Digital libraries are invaluable repositories of information. However, in many situations, their size makes it difficult to access the desired resource. In this paper, we present an automatic, unsupervised, domain-independent and scalable approach for structuring the resources available in a certain electronic repository for a particular domain. The system automatically detects and extracts the...

The concept of comfort is an important one for nursing, but because of its complexity, it has not been analyzed, operationalized or structured for nursing science. In this paper, three technical senses of the term are derived from: (a) contemporary and archaic lexical entries; (b) analysis of how the concept is used in contemporary and historical nursing literature; and (c) theoretical support ...

Due to human impact, there is extensive degradation and loss of marine habitats, which calls for measures that incorporate taxonomic as well as functional and trophic aspects of biodiversity. Since such data is less easily quantifiable in nature, the use of habitats as surrogates or proxies for biodiversity is on the rise in marine conservation and management. However, there is a critical gap i...

Community ecology seeks to explain the number and relative abundance of coexisting species. Four research frontiers in community ecology are closely tied to research in systematics and taxonomy: the statistics of species richness estimators, global patterns of biodiversity, the influence of global climate change on community structure, and phylogenetic influences on community structure. The mos...

The concept of β-diversity, defined as dissimilarity among communities, has been widely used to investigate biodiversity patterns and community assembly rules. However, in ecosystems with high taxonomic β-diversity, due to marked environmental gradients, the level of functional β-diversity among communities is largely overlooked while it may reveal processes shaping community structure. Here, d...