Arquitectura de sitios Web de bibliotecas universitarias : El sistema de bibliotecas de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina

Este trabajo descriptivo exploratorio se propone analizar la arquitectura de información (AI) de sitios Web de bibliotecas de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. Se analizaron 17 bibliotecas y se aplicó una grilla para recabar 10 aspectos relevantes. Los resultados fueron: 1. Ubicación del sitio Web de la biblioteca: 9 sitios incluidos en la página principal de la facultad. 2. Etiquetado de contenidos: terminología simple, sin jergas; no hay homogeneidad entre las bibliotecas. 3. Capacidad de búsqueda: 62 por ciento positiva, 38 por ciento negativa. 4. Sistema de búsqueda: simple 43 por ciento, compleja 10 por ciento, con ayudas 10 por ciento, ninguno 38 por ciento. 5. Sistemas de navegación: globales 5 por ciento, jerárquicos 79 por ciento, locales 5 por ciento, ninguno 11 por ciento. 6. Herramientas de navegación: barras 16 por ciento, frames o marcos 30 por ciento, índices 2 por ciento, mapas de sitio 7 por ciento, menús horizontales 9 por ciento, menús verticales 35 por ciento. 7. Sindicación de contenidos RSS: 3 sitios. 8. Otros servicios: chat 7 por ciento, descarga de documentos 16 por ciento, envío de formularios 14 por ciento, instructivos 21 por ciento, links a otras páginas 23 por ciento, tutoriales 5 por ciento, otros 14 por ciento. 9. Accesibilidad Web: 1 sitio. 10. Otras observaciones: ninguna. Se concluye que el desarrollo de los sitios es dispar y se recomienda considerar pautas de AI como parte de la cooperación en la red de bibliotecas de la UNLP

DBpedia Spotlight: Shedding Light on the Web of Documents

Interlinking text documents with Linked Open Data enables the Web of Data to be used as background knowledge within document-oriented applications such as search and faceted browsing. As a step towards interconnecting the Web of Documents with the Web of Data, we developed DBpedia Spotlight, a system for automatically annotating text documents with DBpedia URIs. DBpedia Spotlight allows users to configure the annotations to their specific needs through the DBpedia Ontology and quality measures such as prominence, topical pertinence, contextual ambiguity and disambiguation confidence. We compare our approach with the state of the art in disambiguation, and evaluate our results in light of three baselines and six publicly available annotation systems, demonstrating the competitiveness of our system. DBpedia Spotlight is shared as open source and deployed as a Web Service freely available for public use.

Semantic Service Discovery Techniques for the composable web

This PhD thesis contributes to the problem of resource and service discovery in the context of the composable web. In the current web, mashup technologies allow developers reusing services and contents to build new web applications. However, developers face a problem of information flood when searching for appropriate services or resources for their combination. To contribute to overcoming this problem, a framework is defined for the discovery of services and resources. In this framework, three levels are defined for performing discovery at content, discovery and agente levels. The content level involves the information available in web resources. The web follows the Representational Stateless Transfer (REST) architectural style, in which resources are returned as representations from servers to clients. These representations usually employ the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which, along with Content Style Sheets (CSS), describes the markup employed to render representations in a web browser. Although the use of SemanticWeb standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) make this architecture suitable for automatic processes to use the information present in web resources, these standards are too often not employed, so automation must rely on processing HTML. This process, often referred as Screen Scraping in the literature, is the content discovery according to the proposed framework. At this level, discovery rules indicate how the different pieces of data in resources’ representations are mapped onto semantic entities. By processing discovery rules on web resources, semantically described contents can be obtained out of them. The service level involves the operations that can be performed on the web. The current web allows users to perform different tasks such as search, blogging, e-commerce, or social networking. To describe the possible services in RESTful architectures, a high-level feature-oriented service methodology is proposed at this level. This lightweight description framework allows defining service discovery rules to identify operations in interactions with REST resources. The discovery is thus performed by applying discovery rules to contents discovered in REST interactions, in a novel process called service probing. Also, service discovery can be performed by modelling services as contents, i.e., by retrieving Application Programming Interface (API) documentation and API listings in service registries such as ProgrammableWeb. For this, a unified model for composable components in Mashup-Driven Development (MDD) has been defined after the analysis of service repositories from the web. The agent level involves the orchestration of the discovery of services and contents. At this level, agent rules allow to specify behaviours for crawling and executing services, which results in the fulfilment of a high-level goal. Agent rules are plans that allow introspecting the discovered data and services from the web and the knowledge present in service and content discovery rules to anticipate the contents and services to be found on specific resources from the web. By the definition of plans, an agent can be configured to target specific resources. The discovery framework has been evaluated on different scenarios, each one covering different levels of the framework. Contenidos a la Carta project deals with the mashing-up of news from electronic newspapers, and the framework was used for the discovery and extraction of pieces of news from the web. Similarly, in Resulta and VulneraNET projects the discovery of ideas and security knowledge in the web is covered, respectively. The service level is covered in the OMELETTE project, where mashup components such as services and widgets are discovered from component repositories from the web. The agent level is applied to the crawling of services and news in these scenarios, highlighting how the semantic description of rules and extracted data can provide complex behaviours and orchestrations of tasks in the web. The main contributions of the thesis are the unified framework for discovery, which allows configuring agents to perform automated tasks. Also, a scraping ontology has been defined for the construction of mappings for scraping web resources. A novel first-order logic rule induction algorithm is defined for the automated construction and maintenance of these mappings out of the visual information in web resources. Additionally, a common unified model for the discovery of services is defined, which allows sharing service descriptions. Future work comprises the further extension of service probing, resource ranking, the extension of the Scraping Ontology, extensions of the agent model, and contructing a base of discovery rules. Resumen La presente tesis doctoral contribuye al problema de descubrimiento de servicios y recursos en el contexto de la web combinable. En la web actual, las tecnologías de combinación de aplicaciones permiten a los desarrolladores reutilizar servicios y contenidos para construir nuevas aplicaciones web. Pese a todo, los desarrolladores afrontan un problema de saturación de información a la hora de buscar servicios o recursos apropiados para su combinación. Para contribuir a la solución de este problema, se propone un marco de trabajo para el descubrimiento de servicios y recursos. En este marco, se definen tres capas sobre las que se realiza descubrimiento a nivel de contenido, servicio y agente. El nivel de contenido involucra a la información disponible en recursos web. La web sigue el estilo arquitectónico Representational Stateless Transfer (REST), en el que los recursos son devueltos como representaciones por parte de los servidores a los clientes. Estas representaciones normalmente emplean el lenguaje de marcado HyperText Markup Language (HTML), que, unido al estándar Content Style Sheets (CSS), describe el marcado empleado para mostrar representaciones en un navegador web. Aunque el uso de estándares de la web semántica como Resource Description Framework (RDF) hace apta esta arquitectura para su uso por procesos automatizados, estos estándares no son empleados en muchas ocasiones, por lo que cualquier automatización debe basarse en el procesado del marcado HTML. Este proceso, normalmente conocido como Screen Scraping en la literatura, es el descubrimiento de contenidos en el marco de trabajo propuesto. En este nivel, un conjunto de reglas de descubrimiento indican cómo los diferentes datos en las representaciones de recursos se corresponden con entidades semánticas. Al procesar estas reglas sobre recursos web, pueden obtenerse contenidos descritos semánticamente. El nivel de servicio involucra las operaciones que pueden ser llevadas a cabo en la web. Actualmente, los usuarios de la web pueden realizar diversas tareas como búsqueda, blogging, comercio electrónico o redes sociales. Para describir los posibles servicios en arquitecturas REST, se propone en este nivel una metodología de alto nivel para descubrimiento de servicios orientada a funcionalidades. Este marco de descubrimiento ligero permite definir reglas de descubrimiento de servicios para identificar operaciones en interacciones con recursos REST. Este descubrimiento es por tanto llevado a cabo al aplicar las reglas de descubrimiento sobre contenidos descubiertos en interacciones REST, en un nuevo procedimiento llamado sondeo de servicios. Además, el descubrimiento de servicios puede ser llevado a cabo mediante el modelado de servicios como contenidos. Es decir, mediante la recuperación de documentación de Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) y listas de APIs en registros de servicios como ProgrammableWeb. Para ello, se ha definido un modelo unificado de componentes combinables para Mashup-Driven Development (MDD) tras el análisis de repositorios de servicios de la web. El nivel de agente involucra la orquestación del descubrimiento de servicios y contenidos. En este nivel, las reglas de nivel de agente permiten especificar comportamientos para el rastreo y ejecución de servicios, lo que permite la consecución de metas de mayor nivel. Las reglas de los agentes son planes que permiten la introspección sobre los datos y servicios descubiertos, así como sobre el conocimiento presente en las reglas de descubrimiento de servicios y contenidos para anticipar contenidos y servicios por encontrar en recursos específicos de la web. Mediante la definición de planes, un agente puede ser configurado para descubrir recursos específicos. El marco de descubrimiento ha sido evaluado sobre diferentes escenarios, cada uno cubriendo distintos niveles del marco. El proyecto Contenidos a la Carta trata de la combinación de noticias de periódicos digitales, y en él el framework se ha empleado para el descubrimiento y extracción de noticias de la web. De manera análoga, en los proyectos Resulta y VulneraNET se ha llevado a cabo un descubrimiento de ideas y de conocimientos de seguridad, respectivamente. El nivel de servicio se cubre en el proyecto OMELETTE, en el que componentes combinables como servicios y widgets se descubren en repositorios de componentes de la web. El nivel de agente se aplica al rastreo de servicios y noticias en estos escenarios, mostrando cómo la descripción semántica de reglas y datos extraídos permiten proporcionar comportamientos complejos y orquestaciones de tareas en la web. Las principales contribuciones de la tesis son el marco de trabajo unificado para descubrimiento, que permite configurar agentes para realizar tareas automatizadas. Además, una ontología de extracción ha sido definida para la construcción de correspondencias y extraer información de recursos web. Asimismo, un algoritmo para la inducción de reglas de lógica de primer orden se ha definido para la construcción y el mantenimiento de estas correspondencias a partir de la información visual de recursos web. Adicionalmente, se ha definido un modelo común y unificado para el descubrimiento de servicios que permite la compartición de descripciones de servicios. Como trabajos futuros se considera la extensión del sondeo de servicios, clasificación de recursos, extensión de la ontología de extracción y la construcción de una base de reglas de descubrimiento.

A general proposal to multilingual information access based on syntactic-semantic patterns

In the last few years, there has been a wide development in the research on textual information systems. The goal is to improve these systems in order to allow an easy localization, treatment and access to the information stored in digital format (Digital Databases, Documental Databases, and so on). There are lots of applications focused on information access (for example, Web-search systems like Google or Altavista). However, these applications have problems when they must access to cross-language information, or when they need to show information in a language different from the one of the query. This paper explores the use of syntactic-sematic patterns as a method to access to multilingual information, and revise, in the case of Information Retrieval, where it is possible and useful to employ patterns when it comes to the multilingual and interactive aspects. On the one hand, the multilingual aspects that are going to be studied are the ones related to the access to documents in different languages from the one of the query, as well as the automatic translation of the document, i.e. a machine translation system based on patterns. On the other hand, this paper is going to go deep into the interactive aspects related to the reformulation of a query based on the syntactic-semantic pattern of the request.

Towards next generation vertical search engines

As the Web evolves unexpectedly fast, information grows explosively. Useful resources become more and more difficult to find because of their dynamic and unstructured characteristics. A vertical search engine is designed and implemented towards a specific domain. Instead of processing the giant volume of miscellaneous information distributed in the Web, a vertical search engine targets at identifying relevant information in specific domains or topics and eventually provides users with up-to-date information, highly focused insights and actionable knowledge representation. As the mobile device gets more popular, the nature of the search is changing. So, acquiring information on a mobile device poses unique requirements on traditional search engines, which will potentially change every feature they used to have. To summarize, users are strongly expecting search engines that can satisfy their individual information needs, adapt their current situation, and present highly personalized search results. ^ In my research, the next generation vertical search engine means to utilize and enrich existing domain information to close the loop of vertical search engine's system that mutually facilitate knowledge discovering, actionable information extraction, and user interests modeling and recommendation. I investigate three problems in which domain taxonomy plays an important role, including taxonomy generation using a vertical search engine, actionable information extraction based on domain taxonomy, and the use of ensemble taxonomy to catch user's interests. As the fundamental theory, ultra-metric, dendrogram, and hierarchical clustering are intensively discussed. Methods on taxonomy generation using my research on hierarchical clustering are developed. The related vertical search engine techniques are practically used in Disaster Management Domain. Especially, three disaster information management systems are developed and represented as real use cases of my research work.^

Towards Next Generation Vertical Search Engines

As the Web evolves unexpectedly fast, information grows explosively. Useful resources become more and more difficult to find because of their dynamic and unstructured characteristics. A vertical search engine is designed and implemented towards a specific domain. Instead of processing the giant volume of miscellaneous information distributed in the Web, a vertical search engine targets at identifying relevant information in specific domains or topics and eventually provides users with up-to-date information, highly focused insights and actionable knowledge representation. As the mobile device gets more popular, the nature of the search is changing. So, acquiring information on a mobile device poses unique requirements on traditional search engines, which will potentially change every feature they used to have. To summarize, users are strongly expecting search engines that can satisfy their individual information needs, adapt their current situation, and present highly personalized search results. In my research, the next generation vertical search engine means to utilize and enrich existing domain information to close the loop of vertical search engine's system that mutually facilitate knowledge discovering, actionable information extraction, and user interests modeling and recommendation. I investigate three problems in which domain taxonomy plays an important role, including taxonomy generation using a vertical search engine, actionable information extraction based on domain taxonomy, and the use of ensemble taxonomy to catch user's interests. As the fundamental theory, ultra-metric, dendrogram, and hierarchical clustering are intensively discussed. Methods on taxonomy generation using my research on hierarchical clustering are developed. The related vertical search engine techniques are practically used in Disaster Management Domain. Especially, three disaster information management systems are developed and represented as real use cases of my research work.

Select, Link and Rank: Diversified Query Expansion and Entity Ranking using Wikipedia

A search query, being a very concise grounding of user intent, could potentially have many possible interpretations. Search engines hedge their bets by diversifying top results to cover multiple such possibilities so that the user is likely to be satisfied, whatever be her intended interpretation. Diversified Query Expansion is the problem of diversifying query expansion suggestions, so that the user can specialize the query to better suit her intent, even before perusing search results. We propose a method, Select-Link-Rank, that exploits semantic information from Wikipedia to generate diversified query expansions. SLR does collective processing of terms and Wikipedia entities in an integrated framework, simultaneously diversifying query expansions and entity recommendations. SLR starts with selecting informative terms from search results of the initial query, links them to Wikipedia entities, performs a diversity-conscious entity scoring and transfers such scoring to the term space to arrive at query expansion suggestions. Through an extensive empirical analysis and user study, we show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art diversified query expansion and diversified entity recommendation techniques.

Iis--integrated Interactome System: A Web-based Platform For The Annotation, Analysis And Visualization Of Protein-metabolite-gene-drug Interactions By Integrating A Variety Of Data Sources And Tools.

High-throughput screening of physical, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions brings important perspectives in the Systems Biology field, as the analysis of these interactions provides new insights into protein/gene function, cellular metabolic variations and the validation of therapeutic targets and drug design. However, such analysis depends on a pipeline connecting different tools that can automatically integrate data from diverse sources and result in a more comprehensive dataset that can be properly interpreted. We describe here the Integrated Interactome System (IIS), an integrative platform with a web-based interface for the annotation, analysis and visualization of the interaction profiles of proteins/genes, metabolites and drugs of interest. IIS works in four connected modules: (i) Submission module, which receives raw data derived from Sanger sequencing (e.g. two-hybrid system); (ii) Search module, which enables the user to search for the processed reads to be assembled into contigs/singlets, or for lists of proteins/genes, metabolites and drugs of interest, and add them to the project; (iii) Annotation module, which assigns annotations from several databases for the contigs/singlets or lists of proteins/genes, generating tables with automatic annotation that can be manually curated; and (iv) Interactome module, which maps the contigs/singlets or the uploaded lists to entries in our integrated database, building networks that gather novel identified interactions, protein and metabolite expression/concentration levels, subcellular localization and computed topological metrics, GO biological processes and KEGG pathways enrichment. This module generates a XGMML file that can be imported into Cytoscape or be visualized directly on the web. We have developed IIS by the integration of diverse databases following the need of appropriate tools for a systematic analysis of physical, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions. IIS was validated with yeast two-hybrid, proteomics and metabolomics datasets, but it is also extendable to other datasets. IIS is freely available online at: http://www.lge.ibi.unicamp.br/lnbio/IIS/.

A Procedure for Semantic Querying in the Adaptive Formalism

This paper contains a new proposal for the definition of the fundamental operation of query under the Adaptive Formalism, one capable of locating functional nuclei from descriptions of their semantics. To demonstrate the method`s applicability, an implementation of the query procedure constrained to a specific class of devices is shown, and its asymptotic computational complexity is discussed.

Special issue: Selected papers from the sixth IFIP 2.6 working conference on visual database systems: Guest editors' introduction

While multimedia data, image data in particular, is an integral part of most websites and web documents, our quest for information so far is still restricted to text based search. To explore the World Wide Web more effectively, especially its rich repository of truly multimedia information, we are facing a number of challenging problems. Firstly, we face the ambiguous and highly subjective nature of defining image semantics and similarity. Secondly, multimedia data could come from highly diversified sources, as a result of automatic image capturing and generation processes. Finally, multimedia information exists in decentralised sources over the Web, making it difficult to use conventional content-based image retrieval (CBIR) techniques for effective and efficient search. In this special issue, we present a collection of five papers on visual and multimedia information management and retrieval topics, addressing some aspects of these challenges. These papers have been selected from the conference proceedings (Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN: 1-4020- 7060-8) of the Sixth IFIP 2.6 Working Conference on Visual Database Systems (VDB6), held in Brisbane, Australia, on 29–31 May 2002.

The Adequacy of the Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) Systems for the Creation of intangible Managerial Accounting Information: an exploratory study

The general objective of this work was to study the contribution of the ERP for the quality of the managerial accounting information, through the perception of managers of large sized Brazilian companies. The initial principle was that, presently, we live in an enterprise reality characterized by global and competitive worldwide scenery where the information about the enterprise performance and the evaluation of the intangible assets are necessary conditions for the survival, of the companies. The research of the exploratory type is based on a sample of 37 managers of large sized-Brazilian companies. The analysis of the data treated by means of the qualitative method showed that the great majority of the companies of the sample (86%) possess an ERP implanted. It also showed that this system is used in combination with other applicative software. The managers, in its majority, were also satisfied with the information generated in relation to the dimensions Time and Content. However, with regard to the qualitative nature of the information, the ERP made some analysis possible when the Balanced Scorecard was adopted, but information able to provide an estimate of the investments carried through in the intangible assets was not obtained. These results Suggest that in these companies ERP systems are not adequate to support strategic decisions.

Using visual spatial search interface for WWW applications

Most Internet search engines are keyword-based. They are not efficient for the queries where geographical location is important, such as finding hotels within an area or close to a place of interest. A natural interface for spatial searching is a map, which can be used not only to display locations of search results but also to assist forming search conditions. A map-based search engine requires a well-designed visual interface that is intuitive to use yet flexible and expressive enough to support various types of spatial queries as well as aspatial queries. Similar to hyperlinks for text and images in an HTML page, spatial objects in a map should support hyperlinks. Such an interface needs to be scalable with the size of the geographical regions and the number of websites it covers. In spite of handling typically a very large amount of spatial data, a map-based search interface should meet the expectation of fast response time for interactive applications. In this paper we discuss general requirements and the design for a new map-based web search interface, focusing on integration with the WWW and visual spatial query interface. A number of current and future research issues are discussed, and a prototype for the University of Queensland is presented. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Learning objects recommendation in an adaptive educational hypermedia system

The aim of this paper is presenting the modules of the Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System PCMAT, responsible for the recommendation of learning objects. PCMAT is an online collaborative learning platform with a constructivist approach, which assesses the user’s knowledge and presents contents and activities adapted to the characteristics and learning style of students of mathematics in basic schools. The recommendation module and search and retrieval module choose the most adequate learning object, based on the user's characteristics and performance, and in this way contribute to the system’s adaptability.