Automatically exposing OpenLifeData via SADI semantic Web Services

Background: Two distinct trends are emerging with respect to how data is shared, collected, and analyzed within the bioinformatics community. First, Linked Data, exposed as SPARQL endpoints, promises to make data easier to collect and integrate by moving towards the harmonization of data syntax, descriptive vocabularies, and identifiers, as well as providing a standardized mechanism for data access. Second, Web Services, often linked together into workflows, normalize data access and create transparent, reproducible scientific methodologies that can, in principle, be re-used and customized to suit new scientific questions. Constructing queries that traverse semantically-rich Linked Data requires substantial expertise, yet traditional RESTful or SOAP Web Services cannot adequately describe the content of a SPARQL endpoint. We propose that content-driven Semantic Web Services can enable facile discovery of Linked Data, independent of their location. Results: We use a well-curated Linked Dataset - OpenLifeData - and utilize its descriptive metadata to automatically configure a series of more than 22,000 Semantic Web Services that expose all of its content via the SADI set of design principles. The OpenLifeData SADI services are discoverable via queries to the SHARE registry and easy to integrate into new or existing bioinformatics workflows and analytical pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of this system through comparison of Web Service-mediated data access with traditional SPARQL, and note that this approach not only simplifies data retrieval, but simultaneously provides protection against resource-intensive queries. Conclusions: We show, through a variety of different clients and examples of varying complexity, that data from the myriad OpenLifeData can be recovered without any need for prior-knowledge of the content or structure of the SPARQL endpoints. We also demonstrate that, via clients such as SHARE, the complexity of federated SPARQL queries is dramatically reduced.

Executing SADI services in Galaxy

Background: In recent years Galaxy has become a popular workflow management system in bioinformatics, due to its ease of installation, use and extension. The availability of Semantic Web-oriented tools in Galaxy, however, is limited. This is also the case for Semantic Web Services such as those provided by the SADI project, i.e. services that consume and produce RDF. Here we present SADI-Galaxy, a tool generator that deploys selected SADI Services as typical Galaxy tools. Results: SADI-Galaxy is a Galaxy tool generator: through SADI-Galaxy, any SADI-compliant service becomes a Galaxy tool that can participate in other out-standing features of Galaxy such as data storage, history, workflow creation, and publication. Galaxy can also be used to execute and combine SADI services as it does with other Galaxy tools. Finally, we have semi-automated the packing and unpacking of data into RDF such that other Galaxy tools can easily be combined with SADI services, plugging the rich SADI Semantic Web Service environment into the popular Galaxy ecosystem. Conclusions: SADI-Galaxy bridges the gap between Galaxy, an easy to use but "static" workflow system with a wide user-base, and SADI, a sophisticated, semantic, discovery-based framework for Web Services, thus benefiting both user communities.

Computing abuse related damages in the case of new entry: An illustration for the Directory Enquiry Services market

A number of European countries, among which the UK and Spain, have opened up their Directory Enquiry Services (DQs, or 118AB) market to competition. We analyse the Spanish case, where both local and foreign firms challenged the incumbent as of April 2003. We argue that the incumbent had the ability to abuse its dominant position, and that it was a perfectly rational strategy. In short,the incumbent raised its rivals' costs directly by providing an inferior quality version of the (essential) input, namely the incumbent's subscribers' database. We illustrate how it is possible to quantify the effect of abuse in situation were the entrant has no previous history in the market. To do this, we use the UK experience to construct the relevant counterfactual, that is the "but for abuse" scenario. After controlling for relative prices and advertising intensity, we find that one of the foreign entrants achieved a Spanish market share of only half of what it would have been in the absence of abuse.

Are Bar Associations Anticompetitive? An Empirical Analysis of Recommended Prices for Legal Services in Spain

The European Commission Report on Competition in Professional Services found that recommended prices by professional bodies have a significant negative effect on competition since they may facilitate the coordination of prices between service providers and/or mislead consumers about reasonable price levels. Professional associations argue, first, that a fee schedule may help their members to properly calculate the cost of services avoiding excessive charges and reducing consumers’ searching costs and, second, that recommended prices are very useful for cost appraisal if a litigant is condemned to pay the legal expenses of the opposing party. Thus, recommended fee schedules could be justified to some extent if they represented the cost of providing the services. We test this hypothesis using cross‐section data on a subset of recommended prices by 52 Spanish bar associations and cost data on their territorial jurisdictions. Our empirical results indicate that prices recommended by bar associations are unrelated to the cost of legal services and therefore we conclude that recommended prices have merely an anticompetitive effect.

The impacts of leadership in the quality of municipal public services: case study of a portuguese municipal council

[EN]The present research work, based on some of the components of the Common Assessment Framework, sets to analyse the influence held by leadership in specific factors that constitute the organisational climate, and also the impact that these factors have on the quality of municipal public services. For the purposes of this study, we propose Likert’s exploitative autocratic and participative leadership styles to explain the genesis, structure and workflow. As far as the organisational climate is concerned, the variables used are motivation, satisfaction, empowerment, conflict and stress. The main conclusions that arose was that a participative leader confers higher relevance to the quality of service, through motivation, satisfaction, empowerment and human resources positive results, than an exploitative autocratic leader. Performed contributions are based on the empiric research hereby presented, and new research guidelines are proposed. The research methodology used was qualitative, based on the case study.

Mitigation Techniques to Reduce the Impact of Wind Turbines on Radar Services

Radar services are occasionally affected by wind farms. This paper presents a comprehensive description of the effects that a wind farm may cause on the different radar services, and it compiles a review of the recent research results regarding the mitigation techniques to minimize this impact. Mitigation techniques to be applied at the wind farm and on the radar systems are described. The development of thorough impact studies before the wind farm is installed is presented as the best way to analyze in advance the potential for interference, and subsequently identify the possible solutions to allow the coexistence of wind farms and radar services.

Long Run Trends in the Price of Energy and Energy Services

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Competing Ecosystem services: an Assessment of Carbon and timber in the Tropical forests of Central America

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Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services: Conflicts in Classification

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Divergences in the Long Run Trends in the Price of Energy and of Energy Services

32 p.

Classifying Ecosystem Services for Economic Valuation: The case of forest water services

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Economic Assessment of Forest Ecosystem Services Losses: Cost of Policy Inaction

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Competing Ecosystem Services: an Assessment of Carbon and Timber in the Tropical Forests of Central America

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Exploitation of soil biota ecosystem services in agriculture: a bioeconomic approach

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Towards a Comprehensive Approach to Quantifying and Mapping Ecosystem Services Flows

25 p.