A geometric configuration ontology to support spatial querying

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.A number of ontologies of spatial relations have been defined in the literature, but most of these are either confined to a small subset of relations, or focussed on language expressions, and not specified geometrically. This paper presents an ontology of geometric configurations, to reflect and specify the range of spatial relations that have been discussed by previous researchers and that are commonly expressed in natural language, and to provide a sufficiently specific definition of the relations to allow them to be executed as spatial queries. Although this work was motivated by a goal to translate natural language describing location into spatial queries, we anticipate wider applications of the ontology for other purposes. We define a three level ontology, informed by the literature and the study of a corpus of expressions of natural language geospatial location descriptions, and present the concepts and the definition using spatial queries

Psychological adjustment to craniofacial conditions (excluding oral clefts): A review of the literature

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Objective: A congenital craniofacial anomaly (CFA) is expected to impact upon several domains of psychological, emotional and social functioning, yet no recent reviews have comprehensively summarised the available literature. Further, existing reviews tend to draw upon literature in the field of cleft lip and palate, and do not give substantive attention to other types of CFAs. Design: A review of 41 papers published between January 2000 and March 2016 pertaining to psychological adjustment to CFAs. Main outcome measures: Findings are presented according to key psychological domains: General Psychological Well-being, Quality of Life, Behaviour, Emotional Well-being, Social Experiences, Appearance, and Treatment-Related Experiences. Results: Current literature offers a contradictory picture of adjustment to CFAs. Psychological adjustment appeared to be comparable to norms and reference groups in approximately half of the papers related to non-syndromic CFAs, while more variation was found across domains among samples with syndromic CFAs. Associations were found between adjustment, physical health and cognitive function in several papers. The review identified a number of gaps in the literature, such as the inclusion of a wide range of diagnoses within research samples. Conclusions: This review demonstrates the complexity of findings, both within and across domains, and highlights a number of methodological challenges

Psychological adjustment to cleft lip and/or palate: A narrative review of the literature

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Objective: Adjustment to cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) is multifaceted, involving several domains of psychological and social functioning. A substantial increase in research in this area has been evident in recent years, along with a preliminary shift in how adjustment to CL/P is conceptualised and measured. An updated and comprehensive review of the literature is needed in light of the rapidly expanding and changing field. Design: A narrative review of 148 quantitative and qualitative studies published between January 2004 and July 2015. Main outcome measures: Findings are presented according to five key domains of adjustment: Developmental Trajectory, Behaviour, Emotional Well-being, Social Experiences and Satisfaction with Appearance and Treatment. Data pertaining to General Psychological Well-being were also examined. Results: The overall impact of CL/P on psychological adjustment appears to be low. Nonetheless, the review demonstrates the complexity of findings both within and across domains, and highlights recurring methodological challenges. Conclusions: Research findings from the last decade are considered to be largely inconclusive, although some areas of emerging consensus and improvements in the approaches used were identified. Efforts to collect data from large, representative and longitudinal samples, which are comparable across studies and encompassing of the patient perspective, should be doubled

"Exposed and vulnerable": Parent reports of their child's experience of multidisiplinary craniofacial consultations

Objective: Childhood is a period of extensive socioemotional development, which can be impacted by the presence of a congenital craniofacial anomaly (CFA). Complex multidisciplinary treatment and long-term follow-up is normally required, yet understanding of children’s treatment experiences is limited. The objective of this study was to investigate children’s experiences of multidisciplinary team (MDT) consultations from the perspective of their parents.Design: Thirty-eight parents of children with a rare CFA were interviewed in person or over the telephone. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, translated into English, and explored using thematic analysis.Results: Background factors influencing the child’s experience of the consultation included age, developmental stage, personality, and prior treatment experiences. Participants tried to prepare their child for meeting the MDT, but did not fully understand what to expect themselves. During consultations, participants were acutely focused on their child’s emotional state, making it difficult to balance their desire to protect the child from potentially negative experiences, and the need to engage in a constructive dialogue with health professionals. Participants believed that health professionals’ conduct could considerably influence the child’s wellbeing and subsequent treatment decisions. Finally, participants highlighted the need to debrief their child to help them adjust positively.Conclusions: The ultimate goal of craniofacial care is to help children develop into confident adults who are able to cope with the challenges associated with their condition. MDTs play a vital role in creating a safe and supportive environment in which children feel genuinely informed and involved in key aspects of their care

Automated Georeferencing of Antarctic Species

Many text documents in the biological domain contain references to the toponym of specific phenomena (e.g. species sightings) in natural language form "In Garwood Valley summer activity was 0.2% for Umbilicaria aprina and 1.7% for Caloplaca sp. ..." While methods have been developed to extract place names from documents, and attention has been given to the interpretation of spatial prepositions, the ability to connect toponym mentions in text with the phenomena to which they refer (in this case species) has been given limited attention, but would be of considerable benefit for the task of mapping specific phenomena mentioned in text documents. As part of work to create a pipeline to automate georeferencing of species within legacy documents, this paper proposes a method to: (1) recognise species and toponyms within text and (2) match each species mention to the relevant toponym mention. Our methods find significant promise in a bespoke rules- and dictionary-based approach to recognise species within text (F1 scores up to 0.87 including partial matches) but less success, as yet, recognising toponyms using multiple gazetteers combined with an off the shelf natural language processing tool (F1 up to 0.62). Most importantly, we offer a contribution to the relatively nascent area of matching toponym references to the object they locate (in our case species), including cases in which the toponym and species are in different sentences. We use tree-based models to achieve precision as high as 0.88 or an F1 score up to 0.68 depending on the downsampling rate. Initial results out perform previous research on detecting entity relationships that may cross sentence boundaries within biomedical text, and differ from previous work in specifically addressing species mapping

“Will you still feel beautiful when you find out you are different?” Parents’ experiences, reflections, and appearance-focused conversations about their child’s visible difference

To investigate parents’ reflections and experiences of having a child born with an appearance-altering condition, interviews with 33 parents of children born with rare craniofacial conditions were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: “Managing emotions: A dynamic process,” “Through another lens: External reminders of difference,” and “Awareness of difference: Approaching the child.” Findings suggest that although parents learned to accept and love their child’s visible difference, external factors such as appearance-altering surgery and other people’s reactions activated difficult emotions in parents. Parents struggled to decipher whether and when to raise appearance-related issues with their child, and how this could be done without distressing the child. Anticipatory guidance that facilitates positive appearance-focused conversations both within and outside the home seems to be needed. Parenting skills could also be strengthened by preparing parents for social reactions to the child’s visible difference, and their child’s changed appearance following surgery

Self-perceptions of romantic appeal in adolescents with a cleft lip and/or palate

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd During adolescence, romantic relationships are a key developmental milestone. Coupled with the increasing salience of appearance and social acceptance, adolescents with an appearance-altering condition may feel particularly vulnerable when it comes to romantic relationships. This study aimed to explore the prevalence of romantic experiences among adolescents with a cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P), and to investigate how these experiences could be related to depressive symptoms and global self-worth. The study included 661 Norwegian adolescents with CL/P, who were compared to a large national sample. The prevalence of romantic relationships was lower among adolescents with CL/P compared to the reference group, although the overall impact on depressive symptoms and global self-worth appeared to be low. This study is one of few to explore the impact of a congenital visible condition on experiences of romantic relationships and provides preliminary insight into a significant, yet complex topic

From Here to Eternity: An Experiment Applying the e-Framework Infrastructure for Education and Research and the SUMO Ontology to Standards-based Geospatial Web Services

A number of efforts have been made in recent years to define standards for the description of resources (including web services) in services oriented architectures. These standards often use description logic ontologies (for example, OWL-S) and are intended to be machine-readable. They have been applied to geospatial web services to describe the functions that those services perform in a way that can be automatically interpreted by systems. By contrast, little effort has gone into the development of human readable descriptions of resources in a services oriented architecture, other than using unstructured natural language. e-Framework is an infrastructure for the higher education environment that provides a typology of human-readable artefacts that can be used to describe resources, and provides an internal structure for those artefacts. e-Framework has thus far not been used with geospatial information even though geospatial information has a number of important roles in education and research, and has a well-organised community of users and creators. This paper applies the e-Framework infrastructure to OGC web services, and also recommends the refinement of e-Framework with the use of the SUMO Upper Level Ontology to define Service Genres, the most abstract level of artefacts in e-Framework. It then illustrates the ways in which the Open Geospatial Consortium standards and specifications may be described in e-Framework. The work evaluates SUMO for e-Framework purposes, finding that its use for Service Genres is possible and offers a number of gains. It also evaluates e-Framework from a geospatial perspective, and shows that e-Framework’s constraints on resource descriptions do not suit the large and complex nature of geospatial web services

Creating a Multilingual Geospatial Thesaurus: GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas Translations for Italian, Spanish, French and Slovenian

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) are a set of terms of interest for the development of global spatial data infrastructures. These SBAs form a two level hierarchy (categories and subcategories) ranging from natural disasters to human health. The SBAs are used widely by international geographic information sharing initiatives and policy makers. One of the uses of the SBAs is to allow users to search a spatial data infrastructure for resources that relate to the theme of interest (category or subcategory) selected. However, the SBAs are currently only specified in English. In this paper, we provide a translation of the SBAs into Italian, Spanish, French, and Slovenian in order to support multilingual search, and we underline the issues involved in the translation. Since some of these issues seem to be strictly related to a few discrepancies present in the original version of the SBAs, this paper also proposes a revision of the original set of terms in English