Work has been so incredibly hectic lately that I've been neglecting my reading - have managed to skim-read a few things so am making a note here as I'll forget otherwise...
CILIP Gazette (31 Oct - 13 Nov) has a cover feature ("Digital services 'challenge' HE") which reports on a JISC survey of senior staff and the latest SCONUL stats which show "the proportion of digital journals to printed journals shifting from 25% to 75% in 8 years. Some 45% of all acquisitions expenditure now goes on electronic formats".
HSJ (16 Oct) reports that members of the Long Term Conditions Alliance will merge with a new patient representation body and expected to become part of National Voices, being developed by Chief Exec David Pink.
Strategic Content Alliance (Oct newsletter) reports on the UKRDS interim report (www.ukrds.ac.uk) - it'll be interesting to see how that's taken forward. http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2008/10/sca_news_2008_october-final.pdf
Strategic Content Alliance (Sept newsletter) reports that the UK has "increased its share of published research in the world's most influential scientific journals" from a DIUS report.
http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2008/09/sca_news_2008_september-final.pdf
The SCA Sept newsletter also mentions the emerging W3C POWDER protocol which allows metadata to be associated with multiple resources. "POWDER has been developed to create and use authoritative descriptions that identify online resources that meet specific criteria, such as those published under a specific licence or subject to a given code of conduct or suitable for children". http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
Showing posts with label semantic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label semantic. Show all posts
Friday, 7 November 2008
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
"Semantic Medline"
Interesting story in Information Today...
Cognition launches Semantic Medline
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/wndReader.asp?ArticleId=50075
"...enables complex health and life science material to be rapidly and efficiently discovered with greater precision and completeness using natural language processing (NLP) technology"
I tried a quick search "exercise and depression" just to see it working - results are mostly relevant on the first couple of pages - it does offer you to select the correct meaning e.g. of depression (feeling of sadness/hopelessness) but still seems to bring up records referring to other meanings (e.g. ST segmental depression) - although I guess it's impossible to avoid that - and the definitions might be more useful if sourced from a medical dictionary which they don't appear to be. It would be interesting to compare results using MeSH.
Given that my search retrieved over 7000 results, it would also be useful to have some options for narrowing the search - suggesting additional search terms (e.g. are you interested in a particular population e.g. postnatal?)
http://www.semanticmedline.com
Cognition launches Semantic Medline
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/wndReader.asp?ArticleId=50075
"...enables complex health and life science material to be rapidly and efficiently discovered with greater precision and completeness using natural language processing (NLP) technology"
I tried a quick search "exercise and depression" just to see it working - results are mostly relevant on the first couple of pages - it does offer you to select the correct meaning e.g. of depression (feeling of sadness/hopelessness) but still seems to bring up records referring to other meanings (e.g. ST segmental depression) - although I guess it's impossible to avoid that - and the definitions might be more useful if sourced from a medical dictionary which they don't appear to be. It would be interesting to compare results using MeSH.
Given that my search retrieved over 7000 results, it would also be useful to have some options for narrowing the search - suggesting additional search terms (e.g. are you interested in a particular population e.g. postnatal?)
http://www.semanticmedline.com
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Reuters and semantic web
The Economist reports on the semantic web, referring to Reuters' new service Calais which is free. It also mentions other people working in this area: Twine, Powerset, Metaweb, Hakia, Adaptive Blue, Yahoo and Qitera.
Monday, 17 March 2008
Semantic web - various
Some discussion recently about the vision of the semantic web...
Tim Berners Lee features in The Times Online (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3532832.ece) talking about the potential of the semantic web
Discussion on the BCS-KIDDM list referred to an earlier talk by Prof Ian Horrocks (http://www.epsg.org.uk/pub/needham2005/Horrocks_needham2005.pdf) which is a very readable intro to the concepts behind the semantic web and also refers to Manchester's work with Protege, including the pizza demo.
Yahoo have also been talking about semantic web, in particular its application in web searching (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html):
"In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources."
Tim Berners Lee features in The Times Online (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3532832.ece) talking about the potential of the semantic web
Discussion on the BCS-KIDDM list referred to an earlier talk by Prof Ian Horrocks (http://www.epsg.org.uk/pub/needham2005/Horrocks_needham2005.pdf) which is a very readable intro to the concepts behind the semantic web and also refers to Manchester's work with Protege, including the pizza demo.
Yahoo have also been talking about semantic web, in particular its application in web searching (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html):
"In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources."
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
BiomedExperts
A new service from Collexis (free to individual researchers but not sure if there is a cost for institutions and research groups) which profiles researchers and promotes networking and collaboration. An interesting way of building on the social networking buzz, it seems to offer the ability to find researchers by expertise and visual representations of your own network of contacts. One weakness seems to be that profiles are built on recent publications, which might not give the whole picture, particularly ongoing work. I could see this working really well in something like UK Pubmed Central where you could add in the grant information to pull in the ongoing work.
http://www.biomedexperts.com/Portal.aspx
http://www.biomedexperts.com/Portal.aspx
Monday, 14 January 2008
Information World Review - various news
Information World Review (Dec 07):
Information World Review (Jan 08):
- Good to see VizNet getting a mention, "VizNet rescues research from data overload"
- Interesting article on scientific information, "STM Mines Workflow": "Information overload is shifting the researcher's search and find paradigm away from document retrieval and towards information extraction"
- A useful article, "Back to basics: the wiki" on the advantages and strengths of wikis in a corporate environment, choosing between open source and commercial wikis and some suggestions of how wikis can be utilised and for what: "You need a wiki when...communication is a chore; important information is scattered around email inboxes" "Think wiki for bottom-up rather than top-down content control where you don't need centralised governance. think CMS for top-down content control where compliance demands such governance"
Information World Review (Jan 08):
- "Wales urges librarians to help build better Wikipedia" on Jimmy Wales' plea for librarians to get involved in the Wikipedia Academies to teach wiki editing skills.
- "The time has come for the semantic web to SPARQL" talks about SPARQL which "is designed to pick up truly relevant information from the internet in RDF format" and GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) which extracts RDF from XML and XHTML.
Friday, 4 January 2008
"Semantic web in action" article
Back in Scientific American featured an article by Tim Berners-Lee and others on the possibilities offered by the semantic web. Last month's issue (Dec 07) featured an article by Lee Feigenbaum and others which gives a good overview of progress towards that early vision. The article is online but for a fee: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web-in-action.
The article talks about how the development of standards (RDF and OWL) has spurred developments in the commercial sector. A number of large organisations are now using ontologies to manage information and deliver content. It also talks about how the semantic web can build on the popularity of tagging on social sites such as Facebook and Flickr as RDF and ontologies are maturing.
The article features two interesting case studies in drug discovery; and health care. A common theme across both case studies is the volume of data/information. It'd be interesting to learn more about the contribution text mining can make to the Semantic Web vision - the BOOTStrep project at NaCTeM is exploring the role of text mining in ontology development, for example.
Other interesting applications mentioned include: Science Commons (semantic web tools for attaching copyright and licensing info to data) and DBpedia (linking information within Wikipedia).
Their conclusion? "Grand visions rarely progress exactly as planned, but the Semantic Web is indeed emerging and is making online information more useful than ever".
The article talks about how the development of standards (RDF and OWL) has spurred developments in the commercial sector. A number of large organisations are now using ontologies to manage information and deliver content. It also talks about how the semantic web can build on the popularity of tagging on social sites such as Facebook and Flickr as RDF and ontologies are maturing.
The article features two interesting case studies in drug discovery; and health care. A common theme across both case studies is the volume of data/information. It'd be interesting to learn more about the contribution text mining can make to the Semantic Web vision - the BOOTStrep project at NaCTeM is exploring the role of text mining in ontology development, for example.
Other interesting applications mentioned include: Science Commons (semantic web tools for attaching copyright and licensing info to data) and DBpedia (linking information within Wikipedia).
Their conclusion? "Grand visions rarely progress exactly as planned, but the Semantic Web is indeed emerging and is making online information more useful than ever".
Thursday, 13 December 2007
The structured web
Interesting post on Alex Iskold's blog: http://alexiskold.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/the-structured-web-a-primer/ looking at how the web will evolve to handle structured information, thus paving the way for the Semantic Web.
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructures Workshop
I managed to catch some of the Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructures Workshop today, part of the eSI programme and hosted by the Welsh eScience Centre. Here are my quick notes...
Rob Lemmens from International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation talked about end-user tools. He outlined the different approaches of corporate/national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) which is a centralised approach and Web 2.0 which is community driven. SDIs are based on stricter rules for annotation and accuracy tends to be higher than Web 2.0 tools, although this is changing. Rob outlined the need for a semantic interoperability framework (combination of ontologies, their relationships and methods for ontology-based description of info sources - data sets, services etc) and a semantic interoperability infrastructure (comprises framework and the tools to maintain and use the framework as well as the information sources produced within this framework). Rob's presentation also included a slide outlining the characteristics of an ontology which was a good representation and a demonstration of ontology visualisation (same tool which ASSERT is using for clustering?). Rob concluded by summarising what the geospatial community can learn and take from Web 2.0, for example tagging/tag clouds, tools for building ontologies (community tagging e.g Google Image Labeller), instant feedback (e.g. password strength bars when selecting a new password) - on the negative side, community-driven tagging can lead to weak semantics. Rob suggests combining the best of both SDI and Web 2.0 worlds - map the SDI and Web2.0 ontologies to create dynamic annotations of geo sources, thus improving discovery.
Ulrich Bugel from Fraunhofer Institut IITB presented on ontology based discovery and annotation of resources in geospatial applications. Ulrich talked about the ORCHESTRA project (http://www.eu-orchestra.org/) which aims to design and implement an open service-oriented architecture to improve interoperability in a risk management setting (e.g. how big is the risk of a forest fire in a certain region of the Pyrenees in a given season?). This question has spatial references (cross-border, cross-administration); temporal references (time series and prognostics); thematic reference (forest fire); and conceptual reference (what is risk?). ORCHESTRA will build a service network to address these sorts of question. Interoperability is discussed on 3 levels - syntactic (encodings), structural (schemas, interfaces), semantic (meaning). The project has produced the Reference Model for the ORCHESTRA Architecture (RM-OA), drawing on standards from OGC, OASIS, W3C, ISO 191xx, ISO RM-ODP. Many iterations of the Reference Model which led to Best Practice status at OGC. The ORCHESTRA Architecture comprises a number of semantic services: Annotation Service automatically generates meta-information from sources and relates them to elements of an ontology; Ontology Access Service enabling high-level access and queries to ontologies; Knowledge Base Service; Semantic Catalogue Service.
Ian Holt from Ordnance Survey presented on geospatial semantics research at OS. OS has one of the largest geospatial databases, unsurprisingly, with 400 million features and over 2000 concepts. Benefits of semantics research: quality control, better classification; semantic web enablement, semi-automated data integration, data and product repurposing; data mining - i.e. benefits to OS and to customers. OS has developed a topographic domain ontology which provides a framework for specifying content. www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology. Developed ontologies for hydrology; administrative geography; buildings and places. Working on addresses; settlements; and land forms. Supporting modules on mereology, spatial relations, network topology. Conceptual ontology- knowledge represented in a form understandable by people vs computational topology - knowledge represented in a form understandable by computers. A controlled natural language called Rabbit has been developed - structured English, compilable to OWL. OS is also part of the OWL 1.1. task force to develop a controlled natural language syntax. A project currently underway developing plug in for Protege with Leeds University - allows natural language descriptions and in the back end, will translate into an OWL model. The first release is scheduled for December with further release planned for March 08. Ian also talked about experimental work to semantically describe gazetteers - an RDF version (downloadable?) to represent the data and OWL ontology to describe the concepts. This work includes administrative regions and work underway to include cities etc. Through their work, OS has experienced some problems with RDF - e.g. may degrade performance (they have >10 billion triples); how much is really needed?. Ian described some work on semantic data integration e.g. "find all addresses with a taxable value over £500,000 in Southampton" so looking at how to merge ontologies (i.e. creating another ontology rather than interoperability between the two). Ian briefly covered some lessons learned - ontologies are never perfect and can't offer complete descriptions of any domain; automatic tools are used as far as possible. Ian also describe work on linking ontologies to databases using D2RQ which maps SPARQL queries to SQL, creating "virtual" RDF. Conclusions : domain experts need to be at the centre of the process; technology transfer is difficult - benefits of semantics in products and applications must be clarified.
Rob Lemmens from International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation talked about end-user tools. He outlined the different approaches of corporate/national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) which is a centralised approach and Web 2.0 which is community driven. SDIs are based on stricter rules for annotation and accuracy tends to be higher than Web 2.0 tools, although this is changing. Rob outlined the need for a semantic interoperability framework (combination of ontologies, their relationships and methods for ontology-based description of info sources - data sets, services etc) and a semantic interoperability infrastructure (comprises framework and the tools to maintain and use the framework as well as the information sources produced within this framework). Rob's presentation also included a slide outlining the characteristics of an ontology which was a good representation and a demonstration of ontology visualisation (same tool which ASSERT is using for clustering?). Rob concluded by summarising what the geospatial community can learn and take from Web 2.0, for example tagging/tag clouds, tools for building ontologies (community tagging e.g Google Image Labeller), instant feedback (e.g. password strength bars when selecting a new password) - on the negative side, community-driven tagging can lead to weak semantics. Rob suggests combining the best of both SDI and Web 2.0 worlds - map the SDI and Web2.0 ontologies to create dynamic annotations of geo sources, thus improving discovery.
Ulrich Bugel from Fraunhofer Institut IITB presented on ontology based discovery and annotation of resources in geospatial applications. Ulrich talked about the ORCHESTRA project (http://www.eu-orchestra.org/) which aims to design and implement an open service-oriented architecture to improve interoperability in a risk management setting (e.g. how big is the risk of a forest fire in a certain region of the Pyrenees in a given season?). This question has spatial references (cross-border, cross-administration); temporal references (time series and prognostics); thematic reference (forest fire); and conceptual reference (what is risk?). ORCHESTRA will build a service network to address these sorts of question. Interoperability is discussed on 3 levels - syntactic (encodings), structural (schemas, interfaces), semantic (meaning). The project has produced the Reference Model for the ORCHESTRA Architecture (RM-OA), drawing on standards from OGC, OASIS, W3C, ISO 191xx, ISO RM-ODP. Many iterations of the Reference Model which led to Best Practice status at OGC. The ORCHESTRA Architecture comprises a number of semantic services: Annotation Service automatically generates meta-information from sources and relates them to elements of an ontology; Ontology Access Service enabling high-level access and queries to ontologies; Knowledge Base Service; Semantic Catalogue Service.
Ian Holt from Ordnance Survey presented on geospatial semantics research at OS. OS has one of the largest geospatial databases, unsurprisingly, with 400 million features and over 2000 concepts. Benefits of semantics research: quality control, better classification; semantic web enablement, semi-automated data integration, data and product repurposing; data mining - i.e. benefits to OS and to customers. OS has developed a topographic domain ontology which provides a framework for specifying content. www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology. Developed ontologies for hydrology; administrative geography; buildings and places. Working on addresses; settlements; and land forms. Supporting modules on mereology, spatial relations, network topology. Conceptual ontology- knowledge represented in a form understandable by people vs computational topology - knowledge represented in a form understandable by computers. A controlled natural language called Rabbit has been developed - structured English, compilable to OWL. OS is also part of the OWL 1.1. task force to develop a controlled natural language syntax. A project currently underway developing plug in for Protege with Leeds University - allows natural language descriptions and in the back end, will translate into an OWL model. The first release is scheduled for December with further release planned for March 08. Ian also talked about experimental work to semantically describe gazetteers - an RDF version (downloadable?) to represent the data and OWL ontology to describe the concepts. This work includes administrative regions and work underway to include cities etc. Through their work, OS has experienced some problems with RDF - e.g. may degrade performance (they have >10 billion triples); how much is really needed?. Ian described some work on semantic data integration e.g. "find all addresses with a taxable value over £500,000 in Southampton" so looking at how to merge ontologies (i.e. creating another ontology rather than interoperability between the two). Ian briefly covered some lessons learned - ontologies are never perfect and can't offer complete descriptions of any domain; automatic tools are used as far as possible. Ian also describe work on linking ontologies to databases using D2RQ which maps SPARQL queries to SQL, creating "virtual" RDF. Conclusions : domain experts need to be at the centre of the process; technology transfer is difficult - benefits of semantics in products and applications must be clarified.
Alun Preece from Cardiff University presented on an ontology-based approach to assigning sensors to tasks. The idea is to bridge the gap between people out in the field needing to make decisions (e.g. disaster management) and the data/information produced from networks of sensors and other sources. Issues tackled: data orchestration (determine, locate, characterise resources required); reactive source deployment (repurpose, move, redeploy resources); push/pull data delivery. The approach is ontology-centric and involves semantic matchmaking. Work on proof of concept - SAM (Sensor Assignment for Missions) software prototype and integration with a sensor network. This work is funded by US/UK to support military application - intelligence, surveillance and reconaissance (ISR) requirements. The work uses ontologies to specify ISR requirements of a mission (e.g. night surveillance, intruder detection) and to specify the ISR capabilities provided by different asset types. Uses semantic reasoning to compare mission requirements and capabilities and to decide if requirements are satisfied. For example, if a mission requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), the ontology would specify different types of UAV and the requirements of the mission (e.g. high altitude to fly above weather, endurance) and the semantic matchmaking (exact, subsuming, overlapping, disjoint) then leads to a preferred choice. The project has engaged with domain experts to get the information into the ontology and to share conceptualisations. Alun showed the Mission and Means Framework Ontology which is a high-level ontology which is fleshed out with more specific concepts.
Slides from the workshop will be uploaded to http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=832
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Gnizr
Have come across this twice this week, both times in a geospatial context. The Geospatial Semantic Web blog describes Gnizr, a new open source application http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2007/11/16/gnizr-open-source. One of my projects is considering using Gnizr, possibly with its sister application KnowledgeSmarts, which I don't think is open source. (More info at http://code.google.com/p/gnizr/ and http://www.imagemattersllc.com/products/gnizr.php)
Monday, 12 November 2007
Semantic Web?
New Scientist has an interesting article, "'Semantic' website promises to organise your life" (http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn12903-semantic-website-promises-to-organise-your-elife.html?feedId=online-news_rss20) which talks about Twine, currently in beta testing. Twine uses annotation and natural language processing. It'll be interesting to see how it works when it's released. The article mentions other semantic services in development: Powerset, True Knowledge and Freebase.
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
"Semantic Web vision: where are we?"
Thanks to Alan Rector for pointing this out:
The Semantic Web Vision: Where Are We?
"The aim of this article is to present a snapshot that can capture key trends in the Semantic Web, such as application domains, tools, systems, languages and techniques being used, and a projection on when organizations will put their full-blown systems into production."
http://dme.uma.pt/jcardoso/sw-survey-2007.pdf
The Semantic Web Vision: Where Are We?
"The aim of this article is to present a snapshot that can capture key trends in the Semantic Web, such as application domains, tools, systems, languages and techniques being used, and a projection on when organizations will put their full-blown systems into production."
http://dme.uma.pt/jcardoso/sw-survey-2007.pdf
Friday, 5 October 2007
Semantic image retrieval
NewScientist.com features a story New search tool gets the picture about a new search tool developed by Southampton Uni. The story mentions the limitations of the tool, e.g. that it is difficult to expand and may not cope with the variety of images on the web; but also the strengths e.g. dealing with language, producing more discriminating search results.
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