Interoperability between classification systems using metadata

The First on-Line conference on Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR'05): Approaches to advanced information systems, 21-30 November 2005Metadata are structures which catalogue, classify, describe and articulate electronic information. The Subject element of Dublin Core is used for c1assification systems and subject headings. There are five ways of applying semantic interoperability: interoperability between controlled vocabularies in the same language; between controlled vocabularies in different languages and classification systems; between subject headings and c1assification systems; between c1assification systems; and between languages. The relations between diverse types of standards or systems present diverse difficulties. The electronic information container, which is Internet, guarantees the trend to try and achieve the interoperability of content analysis, whether it be between c1assification systems, or subject headings. The organisation of information in a physical format has transferred its organisational forms to the structuring of electronic information. The digital formal transforms the organisational form itself. If, in information the message is the medium, in organisation the structure is the medium.Publicad

From the invalidity of a General Classification Theory to a new organization of knowledge for the millennium to come

Proceedings der 10. Tagung der Deutschen Sektion der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Wissensorganisation. Wien, 3-5 Juli 2006The idea of organizing knowledge and the determinism in classifícation structures implicitly involve certain limits which are translated into a General Theory on the Classifícation of Knowledge, given that classifícation responds to specific parameters and structures more than to a theoretical concept. The classifícation of things is a refiection of their classifícation by man, and this is what determines classifícation structures. The classifícation and organization of knowledge are presented to us as an artificial construct or as a useful fiction elaborated by man. Positivist knowledge reached its peak in the 20* century when science classifications and implemented classifícation systems based on the latter were to be gestated and Consolidated. Pragmatism was to serve as the epistemological and theoretical basis for science and its classifícation. If the classifícation of the sciences has given rise to clastification systems, the organisation and representation of knowledge has to currendy give rise to the context of the globalisation of electronic information in the hypertextual organisational form of electronic information where, if in information the médium ivas the message, in organisation the médium is the structure. The virtual reality of electronic information delves even deeper into it; the process is completed as the subject attempts to look for information. This information market needs standards of an international nature for documents and data. This body of information organization will be characterized by its dynamic nature. If formal and material structures change our concept of knowledge and the way it is structured, then this organization will undergo dynamic change along with the material and formal structures of the real world. The semantic web is a qualitative leap which can be glimpsed on tiie new knowledge horizon; the latter would be shaped with the full integration of contents and data, the language itself would include data and its rules of reason or representation system. The new organisation of knowledge points to a totally nCw conception; post-modern epistemology has yet to be articulated. In the 21 st century, the organization of electronic information is presenting a novel hypertextual, non-linear architecture that will lead to a new change in the paradigm for organization of knowledge for the mülennium to come.Publicad

A Parallel Branch and Bound Algorithm for the Maximum Labelled Clique Problem

The maximum labelled clique problem is a variant of the maximum clique problem where edges in the graph are given labels, and we are not allowed to use more than a certain number of distinct labels in a solution. We introduce a new branch-and-bound algorithm for the problem, and explain how it may be parallelised. We evaluate an implementation on a set of benchmark instances, and show that it is consistently faster than previously published results, sometimes by four or five orders of magnitude.Comment: Author-final version. Accepted to Optimization Letter

Human capital and other determinants in the life cycle of the price of a slave: The case of spanish america in the eighteenth century

This paper analizes the determinants of the price life cicle of a slave, dealing particularly with the impact of the human capital, both with respect to skills and health. The paper details the source of the sample -including more than two thousand Spanish American Slaves of the 18th Century-and discusses its reliability, moving on to a descriptive analysis in the geographic and historical context. Later on it looks at the factors influencing price in several types of economic activity, and ends by comparing the conclusions with those obtained in other studies

Partial Degree Formulae for Plane Offset Curves

In this paper we present several formulae for computing the partial degrees of the defining polynomial of the offset curve to an irreducible affine plane curve given implicitly, and we see how these formulae particularize to the case of rational curves. In addition, we present a formula for computing the degree w.r.t the distance variable.Comment: 24 pages, no figure

UPM-UC3M system for music and speech segmentation

This paper describes the UPM-UC3M system for the Albayzín evaluation 2010 on Audio Segmentation. This evaluation task consists of segmenting a broadcast news audio document into clean speech, music, speech with noise in background and speech with music in background. The UPM-UC3M system is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), including a 3-state HMM for every acoustic class. The number of states and the number of Gaussian per state have been tuned for this evaluation. The main analysis during system development has been focused on feature selection. Also, two different architectures have been tested: the first one corresponds to an one-step system whereas the second one is a hierarchical system in which different features have been used for segmenting the different audio classes. For both systems, we have considered long term statistics of MFCC (Mel Frequency Ceptral Coefficients), spectral entropy and CHROMA coefficients. For the best configuration of the one-step system, we have obtained a 25.3% average error rate and 18.7% diarization error (using the NIST tool) and a 23.9% average error rate and 17.9% diarization error for the hierarchical one

Strengthening financial innovations in energy supply projects for rural exploitations in developing countries

Sustainable energy supply models are needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations for 2015. On the other hand, sustainability of agricultural exploitations in rural areas is a pre-requisite to achieve the objective of halving the proportion of people that lives in poverty, and productivity of such exploitations is closely related to energy supply. This article analyses the results of a survey of experts, suggesting that there may be good chances to innovate in the financing of agricultural electrification projects in developing countries. The experts’ opinion suggests that new sources of financing could be mobilised and oriented towards the promotion of sustainable initiatives in developing countries. Financial mechanisms should be adapted to the characteristics of decentralised systems of energy production with renewable sources or with mixed technologies, in order to overcome the barriers derived from the high initial price of the applications, and to the specific conditions of the agricultural sector. The participation of funds from the beneficiaries and the incorporation of the beneficiaries in the initial phases of project organisation would allow for the development of productive solutions with a higher potential to generate resources and to articulate sustainable proposals. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Evitar la merma en la formulación el conocimiento: aportación de Sonia Muñoz-Alonso

Sin resume

Design of pixel-level ADCs for energy-sensitive hybrid pixel detectors

Single-photon counting hybrid pixel detectors have shown\ud to be a valid alternative to other types of X-ray imaging\ud devices due to their high sensitivity, low noise, linear behavior\ud and wide dynamic range. One important advantage of these\ud devices is the fact that detector and readout electronics are\ud manufactured separately. This allows the use of industrial\ud state-of-the-art CMOS processes to make the readout\ud electronics, combined with a free choice of detector material\ud (high resistivity Silicon, GaAs or other). By measuring not\ud only the number of X-ray photons but also their energies (or\ud wavelengths), the information content of the image increases,\ud given the same X-ray dose. We have studied several\ud possibilities of adding energy sensitivity to the single photon\ud counting capability of hybrid pixel detectors, by means of\ud pixel-level analog-to-digital converters. We show the results of\ud simulating different kinds of analog-to-digital converters in\ud terms of power, area and speed

Towards a single-photon energy-sensitive pixel readout chip: pixel level ADCs and digital readout circuitry

Unlike conventional CMOS imaging, a single\ud photon imager detects each individual photon impinging on\ud a detector, accumulating the number of photons during a\ud certain time window and not the charge generated by the all\ud the photons hitting the detector during said time window.\ud The latest developments in the semiconductor industry\ud are allowing faster and more complex chips to be designed\ud and manufactured. With these developments in mind we are\ud working towards the next step in single photon X-ray imaging:\ud energy sensitive pixel readout chips. The goal is not only\ud to detect and count individual photons, but also to measure\ud the charge deposited in the detector by each photon, and\ud consequently determine its energy. Basically, we are aiming\ud at a spectrometer-in-a-pixel, or a “color X-ray camera”.\ud The approach we have followed towards this goal is the\ud design of small analog-to-digital-converters at the pixel level,\ud together with a very fast digital readout from the pixels to\ud the periphery of the chip, where the data will be transmitted\ud off-chip.\ud We will present here the design and measurement on prototype\ud chips of two different 4-bit pixel level ADCs. The\ud ADCs are optimized for very small area and low power, with\ud a resolution of 4-bits and a sample rate of 1 Msample/s. The\ud readout architecture is based around current-mode sense\ud amplifiers and asynchronous token-passing between the pixels.\ud This is done in order to achieve event-by-event readout\ud and, consequently, on-line imaging. We need to read eventby-\ud event (photon-by-photon), because we cannot have memory\ud on the pixels due to obvious size constraints. We use\ud current-mode sense amplifiers because they perform very\ud well in similar applications as very fast static-RAM readout