Towards a standardised metadata protocol for urban meteorological networks

With the growing number and significance of urban meteorological networks (UMNs) across the world, it is becoming critical to establish a standard metadata protocol. Indeed, a review of existing UMNs indicate large variations in the quality, quantity, and availability of metadata containing technical information (i.e., equipment, communication methods) and network practices (i.e., quality assurance/quality control and data management procedures). Without such metadata, the utility of UMNs is greatly compromised. There is a need to bring together the currently disparate sets of guidelines to ensure informed and well-documented future deployments. This should significantly improve the quality, and therefore the applicability, of the high-resolution data available from such networks. Here, the first metadata protocol for UMNs is proposed, drawing on current recommendations for urban climate stations and identified best practice in existing networks

Understanding climate data through commentary metadata: the CHARMe project

We describe the CHARMe project, which aims to link climate datasets with publications, user feedback and other items of "commentary metadata". The system will help users learn from previous community experience and select datasets that best suit their needs, as well as providing direct traceability between conclusions and the data that supported them. The project applies the principles of Linked Data and adopts the Open Annotation standard to record and publish commentary information. CHARMe contributes to the emerging landscape of "climate services", which will provide climate data and information to influence policy and decision-making. Although the project focuses on climate science, the technologies and concepts are very general and could be applied to other fields.

Deficits in agency in schizophrenia, and additional deficits in body image, body schema, and internal timing, in passivity symptoms

Individuals with schizophrenia, particularly those with passivity symptoms, may not feel in control of their actions, believing them to be controlled by external agents. Cognitive operations that contribute to these symptoms may include abnormal processing in agency as well as body representations that deal with body schema and body image. However, these operations in schizophrenia are not fully understood, and the questions of general versus specific deficits in individuals with different symptom profiles remain unanswered. Using the projected-hand illusion (a digital video version of the rubber-hand illusion) with synchronous and asynchronous stroking (500 ms delay), and a hand laterality judgment task, we assessed sense of agency, body image, and body schema in 53 people with clinically stable schizophrenia (with a current, past, and no history of passivity symptoms) and 48 healthy controls. The results revealed a stable trait in schizophrenia with no difference between clinical subgroups (sense of agency) and some quantitative (specific) differences depending on the passivity symptom profile (body image and body schema). Specifically, a reduced sense of self-agency was a common feature of all clinical subgroups. However, subgroup comparisons showed that individuals with passivity symptoms (both current and past) had significantly greater deficits on tasks assessing body image and body schema, relative to the other groups. In addition, patients with current passivity symptoms failed to demonstrate the normal reduction in body illusion typically seen with a 500 ms delay in visual feedback (asynchronous condition), suggesting internal timing problems. Altogether, the results underscore self-abnormalities in schizophrenia, provide evidence for both trait abnormalities and state changes specific to passivity symptoms, and point to a role for internal timing deficits as a mechanistic explanation for external cues becoming a possible source of self-body input.

Towards a Protocol for the Attachment of Metadata to Service Descriptions and its Use in Semantic Discovery

Service discovery in large scale, open distributed systems is difficult because of the need to filter out services suitable to the task at hand from a potentially huge pool of possibilities. Semantic descriptions have been advocated as the key to expressive service discovery, but the most commonly used service descriptions and registry protocols do not support such descriptions in a general manner. In this paper, we present a protocol, its implementation and an API for registering semantic service descriptions and other task/user-specific metadata, and for discovering services according to these. Our approach is based on a mechanism for attaching structured and unstructured metadata, which we show to be applicable to multiple registry technologies. The result is an extremely flexible service registry that can be the basis of a sophisticated semantically-enhanced service discovery engine, an essential component of a Semantic Grid.

Mapping Attribution Metadata to the Open Provenance Model

A description of a data item's provenance can be provided in dierent forms, and which form is best depends on the intended use of that description. Because of this, dierent communities have made quite distinct underlying assumptions in their models for electronically representing provenance. Approaches deriving from the library and archiving communities emphasise agreed vocabulary by which resources can be described and, in particular, assert their attribution (who created the resource, who modied it, where it was stored etc.) The primary purpose here is to provide intuitive metadata by which users can search for and index resources. In comparison, models for representing the results of scientific workflows have been developed with the assumption that each event or piece of intermediary data in a process' execution can and should be documented, to give a full account of the experiment undertaken. These occurrences are connected together by stating where one derived from, triggered, or otherwise caused another, and so form a causal graph. Mapping between the two approaches would be benecial in integrating systems and exploiting the strengths of each. In this paper, we specify such a mapping between Dublin Core and the Open Provenance Model. We further explain the technical issues to overcome and the rationale behind the approach, to allow the same method to apply in mapping similar schemes.

Uma Avaliação de abordagens alternativas para armazenar RDF em banco de dados relacional

O Resource Description Framework (RDF) é uma infra-estrutura, que possibilita a codificação, troca e reuso de metadata estruturado. Metadata é dados sobre dados. O termo refere a qualquer dado usado para ajudar a identificação, descrição e localização de recursos eletrônicos na rede. O RDF permite adicionar declarações, sinônimos e palavras que não estão presentes nos recursos, mas que são pertinentes a eles. Uma declaração RDF pode ser desenhada usando diagramas de arcos e nodos, onde os nodos representam os recursos e os arcos representam as propriedades nomeadas. O modelo básico consiste em recursos, propriedades e objetos. Todas as coisas sendo descritas pelas declarações RDF são chamadas de recursos. Um recurso pode ser uma página da Web inteira ou um elemento específico HTML ou XML dentro de um documento fonte. Uma propriedade é um aspecto específico, característica, atributo, ou relação usada para descrever um recurso. O objeto pode ser um outro recurso ou um literal. Estas três partes, juntas, formam uma declaração RDF. O resultado do parser para recursos com metadata RDF, é um conjunto de declarações referentes aquele recurso. A declaração destas propriedades e a semântica correspondente delas estão definidas no contexto do RDF como um RDF schema. Um esquema não só define as propriedades do recurso (por exemplo, título, autor, assunto, tamanho, cor, etc.), mas também pode definir os tipos de recursos sendo descritos (livros, páginas Web, pessoas, companhias, etc.). O RDF schema, provê um sistema básico de tipos necessários para descrever tais elementos e definir as classes de recursos. Assim, os recursos constituindo este sistema de tipos se tornam parte do modelo RDF de qualquer descrição que os usa. A geração de modelos RDF pode ser conseguida através de algoritmos implementados com linguagens de programação tradicionais e podem ser embutidos em páginas HTML, documentos XML e até mesmo em imagens. Com relação a modelos em imagens, servidores Web específicos são usados para simular dois recursos sobre o mesmo URI, servindo ora a imagem ora a descrição RDF. Uma alternativa para armazenar e manipular grande quantidade de declarações RDF é usar a tecnologia de banco de dados relacional. Abordagens para armazenar declarações RDF em banco de dados relacional foram propostas, mas todas elas mantêm modelos diversos de diferentes fontes. Critérios de avaliação como tempo de carga, proliferação de tabelas, espaço, dados mantidos e custo de instruções SQL foram definidos. Duas abordagens apresentaram resultados satisfatórios. Com uma nova abordagem proposta por este trabalho se obteve melhores resultados principalmente no aspecto de consultas. A nova proposta provê mecanismos para que o usuário faça seu próprio modelo relacional e crie suas consultas. O conhecimento necessário pelo usuário se limita em parte aos modelos mantidos e ao esquema RDF.

Next Generation Catalogs (NGCs) : Meeting User Needs with Metadata and Search Technology

Recommendations • Become a beta partner with vendor • Test load collections before going live • Update cataloging codes to benefit your community • Don’t expect to drastically change cataloging practices

An Overview of the Use of Metadata in Agriculture

Metadata is data that fully describes the data and the areas they represent, allowing the user to decide on their use as best as possible. Allow reporting on the existence of a set of data linked to specific needs. The use of metadata has the purpose of documenting and organizing a structured organizational data in order to minimize duplication of efforts to locate them and to facilitate maintenance. It also provides the administration of large amounts of data, discovery, retrieval and editing features. The global use of metadata is regulated by a technical group or task force composed of several segments such as industries, universities and research firms. Agriculture in particular is a good example for the development of typical applications using metadata is the integration of systems and equipment, allowing the implementation of techniques used in precision agriculture, the integration of different computer systems via webservices or other type of solution requires the integration of structured data. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the standards of metadata areas consolidated as agricultural.

Applicazione di strumenti e metodi per la gestione ambientale di un territorio vasto - Sviluppo di un sistema di gestione ambientale in un ente pubblico secondo lo schema europeo EMAS e analisi di un sistema energetico territoriale

Environmental Management includes many components, among which we can include Environmental Management Systems (EMS), Environmental Reporting and Analysis, Environmental Information Systems and Environmental Communication. In this work two applications are presented: the developement and implementation of an Environmental Management System in local administrations, according to the European scheme "EMAS", and the analysis of a territorial energy system through scenario building and environmental sustainability assessment. Both applications are linked by the same objective, which is the quest for more scientifically sound elements; in fact, both EMS and energy planning are oftec carachterized by localism and poor comparability. Emergy synthesis, proposed by ecologist H.T. Odum and described in his book "Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making" (1996) has been chosen and applied as an environmental evaluation tool, in order complete the analysis with an assessment of the "global value" of goods and processes. In particular, eMergy syntesis has been applied in order to improve the evaluation of the significance of environmental aspects in an EMS, and in order to evaluate the environmental performance of three scenarios of future evolution of the energy system. Regarding EMS, in this work an application of an EMS together with the CLEAR methodology for environmental accounting is discussed, in order to improve the identification of the environmental aspects; data regarding environmental aspects and significant ones for 4 local authorities are also presented, together with a preliminary proposal for the integration of the assessment of the significance of environmental aspects with eMergy synthesis. Regarding the analysis of an energy system, in this work the carachterization of the current situation is presented together with the overall energy balance and the evaluation of the emissions of greenhouse gases; moreover, three scenarios of future evolution are described and discussed. The scenarios have been realized with the support of the LEAP software ("Long Term Energy Alternatives Planning System" by SEI - "Stockholm Environment Institute"). Finally, the eMergy synthesis of the current situation and of the three scenarios is shown.

Metadata editing: un'implementazione per Open Office

The purpose of this thesis is to enhance the functionalities of GAFFE, a flexible, interactive and user-friendly application for editing metadata in office documents by supporting different ontologies stored inside and outside of the digital document, by adding new views and forms and by improving its ease of use.