Complex biological systems manifest a large variety of emergent phenomena among which prominent roles belong to self-organization and swarm intelligence. Generally, each level in a biological hierarchy possesses its own systemic properties and requires its own way of observation, conceptualization, and modeling. In this work, an attempt is made to outline general guiding principles in explorati...

Research and patient communities are firmly interdependent. Engaged patient communities provide biological samples and data that drive discoveries which, in turn, fuel the development of novel therapies. Historically, Huntington's disease (HD) has benefited from trusting interactions between scientists and patients. However, even for HD, communication between the research and patient communitie...

Modelling arguments on the social web is a key challenge for those studying computational argumentation. This is because formal models of argumentation tend to assume dialectic and logical argument, whereas argumentation on the social web is highly eristic. In this paper we explore this gap by bringing together the Argument Interchange Format (AIF) and the Semantic Interlinked Online Communitie...

Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the “Social Web”, i.e. on Web 2.0 community sites, nd this content is being annotated and commented upon. The ability to view an individual’s entire contribution to the Social Web would be an nteresting and valuable service, particularly important as social networks are often being formed through created ...

During the Phanerozoic, the diversity of immobile suspension feeders living on the surface of soft substrata (ISOSS) declined significantly. Immobile taxa on hard surfaces and mobile taxa diversified. Extinction rates of ISOSS were significantly greater than in other benthos. These changes in the structure of benthic communities are attributed to increased biological disturbance of the sediment...

Diversity indices provide simple and powerful metrics for assessing biological communities. Based on entropy measures, the approach considers statistical and thermodynamic inferences to deduce ecological patterns. However, concerns exist regarding the accuracy of diversity indices. Because relative quantities depend on the sorting of organisms (e.g., guilds and species) and their interactions, ...

The detection of community structure is a widely accepted means of investigating the principles governing biological systems. Recent efforts are exploring ways in which multiple data sources can be integrated to generate a more comprehensive model of cellular interactions, leading to the detection of more biologically relevant communities. In this work, we propose a mathematical programming mod...

There has been much recent interest and progress in the characterization of community structure and community assembly processes through the application of phylogenetic methods. To date most focus has been on groups of taxa for which some relevant detail of their ecology is known, for which community composition is reasonably easily quantified and where the temporal scale is such that speciatio...

The accelerating rate of change in biodiversity patterns, mediated by ever increasing human pressures and global warming, demands a better understanding of the relationship between the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning (BEF). Recent investigations suggest that the functional structure of communities, i.e. the composition and diversity of functional traits, is the mai...