The SEALS Yardsticks for Ontology Management

This paper describes the rst SEALS evaluation campaign over ontology engineering tools (i.e., the SEALS Yardsticks for Ontology Management). It presents the dierent evaluation scenarios dened to evaluate the conformance, interoperability and scalability of these tools, and the test data used in these scenarios

The Bologna process and its perspectives

At the end of the first decade of this new millennium, we have reached the deadline set for the Bologna process. It is therefore an appropriate moment to look back to see where we have progressed and where we have fallen short of our aspirations. The Bologna Process was a major reform created with the claimed goal of providing responses to issues such as the public responsibility for higher education and research, higher education governance, the social dimension of higher education and research, and the values and roles of higher education and research in modern, globalized, and increasingly complex societies with the most demanding qualification needs

Boosting infrared energy transfer in 3D nanoporous gold antennas

The applications of plasmonics to energy transfer from free-space radiation to molecules are currently limited to the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum due to the intrinsic optical properties of bulk noble metals that support strong electromagnetic field confinement only close to their plasma frequency in the visible/ultraviolet range. In this work, we show that nanoporous gold can be exploited as a plasmonic material for the mid-infrared region to obtain strong electromagnetic field confinement, co-localized with target molecules into the nanopores and resonant with their vibrational frequency. The effective optical response of the nanoporous metal enables the penetration of optical fields deep into the nanopores, where molecules can be loaded thus achieving a more efficient light–matter coupling if compared to bulk gold. In order to realize plasmonic resonators made of nanoporous gold, we develop a nanofabrication method based on polymeric templates for metal deposition and we obtain antenna arrays resonating at mid-infrared wavelengths selected by design. We then coat the antennas with a thin (3 nm) silica layer acting as the target dielectric layer for optical energy transfer. We study the strength of the light–matter coupling at the vibrational absorption frequency of silica at 1240 cm−1 through the analysis of the experimental Fano lineshape that is benchmarked against identical structures made of bulk gold. The boost in the optical energy transfer from free-space mid-infrared radiation to molecular vibrations in nanoporous 3D nanoantenna arrays can open new application routes for plasmon-enhanced physical–chemical reactions