Metadata, literally " data about data, " has become a widely used yet still frequently underspecified term that is understood in different ways by the diverse professional communities that design, create, describe, preserve, and use information systems and resources. It is a construct that has been around for as long as humans have been organizing information, albeit transparently in many cases...

Taxonomy is at the center of modern biodiversity science, since it defines dual name and meaning species that jointly allows biologists to study classify organisms while linking observations from multiple sources. With accelerating digitization data has come increased need for readily available taxonomic products, as reflected in number initiatives dedicated curating publishing digital lists ac...

When glancing at the cover of the sixth edition of A Dictionary of Epidemiology, the first question that came to mind was whether a new edition of the dictionary was really necessary in an era when everything or almost everything can be found on the internet. It is a difficult question: instead of discussing whether a book is good or not, we debate whether it makes sense to have it in the first...

The effective ranking of documents in search engines is based on various document features, such as the frequency of the query terms in each document, the length, or the authoritativeness of each document. In order to obtain a better retrieval performance, instead of using a single or a few features, there is a growing trend to create a ranking function by applying a learning to rank technique ...

medicine, it was almost inevitable that this wishful idea would arise. Unfortunately, this is not the much-wanted definitive text. This feeling of disappointment in the book, however, is not due to any failure to attain the aims stated in the preface: "This volume offers to students of psychiatry a comprehensive view of dynamic psychiatry. The dynamic trend in psychiatry is the result of the im...

Gamification aims at applying game design principles and elements, such as points, badges, feedbacks or leader boards in nongaming environments. An interesting goal of gamification is to combine and exploit the fun factor for targeting other aspects like achieving more accurate work, more cost effective solutions and better retention rates. The application of gamification techniques to IR tasks...

This paper presents Arianna, the approach used in Diviana, a small Italian e-consulting organization, for defining a standard in describing the semantic of e-government services. Such a standard is born sharing (and not imposing!) information with Italian Local Public Administration (LPA) Entities, especially Comuni. In order to describe semantically the LPA services, our approach models ontolo...

C heer up! You are not alone in your concern for our specialty: the fall in recruitment to family practice residencies in the USA is sufficient for it to be overtaken by paediatrics and the declining attraction of internal medicine to US medical students was lamented by two American physicians who quoted a Texan saying ‘‘when the horse dies, get off’’. Is (community) paediatrics dying or dead? ...

The landscape of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) is changing. In addition to traditional authoritative and reliably sourced geospatial data, SDIs increasingly need to incorporate data from non-traditional sources, such as local sensor networks and crowd-sourced message databases. These new data come with variable, loosely defined, and sometimes unknown provenance, semantics, and content. Th...

What can text sentiment analysis technology be used for, and does a more usage-informed view on sentiment analysis pose new requirements on technology development? 1 Human emotion, attitude, mood, affect, sentiment, opinion, and appeal Analysis of sentiment in text is a new and rapidly growing field of study and application. This paper outlines some application areas for sentiment analysis tech...