Ores and concentrates often contain enrichments of scarce or critical elements such as Te, Bi and Sb, but there are few financial incentives or competitive technologies that allow their recovery. They may be lost to tailings or roasted off (becoming an environmental liability), or can incur smelter penalties. Even when recovered during smelting and refining, the value may not be returned to the...

Modern genomic research has access to a plethora of knowledge sources. Often, it is imperative that researchers combine and integrate knowledge from multiple perspectives. Although some technology exists for connecting data and knowledge bases, these methods are only just beginning to be successfully applied to research in modem cell biology. In this paper, we argue that one way to integrate mu...

With the growing awareness of the importance of software maintenance has come a re-evaluation of software maintenance tools. Such tools range from source code analysers to semi-intelligent tools which seek to reconstruct system designs and specification documents from source code. However, it is clear that relying solely upon source code as a basis for reverse engineering has many problems. The...

Ores and concentrates often contain enrichments of scarce or critical elements such as Te, Bi and Sb, but there are few financial incentives or competitive technologies that allow their recovery. They may be lost to tailings or roasted off (becoming an environmental liability), or can incur smelter penalties. Even when recovered during smelting and refining, the value may not be returned to the...

This paper develops new methodology, together with related theories, for combining information from independent studies through confidence distributions. A formal definition of a confidence distribution and its asymptotic counterpart (i.e., asymptotic confidence distribution) are given and illustrated in the context of combining information. Two general combination methods are developed: the fi...

An abundance of biological data sources contain data on classes of scientific entities, such as genes and sequences. Logical relationships between scientific objects are implemented as URLs and foreign IDs. Query processing typically involves traversing links and paths (concatenation of links) through these sources. We model the data objects in these sources and the links between objects as an ...

The results of an optical spectroscopy campaign performed at the Astronomical Observatory of Bologna in Loiano (Italy) on three hard X–ray sources detected by INTEGRAL (IGR J17303−0601, IGR J18027−1455 and IGR J21247+5058) are presented. These data have allowed a determination of the nature for two of them, with IGR J17303−0601 being a low mass X–ray binary in the Galaxy and IGR J18027−1455 a b...

Working Papers are interim reports on work of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and have received only limited review. Views or opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Institute, its National Member Organizations, or other organizations supporting the work.

Mountain landscapes have changed drastically during the 20th century. The knowledge of changing patterns and processes is currently considered a key element for conservation and management. This integrative study combines different data sources, methodologies and representations that contribute to the history of common property land in Leomil highlands (Beira Alta, Portugal). The evaluated mate...

1. ABSTRACT The WWW today offers free access to a wealth of heterogeneous data sources. Combining related data from different sources in a comfortable and automatic fashion is not possible. We present our approach to this problem that is based on a declarative representation of the content of heterogeneous data sources with respect to a global schema. We describe our language to express these c...