Web Research Research Articles

What children need for their normative development Nationwide web research for What Children Need Scale (WCNS) (1)

What children need for their normative development Nationwide web research for What Children Need Scale (WCNS) (1)

Tracing carbon sources through aquatic and terrestrial food webs using amino acid stable isotope fingerprinting.

Tracing the origin of nutrients is a fundamental goal of food web research but methodological issues associated with current research techniques such as using stable isotope ratios of bulk tissue can lead to confounding results. We investigated whether naturally occurring δ13C patterns among amino acids (δ13CAA) could distinguish between multiple aquatic and terrestrial primary production sources. We found that δ13CAA patterns in contrast to bulk δ13C values distinguished between carbon derived from algae, seagrass, terrestrial plants, bacteria and fungi. Furthermore, we showed for two aquatic producers that their δ13CAA patterns were largely unaffected by different environmental conditions despite substantial shifts in bulk δ13C values. The potential of assessing the major carbon sources at the base of the food web was demonstrated for freshwater, pelagic, and estuarine consumers; consumer δ13C patterns of essential amino acids largely matched those of the dominant primary producers in each system. Since amino acids make up about half of organismal carbon, source diagnostic isotope fingerprints can be used as a new complementary approach to overcome some of the limitations of variable source bulk isotope values commonly encountered in estuarine areas and other complex environments with mixed aquatic and terrestrial inputs.

A On-Demand Mapping Method on Query Request in Relational Database Semantic Query

Relational database semantic query namely RDF access to relational database is an important issue in semantic Web research. To realize the query is to build mapping relation between relational database schema and ontology. However, there is natural isomerism between them. The isomerism can be eliminated by transforming relational database schema into similar ontology and then building mapping between conversion ontology and input ontology. This paper realized an ondemanding mapping method when users request query, avoided building all concepts and attributes mapping between conversion ontology and input ontology and improved mapping efficiency.

Fatty acid composition and content of round goby (Neogobius melanostomusPallas 1814) and monkey goby (Neogobius fluviatilisPallas 1814), two invasive gobiid species in the lower Rhine River (Germany)

General Ecology and Limnology, Zoological Institute, University of Cologne, EcologicalResearch Station Grietherbusch, Cologne, GermanyIntroductionInvasive species can have both direct and indirect effects onstructure and function of native food webs of aquatic ecosys-tems (Didham et al., 2005). For a proper estimation of eco-system effects of invasive species food web studies arerequired to understand how invasive species are integrated inthe invaded food webs both as consumers and as potentialnew prey for native predators. This applies for intermediatetrophic consumers in particular. The finding that the invasiveshrimp Limnomysis benedeni contains high amounts ofPUFAs has lead to the suggestion that this invasive crusta-cean improves the dietary availability of PUFAs to planktiv-orous fish and thus exerts food-quality mediated indirecteffects on planktivorous fish (Fink, 2013).Two groups of PUFAs, termed n-3 and n-6 PUFA, respec-tively, are essential for all vertebrates. The three most impor-tant PUFAs in vertebrates are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA,20 : 5n-3), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22 : 6n-3) andarachidonic acid (ARA, 20 : 4n-6). As n-3 and n-6 PUFAscan not be synthesized de novo by most metazoans, theymust be taken up with the diet, either as EPA, DHA andARA, or as their precursors, such as a-linolenic acid (ALA,18 : 3n-3, precursor for EPA and DHA) or linoleic acid(LIN, 18 : 2n-6, precursor for ARA) (Sargent et al., 1995).Awareness of that n-3 PUFA in fish are beneficial to humanhealth (Arts et al., 2001) has led to a focus on n-3 PUFAs inaquatic food web research. However, with respect to theoptimal PUFA composition in the diet of marine fish larvaethe importance of ARA has been stressed (Sargent et al.,1999). Fish eggs are rich in DHA, probably because of itsimportance in the formation of neuronal cellular membranes(Ahlgren et al., 2009). ARA seems to be important to thesurvival of juvenile turbot, whereas DHA improves theirsomatic growth (Ahlgren et al., 2011 19954666/id; Castellet al., 1994 19954808/id), and ARA-enriched diets improvedsurvival of seabream larvae during stress compared to DHAenriched diets (Koven et al., 2001).The two gobiid species investigated here have establishedin the River Rhine since 2006 (Borcherding et al., 2011), andin the meantime their abundances regularly exceed 80% ofthe fish community (Borcherding et al., 2013). Both euryha-line species originate from the Ponto-Caspian area, and thereis strong evidence suggesting the invasion of the River Rhinemainly through Rhine-Main-Danube Canal (Bij de Vaateet al., 2002). However, stable populations of monkey gobyand round goby are as well known from brackish habitats intheir native areas (Kottelat and Freyhof, 2007). It is widelyassumed, though exceptions are known, that marine fishhave a higher content of long-chained polyunsaturated fattyacids of the n-3 type, i.e. EPA and DHA. This view largelyroots in a paper by Henderson and Tocher (1987) thatreported lower content of (long-chained) C

Cloud Computing in Education

Cloud computing - a relatively recent term - builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, and, more recently, networking, and Web and software services. It implies a service-oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand services, and many other things. It is apparent that educational institutions are likely to seize those services offered in the cloud in these difficult times due to its pay-as-you-go cost structure. However, does the cloud have the answers to all the challenges in technical education?

Introducing an annotated bibliography on temporal and evolution aspects in the semantic web

Time is a pervasive dimension of reality as everything evolves as time elapses. Therefore, Web-based information systems and knowledge representation tools at least mirror, and often have to capture, the time-varying and evolutionary nature of the phenomena they model and of the activities they support. This aspect has been acknowledged and long studied in the field of temporal databases [Jensen and Snodgrass 2009] but it truly applies also to the World Wide Web and Semantic Web in particular. Several papers addressing, in an explicit or implicit way, the representation and management of time and evolution in the Semantic Web appeared recently and, on some aspects, showed a clear upward trend in last years, witnessing a sustained and/or growing research interest. Reflecting and acknowledging such interest, we started in 2011 to collect references concerning the handling of time and evolution issues in Semantic Web research. As it was for [Grandi 2003], the purpose of this collection was to compile a bibliography which could be of help, in particular, to students and young researchers. As a result of such almost endless work, we wrote an annotated bibliography [Grandi 2012], whose latest version is available on the Web at URL:

Leveraging social network analysis with topic models and the Semantic Web (extended)

Research in the Semantic Web, especially in modeling virtual communities, has provided models useful to represent the richness of these social network interactions. The SIOC Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities vocabulary provides concepts and properties that can be used to describe information from online communities e.g., message boards, wikis, weblogs, etc.. However, the SIOC ontology does not consider social aspects nor the higher order semantics hidden in linkages between community members. This paper describes SIOC-SNA-DM, an extension of the SIOC vocabulary. SIOC-SNA-DM's model is tri-partite, consisting of People, Policies, and Purposes which are social aspects observable in most social communities. A challenge to using our model is how to populate these aspects, since higher order semantics from interactions need to be extracted. Thus, we explain how this population is done with advanced text mining using a latent semantic technique over a large virtual community called Plexilandia.cl with more than 2500 musicians working on the site.Our previous work, in this area, has shown how including these social aspects help to outperform results generated by state-of-the-art techniques. One of the novelties of this present work is the introduction and the elucidation of SIOC-SNA-DM, and how to populate the ontology in order to support the social aspects needed to enhance results of Social Network Mining techniques.

Interview with David Millard

David Millard is a Senior Lecturer of Computer andWeb Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is also an Associate Director of the University's Centre for Innovation in Technology and Education. He has been lucky enough to be involved in Hypertext and Web research for over fifteen years, firstly in the area of Open, Adaptive and Contextual hypermedia and more recently in the areas of Social Media, UX Design, Narrative Systems, and the emerging discipline of Web Science, particularly the impact of Digital Literacy on Education and Learning. He is passionate about the design of innovative software that is useful to real people. You can find him at http://www.davidmillard.org.

Publishing Knowledge and Transformation of Conventional Web into Semantic Web using Metadata

In Semantic Web research, most of the work has focused around the OWL ontology, natural language processing, word sense disambiguation and semantic matching. Few efforts have been made to provide a publishing methodology for metadata-rich Web content for end users. This work encompasses all possible aspects of publishing pure digital content, such as HTML documents, images, video, and other media documents free from metadata. Afterwards the content could be integrated with metadata to provide optimal capability and scalability for document organization, search and navigation in the aim of explicit knowledge publishing. The effort is made on our specific framework to publish documents which are enriched with metadata for better machine reasoning. The first and the second version of the prototype is a Mozilla Firefox extension called Semantic Web (SWeb) browser. SWeb is intended for managing and publishing knowledge and information, as “publishing knowledge” was missing in the system where we got the opportunity to contribute.

Phytoplankton sterol contents vary with temperature, phosphorus and silicate supply: a study on three freshwater species

The understanding of environmentally induced changes in the biochemical composition of phytoplankton species is of great importance in both physiological studies and ecological food web research. In extensive laboratory experiments we tested the influence of two different temperatures (10°C and 25°C) and a phosphorus supply gradient on the sterol concentrations of the three freshwater phytoplankton species Scenedesmus quadricauda, Cryptomonas ovata and Cyclotella meneghiniana. The diatom C. meneghiniana was additionally exposed to a silicate gradient. In two separate experiments we analysed (1) possible interactive effects of temperature and phosphorus supply and (2) the effect of four phosphorus levels and three silicate levels on algal sterol concentrations. We observed that sterol concentrations were higher at 25°C than at 10°C in S. quadricauda and C. meneghiniana, but were not affected by temperature in C. ovata. Interactive effects of temperature and phosphorus supply on sterol concentrations were found in C. meneghiniana. This presumably was due to the bioconversion of one sterol (24-methylenecholesterol) into another (22-dihydrobrassicasterol). Increasing phosphorus supply resulted in species-specific effects on sterol concentrations, viz. an optimum curve response in S. quadricauda, a saturation curve response in C. meneghiniana and no change in sterol concentration in C. ovata. Effects of silicate supply on the sterols of C. meneghiniana equalled the effects of phosphorus supply. Albeit we did not observe a general trend in the three phytoplankton species tested, we conclude that sterol concentrations of phytoplankton are strongly affected by temperature and nutrient supply. Interactive effects point out the importance of taking into account more than just one environmental factor when assessing the effects of environmentally induced changes on phytoplankton sterol concentrations.

Assessing the quality of textual features in social media

Social media is increasingly becoming a significant fraction of the content retrieved daily by Web users. However, the potential lack of quality of user generated content poses a challenge to information retrieval services, which rely mostly on textual features generated by users (particularly tags) commonly associated with the multimedia objects. This paper presents what, to the best of our knowledge, is currently the most comprehensive study of the relative quality of textual features in social media. We analyze four different features, namely, title, tags, description and comments posted by users, in four popular applications, namely, YouTube, Yahoo! Video, LastFM and CiteULike. Our study is based on an extensive characterization of data crawled from the four applications with respect to usage, amount and semantics of content, descriptive and discriminative power as well as content and information diversity across features. It also includes a series of object classification and tag recommendation experiments as case studies of two important information retrieval tasks, aiming at analyzing how these tasks are affected by the quality of the textual features. Classification and recommendation effectiveness is analyzed in light of our characterization results. Our findings provide valuable insights for future research and design of Web 2.0 applications and services.

Coupling semantics with things in the internet of the future: a survey

The internet of things promises to embed objects within internet, by providing location and search services, by integrating sensor data, user input and stored information. All this is going to be implemented with the support of a processing layer, which is distributed over the network and assures a smart behaviour, exhibited at a global and a local level. Given these premises, this paper explores different aspects connected to smartness, such as identification, representation and intelligence, both individual and collective. Contact points of the internet of things with semantic web and other initiatives, coming from the social web and business and research activities, are explored in a sort of journey through open challenges and achievements from related areas which are worth to be exploited.

Massive RDF Data Complicated Query Optimization Based on MapReduce

Processing massive RDF data complicated query efficiently is a matter of concern for a long time in semantic web research. This paper proposes a MapReduce framework which could be a fast scalable solution. In this framework, the first step is doing the data preprocessing using a method called PredicateLead. Next the JobPartitioner algorithm partitions the query into several MapReduce jobs. The output of previous two operations should be the input of the last step——processing query in MapReduce. A case study on emergency decision demonstrates the efficiency and scalability of this framework.

Bringing relational databases into the Semantic Web: A survey

Relational databases are considered one of the most popular storage solutions for various kinds of data and they have been recognized as a key factor in generating huge amounts of data for Semantic Web applications. Ontologies, on the other hand, are one of the key concepts and main vehicle of knowledge in the Semantic Web research area. The problem of bridging the gap between relational databases and ontologies has attracted the interest of the Semantic Web community, even from the early years of its existence and is commonly referred to as the database-to-ontology mapping problem. However, this term has been used interchangeably for referring to two distinct problems: namely, the creation of an ontology from an existing database instance and the discovery of mappings between an existing database instance and an existing ontology. In this paper, we clearly define these two problems and present the motivation, benefits, challenges and solutions for each one of them. We attempt to gather the most notable approaches proposed so far in the literature, present them concisely in tabular format and group them under a classification scheme. We finally explore the perspectives and future research steps for a seamless and meaningful integration of databases into the Semantic Web.

Semantic Web Portal in University Research Community Framework

One way overcome the weakness of semantic web to make it more user friendly is by displaying, browsing and semantically query data. In this research, we propose Semantic Web Research Community Portal at Faculty of Information Science and Technology – Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (FTSM RC) as the lightest platform of Semantic Web. This platform assists the users in managing the content and making visualization of relevant semantic data by applying meaningful periodically research. In such a way it will strengthen the research information related to research, publications, departments, organizations, events, and groups of researchers. Moreover, it will streamline the issuance process, making it easier for academic staff, support staff, and faculty itself to publish information of faculty and studies research information. By the end, this will provide end users with a better view of the structure of research at the university, allowing users to conduct cross-communication between faculty and study groups by using the search information.

Semantic Web and reasoning for cultural heritage and digital libraries

Cultural heritage and digital libraries are two closely related disciplines that traditionally benefit by the application of innovative information technologies. Currently, Semantic Web research has also grown satisfyingly mature to enable achieving tangible results and added-value in both these knowledgeintensive domains, in spite of the critical challenges of knowledge acquisition and reasoning about complex data. The purpose of this special issue is to put together a selection of high-quality research and development efforts in these areas that can offer an insight about the current state-of-the-art to the interested reader. Two papers in the issue deal with the idea of repurposing the FRBR standard towards semantic annotation and management of bibliographic records, revealing its importance and applicability for library curators in the Semantic Web context. “Supporting Multilingual Bibliographic Resource Discovery with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” presents an FRBR-based service that enhances existing on-line library catalogs in a more semantically rich and relevant way to the user. Moreover, “FRBRML: A FRBR-based Framework for Semantic Interoperability” proposes a framework upon which legacy bibliographic data can be transformed into meaningful semantic descriptions based on the FRBR model. Semantic interoperability is a top-priority issue for cultural heritage applications, due to the need to aggregate legacy and/or disperse data within knowledgeaware services. In “Instance-based Semantic Interoperability in the Cultural Heritage” the authors thoroughly review and evaluate ontology matching methods in cultural heritage scenarios and present their lessons-learned from their experience with the STITCH project. In addition, “A Systemic Approach for Effective Semantic Access to Cultural Content” discusses a system for mapping proprietary metadata schemas to domain models within the framework of Europeana, and discusses reasoning-based techniques and optimizations for their discovery. The Semantic Web can enable novel dimensions in cultural information management and utilization. This is exemplified in the paper “How to Deal with Massively Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Data – Lessons Learned in CultureSampo”. Here, the authors give insights to transforming and publishing existing cross-domain cultural heritage data of multiple forms as linked data, and to maintaining interoperability at a semantic level, while providing novel user interfaces for their exploitation. We are grateful to the various authors that trusted their work with this special issue. Thanks are due to professors Pascal Hitzler and Krzysztof Janowicz, Semantic Web Journal Editors-in-Chief, for their helpful remarks and support in preparing this special issue, and to the reviewers that readily shared their expertise to help make this issue successful. To what extend this may have been achieved, the reader will be the absolute judge. Semantic Web 3 (2012) 1 DOI 10.3233/SW-2012-0050 IOS Press

User models as revealed in web-based research services

The user-centered approach to information retrieval emphasizes the importance of a user model in determining what information will be most useful to a particular user, given their context. Mediated search provides an opportunity to elaborate on this idea, as an intermediary's elicitations reveal what aspects of the user model they think are worth inquiring about. However, empirical evidence is divided over whether intermediaries actually work to develop a broadly conceived user model. Our research revisits the issue in a web research services setting, whose characteristics are expected to result in more thorough user modeling on the part of intermediaries. Our empirical study confirms that intermediaries engage in rich user modeling. While intermediaries behave differently across settings, our interpretation is that the underlying user model characteristics that intermediaries inquire about in our setting are applicable to other settings as well.

Webometric research with the Bing Search API 2.0

In May 2011 the Bing Search API 2.0 had become the only major international web search engine data source available for automatic offline processing for webometric research. This article describes its key features, contrasting them with previous web search data sources, and discussing implications for webometric research. Overall, it seems that large-scale quantitative web research is possible with the Bing Search API 2.0, including query splitting, but that legal issues require the redesign of webometric software to ensure that all results obtained from Bing are displayed directly to the user.

Beyond the Book: Using Web 2.0 Tools to Develop 21st Century Literacies

New information and communications technologies (ICT) are redefining teacher education. A university faculty member and an instructional technology consultant incorporated information and communications technologies within a graduate university methods course. The following research questions explored student perceptions of using Web 2.0 tools as a language arts teaching tool: (a) Do pre-service teachers feel adequately prepared to implement 21st century skills using Web 2.0 tools? and (b) What are the barriers that exist for teachers in using Web 2.0 tools in promoting literacy? Findings suggest educators must continue research of Web 2.0 tools to design new learning opportunities for the future.

Editorial: Special Section on Social Web Technologies in E-Learning

Welcome to the last 2011 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. As you can see, this issue includes a special section devoted to using social web technologies in e-learning. Unlike other special sections, which were scheduled in advance and managed by guest editors, this section was not planned. Yet, with the overall popularity of social web technologies and the increased interest of teachers and educational researchers in this area, more and more papers on this topic have been submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. While planning the last two issues of 2011, we realized that we had a large selection of high quality papers on social web accepted for publication. Collecting these papers in one issue provides a better value for our readers, since together these papers present a good state-of-the-art picture of the current research on social web and e-learning. The set of papers included in this special section is exactly as diverse as we would like an introduction to this research direction to be. Most important is the fact that the most popular social technologies currently explored in the area of e-learning, such as blogs, wikis, and social tagging, are addressed by one or more papers in this special section. The paper “Microblogging in a Classroom: Classifying Students’ Relevant and Irrelevant Questions in a Microblogging-Supported Classroom,” by a group of researchers from Purdue University, deals with the educational usage of microblogging, a technology that Twitter has made popular over the last two years. The paper “An Approach to Folksonomy-Based Ontology Maintenance for Learning Environments,” by Dragan Gasevic, Amal Zouaq, Carlo Torniai, Jelena Jovanovic, and Marek Hatala, explores social tagging technology. It also bridges the gap between social web and Semantic Web research since it explores an approach based on using social tags contributed by learners while using learning environments for ontology maintenance. Christoph Hermann and Thomas Ottmann, in their paper “Electures-Wiki—Toward Engaging Students to Actively Work with Lecture Recordings,” explore an innovative use of the popular wiki technology to engage students to work with lecture recordings. Another paper, “Wikibooks and Wikibookians: Loosely Coupled Community or a Choice for Future Textbooks?” by Meng-Fen Grace Lin, Suthiporn Sajjapanroj, and Curtis J. Bonk, offers a deeper exploration of wikis as a technology and a community of users and discusses the prospects of wikis becoming textbooks of the future. Finally, Brian Thoms, in his paper “A Dynamic Social Feedback System to Support Learning and Social Interaction in Higher Education,” explores the use of blogging in an educational context. The focus of the paper, however, is not the blogs, but a dynamic social feedback technology that could be applicable to a range of social systems. In addition to the fi ve “social” papers, this issue features two regular papers that deal with other aspects of technology-enhanced learning. The paper “Supporting Accessible Technology-Enhanced Training: The eAccess2Learn Framework,” by Demetrios G. Sampson and Panagiotis Zervas, focuses on accessibility and the needs of learners with disabilities. The paper “Evaluation of Telerobotic Interface Components for Teaching Robot Operation,” by Ofi r H. Goldstain, Irad Ben-Gal, and Yossi Bukchin, focuses on engineering education and remote access to educational laboratories.