Semantic-based approach for the discovery of Life Sciences web resources driven by rich user's requirements

In recent years, the number of resources available on the Web has increased quickly. In Life Sciences, researchers are publishing their research results on the Web as web resources with the aim of collaborating with other researchers. However, the discovery of web resources relevant to a specific requirement is a challenging task. The thesis aims to assist the users in the discovery of the most suitable resources for their specific requirements

Semantic transference for enriching multilingual biomedical knowledge resources

Biomedical knowledge resources (KRs) are mainly expressed in English, and many applications using them suffer from the scarcity of knowledge in non- English languages. The goal of the present work is to take maximum profit from existing multilingual biomedical KRs lexicons to enrich their non-English counterparts. We propose to combine different automatic methods to gener- ate pair-wise language alignments. More specifically, we use two well-known translation methods (GIZA++ and Moses), and we propose a new ad-hoc method specially devised for multilingual KRs. Then, resulting alignments are used to transfer semantics between KRs across their languages. Transfer- ence quality is ensured by checking the semantic coherence of the generated alignments. Experiments have been carried out over the Spanish, French and German UMLS Metathesaurus counterparts. As a result, the enriched Span- ish KR can grow up to 1,514,217 concepts (originally 286,659), the French KR up to 1,104,968 concepts (originally 83,119), and the German KR up to 1,136,020 concepts (originally 86,842)

Designing Similarity Measures for XML

In this demonstration we will show a series of tools that support a methodology [1] for the design of complex similarity functions in the context of heterogenous XML systems

XTaGe: a flexible generation system for complex XML collections

We introduce XTaGe (XML Tester and Generator), a system for the synthesis of XML collections meant for testing and micro benchmarking applications. In contrast with existing approaches, XTaGe focuses on complex collections, by providing a highly extensible framework to introduce controlled variability in XML structures. In this paper we present the theoretical foundation, internal architecture and main features of our generator; we describe its implementation, which includes a GUI to facilitate the specication of collections; we discuss how XTaGe's features compare with those in other XML generation systems; finally, we illustrate its usage by presenting a use case in the bioinformatics domai

BioUSeR: a semantic-based tool for retrieving Life Science web resources driven by text-rich user requirements

Background: OpenmetadataregistriesareafundamentaltoolforresearchersintheLifeSciencestryingtolocate resources. While most current registries assume that resources are annotated with well-structured metadata, evidence shows that most of the resource annotations simply consists of informal free text. This reality must be taken into account in order to develop effective techniques for resource discovery in Life Sciences. Results: BioUSeRisasemantic-basedtoolaimedatretrievingLifeSciencesresourcesdescribedinfreetext.The retrieval process is driven by the user requirements, which consist of a target task and a set of facets of interest, both expressed in free text. BioUSeR is able to effectively exploit the available textual descriptions to find relevant resources by using semantic-aware techniques. Conclusions: BioUSeRovercomesthelimitationsofthecurrentregistriesthanksto:(i)richspecificationofuser information needs, (ii) use of semantics to manage textual descriptions, (iii) retrieval and ranking of resources based on user requirements

Tailored semantic annotation for semantic search

This paper presents a novel method for semantic annotation and search of a target corpus using several knowledge resources (KRs). This method relies on a formal statistical framework in which KR concepts and corpus documents are homogeneously represented using statistical language models. Under this framework, we can perform all the necessary operations for an efficient and effective semantic annotation of the corpus. Firstly, we propose a coarse tailoring of the KRs w.r.t the target corpus with the main goal of reducing the ambiguity of the annotations and their computational overhead. Then, we propose the generation of concept profiles, which allow measuring the semantic overlap of the KRs as well as performing a finer tailoring of them. Finally, we propose how to semantically represent documents and queries in terms of the KRs concepts and the statistical framework to perform semantic search. Experiments have been carried out with a corpus about web resources which includes several Life Sciences catalogs and Wikipedia pages related to web resources in general (e.g., databases, tools, services, etc.). Results demonstrate that the proposed method is more effective and efficient than state-of-the-art methods relying on either context-free annotation or keyword-based search.We thank anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions. The work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2011-24147 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)

Relaciones de género de adolescentes en contextos educativos. Análisis de redes sociales con perspectiva de género

Este artículo se enmarca en una investigación más amplia sobre el diagnóstico de la cultura de género en la escuela y la difusión de buenas prácticas coeducativas. En concreto, el propósito de este estudio es analizar la naturaleza de las redes sociales que establecen los y las adolescentes en función del género y tipo de actividad en el contexto escolar. Para ello, se aplica un test sociométrico compuesto por dos situaciones de actividad a 722 estudiantes de Educación Secundaria de Andalucía. Los resultados muestran que los y las estudiantes eligen a las chicas para realizar tareas basadas en el cuidado, mientras que prefieren a los chicos para la actividad que implica competir. Los resultados también revelan que la tarea de competición conforma redes más cohesionadas, presentando más vínculos y relaciones más fuertes, mientras que la actividad basada en el cuidado y afecto configura redes más frágiles y dispersas

El estudio educativo de las emociones : una aproximación sociocultural

Esta revista también aparece bajo el título Education in the knowledge societyEn este trabajo, presentamos una línea de estudios que tiene como finalidad desarrollar una pedagogía emocional, fundamentada teóricamente en el enfoque sociocultural y respaldada por trabajos empíricos que orienten modelos y propuestas para una coeducación sentimental. Temáticas como el fracaso escolar, la teleformación y e-learning y la coeducación articulan los trabajos empíricos y tesis doctorales de esta línea sobre emociones y educación. Posteriormente, presentamos un estudio orientado a la identificación de patrones emocionales en procesos de fracaso escolar. Como metodología se emplea el análisis de discursos autobiográficos recogidos a través de una serie de entrevistas apoyadas en fotografías como elementos estímulo. Una de las contribuciones de este trabajo es la construcción de un sistema de indicadores empíricos para detectar discursos emocionales potencialmente dañinos para el desarrollo educativo de las personas, con especial utilidad para la comunicación emocional en modelos de teleformación y e-learning.This paper presents a research line, which has the aim of develop an Emotional Pedagogy based on the contributions from sociocultural theory and supported by empirical studies, which point towards new models and proposals for emotional coeducation. School failure, e-learning and coeducation are subjects that have been dealt with empirical studies and dissertations from this research line about emotions and education. Finally, we expose an empirical study focusing on identify emotional patterns in school failure processes. For that, we analyze autobiography discourses that are collected by a set of interviews with a procedure based on the use of photography as stimulus. This study provides the creation of an empirical indicators system to identify emotional discourses potentially harmful for educational development of human beings. This system of indicator is useful for the emotional communication in e-learning model