ≥80%. Results: The DIRECt group produced 31 statements in 7 areas of interest: diagnosis, risk factors, genetics, pathology-oncology, endoscopy, therapy, and supportive care. There was strong consensus that all individuals younger than 50 should undergo CRC risk stratification and prompt symptom assessment. All newly diagnosed eoCRC patients should receive germline genetic testing, ideally before surgery. On the basis of current evidence, endoscopic, surgical, and oncologic treatment of eoCRC should not differ from later-onset CRC, except for individuals with pathogenic or likely pathogenic germline variants. The evidence on chemotherapy is not sufficient to recommend changes to established therapeutic protocols. Fertility preservation and sexual health are important to address in eoCRC survivors. The DIRECt group highlighted areas with knowledge gaps that should be prioritized in future research efforts, including age at first screening for the general population, use of fecal immunochemical tests, chemotherapy, endoscopic therapy, and post-treatment surveillance for eoCRC patients. Conclusions: The DIRECt group produced the first consensus recommendations on eoCRC. All statements should be considered together with the accompanying comments and literature reviews. We highlighted areas where research should be prioritized. These guidelines represent a useful tool for clinicians caring for patients with eoCRC

Donne, Informatica ed Albo: professioniste in lotta per i propri diritti

More and more women areactive in the information technology area, and the preservation of their rights and equal opportunities passes for the recognition of associations and professional orders. Of the same importance a right application of the decree law 328 (June 2001) on the “Information area”, which implies the enrollment on the register not only of the graduated in Informatic Engineering (mainly men) but also of those graduated in Information Science and Computer Science (mainly women)

AN APPROACH TO SURFACE RECONSTRUCTION USING UNCERTAIN DATA

In a research context in which multiple and well-behaved Surface Reconstruction algorithms already exist, the main goal is not to implement a visualization toolkit able render complex object, but the implementation of methods which can improve our knowledge on the observed world. This work presents a general Surface Reconstruction framework which encapsulates the uncertainty of the sampled data, making no assumption on the shape of the surface to be reconstructed. Starting from the input points (either points clouds or multiple range images), an Estimated Existence Function (EEF) is built which models the space in which the desired surface could exist and, by the extraction of EEF critical points, the surface is reconstructed. The final goal is the development of a generic framework that is able to adapt the result to different kinds of additional information coming that is from multiple sensors

Manual Segmentation and Semantic-based Hierarchical Tagging of 3D Models

Today 3D objects have become widely available in different application domains, thus it is becoming fundamental to use, integrate and develop techniques for extracting and maintaining their implicit knowledge. These techniques should be encapsulated in intelligent systems able to semantically annotate the 3D models, thus improving their usability and indexing, especially in innovative web cooperative environments. In our work, we are moving in this direction, by defining and developing data structures, methods and interfaces for structuring and semantically annotating 3D complex models (and scenes), even changing over time, according to ontology-driven metadata. In this paper, we focus on tools and methods for manually segmenting manifold 3D models and on the underline structural representation that we build and manipulate. We present also an interface from which the user can inspect and browse the segmentation, describing also the first prototype of an annotation tool which allows a hierarchical semantic-driven tagging of the segmented model

On Evaluating the Quality of RDF Identity Links in the LOD

International audienceThe notion of Linked Data is based on the idea that resources from different data sources can be connected by typed links to enable new knowledge that isolated data sources cannot provide on their own. Today, as the Web of Data is proving its importance, and as an huge amount of data is published on the web in form of RDF triples, the quantity of sameAs links is extremely growing as different data sources often describe equivalent resources. Since most of the sameAs links are discovered automatically and the quality of the data sources can be poor, it is becoming crucial to develop methods for evaluating the quality of these RDF identity links, thus providing a ranking measure of their reliability. In this context, this paper defines a initial methodology for analyzing and evaluating a set of given RDF identity links in the Web of Data, ranking their reliability