Editorial

This special issue covers the significant activities and outputs of the European Commission funded Bioenergy Network of Excellence that has recently completed its six year programme of work. Networks of Excellence (NoE) were intended to address fragmentation of R&D in the European Research Area by integrating resources and expertise needed to enhance Europe’s global competitiveness in key areas. The Bioenergy NoE consortium consists of eight key bioenergy R&D institutes in Europe and covered the entire field of bioenergy. Within the project, the overall strategy to achieve integration followed a well defined process of firstly identifying barriers, then evaluating RTD goals for their removal, followed by a detailed examination of how integration could be realistically achieved and implemented in the longer term. This is described in the first paper by Sipilä and Wilén. The rest of the contents of this special issue are devoted to collaborative outputs of the various joint research activities undertaken during the project that cover biomass, conversion technology, and finally policy and education. Progress was influenced by a number of additional EU instruments launched during the project including the European Industrial Technology Platforms and ERA-NET Bioenergy. These led to the EIBI (European Industrial Bioenergy Initiative) and particularly EERA Bioenergy (European Energy Research Alliance – Bioenergy), which is very effectively continuing the work of Bioenergy NoE by establishing a framework for continued cooperation and collaboration. The project resulted in a high level of interaction and collaboration in European R&D which is being further developed and expanded within EERA Bioenergy. The value of Bioenergy NoE can thus be clearly seen in the exciting programme of research activities being developed in EERA Bioenergy. During the past six years Bioenergy NoE partners have produced over 1000 publications including reports, papers and poster communications. This special issue of Biomass and Bioenergy includes results from a selection of outputs from Bioenergy NoE.

Reflections on five years of evaluating semantic search systems

Evaluations of semantic search systems are generally small scale and ad hoc due to the lack of appropriate resources such as test collections, agreed performance criteria and independent judgements of performance. By analysing our work in building and evaluating semantic tools over the last five years, we conclude that the growth of the semantic web led to an improvement in the available resources and the consequent robustness of performance assessments. We propose two directions for continuing evaluation work: the development of extensible evaluation benchmarks and the use of logging parameters for evaluating individual components of search systems.

A matter of professionalism? Reflection and reflexivity in continuing engineering education and practice

The argument that this paper sets out to critique is that in order to promote professionalism in Engineering Education and Practice, graduate level engineering programmes need to introduce the concepts of reflection and reflexivity into the curriculum right from the onset. By focusing upon the delivery of a newly developed „Work Based‟ Master’s level programme in Professional Engineering, this paper provides an overview of the first part of an empirical study which sets out to investigate the challenges associated with embedding reflection and reflexivity into Engineering Education. The paper concludes by noting that whilst student engineers may struggle with the concepts of reflection and reflexivity, with support and encouragement such difficulties can be overcome. Moreover, by encouraging students to reflect upon their Professional Practice, the programme not only enables students to consider how they may apply what they have learnt to their Professional Practice, but also encourages them to think about how they can link their experiences as Professional Engineers to what and how they learn both whilst on the programme but also as lifelong learners.