Hodges' Model: Welcome to the QUAD: semantic web

Hodges' model is a conceptual framework to support reflection and critical thinking. Situated, the model can help integrate all disciplines (academic and professional). Amid news items, are posts that illustrate the scope and application of the model. A bibliography and A4 template are provided in the sidebar. Welcome to the QUAD ...

Showing posts with label semantic web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label semantic web. Show all posts

Saturday, May 03, 2025

AI-2025: December 16th-18th 2025, Cambridge, UK - fourth call for papers and posters

FOURTH CALL FOR PAPERS AND POSTERS

The proceedings of the AI-20xx conference series are now published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), a sub-series of the distinguished Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series of conference proceedings.

AI-2025: Cambridge, UK, December 16th-18th 2025

Information for authors and to submit a paper  https://www.conferenceexpert.org.uk/?conf=ai2025&section=authors

Organised by BCS SGAI: The British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (a EurAi Member Society).

The leading series of UK-based international conferences on Artificial Intelligence and one of the longest running AI conference series in Europe.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

https://www.bcs-sgai.org/ai2025/

AI-2025 is the forty-fifth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

The scope of the conference comprises the whole range of AI technologies and application areas. AI-2025 reviews recent technical advances in AI technologies and shows how these advances have been applied to solve business problems. Key features are:

  • Papers will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) subseries of the popular Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (www.springer.com/lncs).

  • Papers will be presented in two streams. The Technical Stream presents the best of recent developments in AI, covering a wide range of technical areas. The Application Stream is the largest annual showcase in Europe of real applications using AI technology.

  • A mixture of full papers (maximum 14 A4 pages) presented orally and short papers (maximum 6 A4 pages) presented as posters. Papers of both kinds will be included in the proceedings.

  • Prizes for best paper and best student paper in each stream and best short paper.

  • Invited keynote speakers, including Prof. John Naughton, University of Cambridge..

  • The first day comprises tutorials and workshops to provide greater depth in selected topics. (Separate one-day registration for this day is also available.)

  • A panel session on a topical subject.

  • An 'AI Open Mic' session to allow delegates to have their say about any aspect of AI.

  • In addition to the formal sessions, the conference programme includes a welcome reception and a Gala Dinner.
AI-2025 offers a valuable opportunity to keep up to date with developments in AI and to share experiences in the practical issues of developing AI systems.

FAIRS '25, the seventeenth annual forum for AI research students will immediately precede the AI-2025 conference at Peterhouse College on Monday December 15th, 2025. The aim of FAIRS is to support student members of the AI community providing advice and feedback on their research plans and work. This event is free of charge for research students except for a contribution towards the cost of refreshments and lunch in the College and no conference registration is required.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Paper/Poster Submission: Friday 27th June 2025

    This deadline is considerably later than for previous conferences in this series and will not be extended.

  • Notification of Acceptance: Friday 29th August 2025

  • Camera Ready Paper: Friday 12th September 2025
CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions presenting original work in AI are invited for both the technical and the application stream. Contributions may be submitted either as full papers of up to fourteen A4 pages for oral presentation or as short papers of up to six A4 pages for poster presentation. ...

For more details of Contribution types please see: https://www.bcs-sgai.org/ai2025/
...

All further information including details of the conference committee, program committees, paper format and uploading instructions is given on the conference website.

ALL CORRESPONDENCE SHOULD BE SENT BY EMAIL TO THE CONFERENCE SECRETARIAT: 
sgai-conference AT bcs.org.uk

My source: SGES List - https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=AI-SGES

Friday, December 27, 2024

Living document - "Semantic Web: Past, Present, and Future"

Dear Semantic Web community

As the year ends, the question remains: How will the Semantic Web look in 2025?

Together with Katja Hose, Maria-Esther Vidal, Gerd Groener, and Petr Škoda, we contributed this year an article titled "Semantic Web: Past, Present, and Future", see

https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/TGDK.2.1.3 to the new Diamond Open Access journal on Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK, https://tgdk.org/). This primer has been a living document for 13 years; see the link for details!

As many of us cannot resist checking emails over the break, I ask you to consider the question:
What is our future in 2025?

Many "classical" Semantic Web researchers have witnessed the rise of Linked Open Data, Freebase being bought by Google (largely seen as a big win), and the beginning and success of the Knowledge Graph era. Many of us have moved on to or added topics like graph representation learning, graph neural networks, language models, etc., to our research portfolio. So, how much of the classical topics are left? How much will come back? Should we work more on knowledge graph embeddings obeying OWL axioms? Shall we have federated queries not only over multiple data sources but also include hybrid queries using similarities in graph embeddings?

In the current 2024 version of the primer, we include the latest W3C standards developed by the Semantic Web community. But we also explain the journey from the famous Linked Data principles via Knowledge Graphs to the hot topic of machine learning on graphs!

*The article linked above is an invitation to contribute. Contact me if you are interested!* 

It will be updated from time to time. We like to receive your feedback, and perhaps you would like to contribute to a future version.

Best wishes and happy holidays,

Ansgar

PS: For 2025, there is a plan to update the German version of the article in an introductory textbook on artificial intelligence. It will add Shallow Graph Embeddings, Graph Neural Networks, and the interplay of Knowledge Graphs and Language Models. Once ready, I plan to ping this back to the English version.

My source:
Ansgar Scherp
From:mail AT ansgarscherp.net
To:semantic-web AT w3.org
4.3   3-12
'Domain Ontologies represent knowledge specific to a particular domain [48, 109]. Domain ontologies are used as external sources of background knowledge [48]. They can be built on foundational ontologies [110] or core ontologies [131], which provide precise structuring to the domain ontology and thus improve interoperability between different domain ontologies. Domain ontologies can be simple such as the FOAF ontology or the event ontology mentioned above, or very complex and extensive, having been developed by domain experts, such as the SNOMED medical ontology.' ...

3-13

'Foundational Ontologies have a very wide scope and can be reused in a wide variety of modeling scenarios [24]. They are therefore used for reference purposes [109] and aim to model the most general and generic concepts and relations that can be used to describe almost any aspect of our world [24, 109], such as objects and events. An example is the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) [24]. Such basic ontologies have a rich axiomatization that is important at the developmental stage of ontologies. They help ontology engineers to have a formal and internally consistent conceptualization of the world, which can be modeled and checked for consistency. For the use of foundational ontologies in a concrete application, i.e., during the runtime of an application, the rich axiomatization can often be removed and replaced by a more lightweight version of the foundational ontology.
 In contrast, domain ontologies are built specifically to allow automatic reasoning at runtime. Therefore, when designing and developing ontologies, completeness and complexity on the one hand must always be balanced with the efficiency of reasoning mechanisms on the other. In order to represent structured knowledge, such as the scenario depicted in Figure 1, interconnected ontologies are needed, which are spanned in a network over the Internet. For this purpose, the ontologies used must match and be aligned with each other.'
Health - See also 4.2 (A post in 2025 ...re. SKOS?).

Tuesday, November 08, 2022

Designing for Changing Values (Event & Journal CfP)

I learned of the following research project via

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool
[ https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ @PhilosL ]

- with news of a call for papers:

Hodges' model is ideally to suited to critique of systems and socio-technical dimensions as previously described:

Jones, P. (2009) Socio-Technical Structures, the Scope of Informatics and Hodges’ model, IN, Staudinger, R., Ostermann, H., Bettina Staudinger, B. (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Nursing Informatics and Socio-Technical Structures, Idea Group Publishing, Inc. Chap. 11, pp. 160-174.

Plus, there are many posts tagged 'socio-technical' - hyphenated to emphasize the inter- multi- trans-disciplinary bridges that the model provides (some posts are also tagged 'sociotechnical').

The research project Designing for Changing Values provides encouragement here for the increasing relevance of Hodges' model:

How to Deal with Value Change in Sociotechnical System Design

"Not value neutral

A key insight from philosophy of technology is that technological artifacts and sociotechnical systems are not value neutral, but support or inhibit certain values. Several philosophical accounts for understanding the embedding of values in technological artifacts have been proposed and approaches like Value Sensitive Design, Design for Values and Responsible Innovation have been established for integrating values into technical design.

A theoretical blind spot

A blind spot is, however, the possibility of value change after a sociotechnical system has been designed. For example, when many of our current energy and transportation systems were designed sustainability was not yet a central value, and we are now struggling to incorporate this value into these systems. Progress in the field is currently inhibited by the lack of a philosophical theory of value change in sociotechnical systems.

Better design strategies

This project fills the gap by developing such a theory. It moves beyond the state of the art by proposing a dynamic rather than a static account of values, by developing insights in the dynamics of value change, by extending analysis about the embedding of values in technical artefacts to sociotechnical systems and by developing design strategies that aim at designing sociotechnical systems that can better deal with value change."

https://www.valuechange.eu/


I do wonder about the subjective-objective and qualitative-quantitative 'metrics' of value and values (and other metrics - change, complexity, emergence). In human and mechanistic terms there are marked differences too between value and values. Values are, should, must be, embedded in individual nurses and hence the domains of Hodges' model. This is how (in part) the model supports reflection, and critical thinking.

No surprise then being created for practice, Hodges' model is dynamic. The model can help capture and present an ongoing sequence of frames. Where were we? Where are we going? How have things changed? (This is

Hodges' model prompted the thought of 'holistic bandwidth', the call for papers on corpus analysis seeks examples of formal work. The model, initially blank provides a conceptual framework upon which to capture a conceptually situated corpus. The structure of Hodges' model is a foundation for a relational ontology that draws upon semantic distance between the model's two axes (as per the table below):

INDIVIDUAL <-> GROUP 

HUMANISTIC <-> MECHANISTIC

Not just that but the synonyms that may apply. So for 'individual': person, patient, client, self, client, 'I', 'me', Peter, Chi, student, teacher and whatever role is applicable. This point is vital as there is a potential and workflow that runs from:

1. Neutral, blank, non-judgemental (the model as a template): the content - empty, null state.

2. The model's essential structure.

With a potential for conceptual explosion - from a basic (very simplistic) inherent corpus, to one that is explicit:

3. A response to a situation, a context.

4. That then changes according to events, aims, objectives, strategies, philosophical perspective (recovery, strengths, self-care), policy emphasis ...

In health and social care as suggested above we would hope that the model is employed to shift from the general to the specific - person-centred approach.

 INDIVIDUAL
|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               
HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      
SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 
|
GROUP

value(S)

VALUE(S)

value(s)

VALUE(S)


This conceptual framework is not limited to strategy either, but can also encompass deliberation on operational and tactical concerns.


See also:

Soc. Philosophy & Technology Conf: Charleston, S.C. 8-11 July 2007

20/20 vision minus 1, 2, or 4 blind spots....

'corpus'

Jones, P. (2012). Exploring several dimensions of local, global and glocal using the generic conceptual framework Hodges's model. The Journal Of Community Informatics. 8(3). Retrieved from https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/3034

Jones P. Exploring the relationship of threshold concepts and Hodges’ model of care from the individual to populations and global health. Rev Cuid. 2017; 8(3): 1697-720. http://dx.doi.org/10.15649/cuidarte.v8i3.464

Saturday, April 23, 2022

The 1st International Workshop On Ontologies for the Disaster Domain

We invite submissions to the First Workshop On Ontologies for the Disaster Domain – WOODD -

to be held as a part of The Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO) 2022 at Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden, from August 15 to 19, 2022.

Image via paper from
International Journal of Geo-Information
(Paper - Implementation of FAIR Principles for Ontologies
in the Disaster Domain:
A Systematic Literature Review)



The workshop aims to bring together knowledge modeling engineers, domain ontology experts, developers of disaster knowledge graphs to discuss different techniques and rationale for constructing various ontologies in the disaster domain. This will potentially also set the stage for opening the floor for discussion about limitations of existing research, missing pieces, and overall address a key question

Do we need a domain ontology or a reference ontology for the hazard domain”?

Topics

1) Ontologies that focus on modeling different aspects of the domain (e.g. phases of disaster management life cycle, observational data, spatial-temporal views, such as point, area, or trajectory phenomenon)

2) Ontologies that model causal chains (e.g. for compounding disasters and disaster impacts)

3) Construction and annotation of domain taxonomies or vocabularies using machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies

4) Ontology integration and ontology alignment in the hazard-disaster domain

5) Ontology modularity in the hazard-disaster domain

6) Ontologies and disaster domain knowledge graphs

Submissions are particularly welcome that address aspects of this theme, but submissions outside of the theme, but maintain the core idea of the workshop are also welcome.

Submissions

We encourage three types of contributions:

1) Full research paper: Submitted papers must not exceed 14 pages excluding the bibliography. Please, note that the minimum length is 10 pages.
Short paper: Submitted papers must not exceed 6 pages excluding the bibliography. Please, note that the minimum length is 5 pages (including the bibliography).

2) Extended abstracts (presentation only) should be 2-4 pages long including the bibliography. Please, note that extended abstracts will not be included in the CEUR proceedings.

Submissions should be made via Easychair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jowo2022.

For more guidelines about submissions please refer to the workshop website at 
https://shirlysteph.github.io/woodd-jowo22/

Important Dates

Papers submissions: June 7th, 2022
Papers notifications: July 15th, 2022
Camera-ready version submissions:  August 5th, 2022
JOWO: August 15-19th

Chairs


– Shirly Stephen, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA  
– Rui Zhu, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
– Cogan Shimizu, Kansas State University, USA

My source: Cogan Shimizu via semantic-web AT w3.org

Saturday, April 04, 2020

VerbAtlas 1.0 - Semantic Role Labeling and beyond! c/o Roberto Navigli

VerbAtlas 1.0 - Semantic Role Labeling and beyond!

We are proud to announce that VerbAtlas 1.0 (http://verbatlas.org) is finally available for download at http://verbatlas.org/download. Developed in the Sapienza NLP group (http://nlp.uniroma1.it), the multilingual Natural Language Processing research team at the Sapienza University of Rome, VerbAtlas is a novel large-scale manually-crafted semantic resource for wide-coverage, intelligible and scalable Semantic Role Labeling. The goal of VerbAtlas is to manually cluster WordNet synsets that share similar semantics into sets of semantically-coherent frames. The main features are:
  • 466 semantically-coherent frames using 26 cross-frame VerbNet-inspired semantic roles for their argument structure.
  • Available both for download and via RESTful API.
  • Full coverage of WordNet 3.0 verb synsets (13,000+).
  • Complete linkage to BabelNet 4.0, which supports 280+ languages (new version to come later this year!).
  • Manual mapping to PropBank of all CoNLL-2009 and CoNLL-2012 dataset occurrences (5000+ mappings).
  • Selectional preferences: the superconcept most probably associated with a semantic role in a frame (e.g. food for the patient role of the EAT frame).
  • Default/shadow arguments: arguments logically implied or already incorporated into a verb.
  • Implicit arguments: arguments that are implicit in the argument structure of a verb.
And much more! Please check out our EMNLP 2019 paper:

A. Di Fabio, S. Conia, R. Navigli “VerbAtlas: a Novel Large-Scale Verbal Semantic Resource and Its Application to Semantic Role Labeling”, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, pp. 627-637

and http://verbatlas.org for more details!

A state-of-the-art span-based SRL system which uses VerbAtlas and PropBank jointly is also available from the same website (just type a sentence!).

VerbAtlas is an output of the MOUSSE ERC Consolidator Grant n. 726487 and the ELEXIS project no.731015. Babelscape proudly developed the online interface and API, provides the infrastructure for maintaining the service and works on the improvement of the resource. 

Enjoy!
The Sapienza NLP group
=====================================
Roberto Navigli
Dipartimento di Informatica
Sapienza University of Rome
Viale Regina Elena 295b (building G, second floor)
00161 Roma Italy
Home Page: http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli
Sapienza NLP Group: http://nlp.uniroma1.it
My Source:
The Semantic-web list @w3.org



What are / should be the current core verbs allocated to each of the care (knowledge) domains of Hodges' model?


individual
|
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
|
group - population

*personalise


scientify


socialise

 politicise
*(intra- inter-)personalise?


From above introduction to VerbAtlas:

"A state-of-the-art span-based SRL system which uses VerbAtlas and PropBank jointly is also available from the same website (just type a sentence!)."

Sentence: "Nurses wear certified personal protective equipment to care for patients with Coronavirus." in VerbAtlas 1.0


See also:


Sunday, July 29, 2018

Relatedness and Similarity - in The Health Career Model

How can we demonstrate the basis for the axes, 'found' conceptual structures and conceptual clustering in Hodges' model?

UMLS::Similarity Web Interface (measuring pairwise similarity and relatedness of medical concepts)

Some results and definitions obtained from the above.

Results:

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Lin (lin) is 0.85.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Conceptual Distance (cdist) is 0.5.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Resnik (res) is 1.6384.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Jiang & Conrath (jcn) is 1.7295.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Path Length (path) is 0.5.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Wu & Palmer (wup) is 0.8.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Nguyen & Al-Mubaid (nam) is 0.2038.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Random Measure (random) is 0.5703.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

The similarity of person (C0027361 ) and patient (C0030705 ) using Leacock & Chodorow (lch) is 2.9957.
Using:    SAB :: include MSH
    REL :: include PAR/CHD

--
The relatedness of individual (C0027361 ) and group (C1257890 ) using Vector Measure (vector) is 0.7869.
Using:    SABDEF :: include UMLS_ALL
    RELDEF :: include CUI/PAR/CHD/RB/RN

The relatedness of individual (C0027361 ) and group (C1257890 ) using Adapted Lesk (lesk) is 9584.
Using:    SABDEF :: include UMLS_ALL
    RELDEF :: include CUI/PAR/CHD/RB/RN

--
The relatedness of self (C0036588 ) and group (C1257890 ) using Adapted Lesk (lesk) is 263.
Using:    SABDEF :: include UMLS_ALL
    RELDEF :: include CUI/PAR/CHD/RB/RN

The relatedness of self (C0036588 ) and group (C1561557 ) using Vector Measure (vector) is 0.4054.
Using:    SABDEF :: include UMLS_ALL
    RELDEF :: include CUI/PAR/CHD/RB/RN

Definitions:

individual (C0027361)
HL7V3.0 : A living subject of the species homo sapiens.
NCI : Human beings in general.
NCI : A human being.
NCI_BRIDG : A human being.
MSH : Persons as individuals (e.g., ABORTION APPLICANTS) or as members of a group (e.g., HISPANIC AMERICANS). It is not used for members of the various professions (e.g., PHYSICIANS) or occupations (e.g., LIBRARIANS) for which OCCUPATIONAL GROUPS is available.
individual (C0237401)
individual (C3245468)
HL7V3.0 : Description:Person as specified by coverage policy or program.
HL7V3.0 : Description:The level of coverage under the policy or program is available to an individual.
HL7V3.0 : Description: A role played by a party covered under a policy as the policy holder. An individual may be either a person or an organization.
Note: The party playing the role of an individual insured is not a claimant in the sense conveyed by the RoleClassCoveredParty CLAIM (claimant). However, a named insured may make a claim under a policy, e.g., a party that is the named insured and policy holder under a comprehensive automobile insurance policy may become the claimant for coverage under that policy if injured in an automobile accident and there is no liable third party. In the case of an individual insured making a claim, a role type code INSCLM (insured claimant) subtypes the class to indicate that an individual insured has filed a claim for a loss.
Example: The individual insured under a comprehensive automobile, disability, or property and casualty policy that is the policy holder.
HL7V3.0 :
self (C0036588)
HL7V3.0 : The "same" roleclass asserts an identity between playing and scoping entities: that they are in fact instances of the same entity and, in the case of discrepancies (e.g different DOB, gender), that one or both are in error.
Usage:
playing and scoping entities must have same classcode, but need not have identical attributes or values.
Example:
a provider registry maintains sets of conflicting demographic data for what is reported to be the same individual.
NCI : The individual as the object of his own reflective consciousness.
HL7V3.0 : The relationship that a person has with his or her self.
self (C1551994)
HL7V3.0 : Covered party is the policy holder. Also known as the subscriber.

See also:

WordNet::Similarity

This is a Perl module that implements a variety of semantic similarity and relatedness measures based on information found in the lexical database WordNet. In particular, it supports the measures of Resnik, Lin, Jiang-Conrath, Leacock-Chodorow, Hirst-St.Onge, Wu-Palmer, Banerjee-Pedersen, and Patwardhan-Pedersen. 

n.b. While Hodges' model was created for application in health and social care contexts it can be applied generally.


Sunday, January 29, 2017

Hodges' model: Combined Care Feature Capture - Black Box + White Box?

Nursing is, in theory and practice, far removed from multimedia; which in turn has changed markedly from when the poster quoted below was published in 1999. 

Nursing is 'multi-media' in the sense of combining several data sources across several domains of knowledge and from a range of media.

[From a conference poster no longer available:]
"Feature Detectors 
Feature detectors are used to build a semantically rich index entry for the original multimedia object. They do this on two different levels:
  1. Blackbox detectors are implemented in a programming language to access the raw multimedia data and to derive the desired features from it. Example: the web_header detector sends a HTTP HEAD request to the specified HTTP server and extracts the content type from the response.
  2. Whitebox detectors consist of queries over the already collected feature values. Example: the page_type detector uses the content type to determine if an object is a page.
In the general case blackbox detectors will derive low-level feature data, e.g., the color distribution of an image. But they can also be used for more complex tasks, like finding a face in an image. The function of whitebox detectors is to relate low-level features to concepts, e.g., an image is a portrait because its color distribution classifies it as a photo and it contains exactly one face."
Hodges' model is situated and in healthcare context is everything. Behind a hospital clinic or ward door we might expect certain features to be found. Out in the community following a referral again certain features will be found. The features take on a personalised nature as key features confirming a diagnosis, problem or care issue are presented by the patient (client) or their carer. I'm not sure whether this is useful or not, but the domains of Hodges' model suggests quite a few boxes are required to tick the box that is holistic - integrated care.

And that does not take account of exactly where the knowledge resides; that is another test.


M., A. Schmidt, M. Kersten. Acoi: A System for Indexing Multimedia Objects. In International Workshop on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, November 1999. (n.b. The link in the poster is no longer valid.)

My original source:
ERCIM News No. 59 October 2004 Grammar Enables Effective Multimedia Search Queries. pp.63-64.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Networked Learning Conference 2016 leads to Barcelona which means...?

After the ICIC 2016 in Barcelona this past week I'm still reflecting on Lancaster and the Network Learning Conference. It has been a busy month. I'll write about Barcelona (again) soon, but with the ICIC presentation done (thanks to all 30+ who attended the session and engaged afterwards) I can catch up a little. Despite the stress this implies this is all positive as the challenge lies in the opportunities and tensions between nursing-healthcare, education and technology.

In Lancaster, Fran Tracy (Liverpool John Moores University) and Jesper Jensen (University of Southern Denmark) held a symposium - Designs for learning with the Semantic Web. Three papers were presented followed by discussion on:

1) the emergent nature of semantic web technologies, 2) how participatory research practices like DBR are affected during the development of semantic web technologies and 3) how both of these concepts may find a new place as we move forward into increasingly complex and changeable educational environments.
By means of introduction there were several useful pointers and reminders, including Stahl with a definition of emergence and a definition of design based learning (and DB Research). It was the combination of semantic web, DBR and networked learning which made this an immediate must-go-to session for me. My research proposal is seeking to combine these aspects plus situated learning.

I probably won't be following DBR by-the-letter(s) as defined by some advocates. My application will to some extent be emergent. There will, as I envisage it, be several invitations for users to contribute to DBR but being asynchronous this needs to be factored in. All learners - users could contribute to successive iterations, but this is unlikely and once the numbers get beyond 10-15 it would become complex and difficult to make a sense of. Poll-based reconciliation might work? As per #2 above my plan would be that a number of subjects (web users) would provide views on their experience with the model and the future site. So it is DBR on a scale that befits a small-scale evaluation study. Tracey also mentioned Wang and Hannafin (2005) and their definition of DBR:
a systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories. (p. 7)
The context sensitive is were I see a role for situated learning. There are a couple of hierarchies that result. Situated learning brings in the community (- of practice), but Hodges' is firstly about the student, the care situation and their learning with the model, reflection and developing reflective practice. There are few examples of technology mediated group reflection, but the technical challenges of the group form make the individual starting point more realistic?

Simonson also cites the above and notes how DBR is pragmatic. My approach is pragmatic (that's why it's taking so long).

In Hodges' model I've written before how the interpersonal care domain, combines the INTRA (an individual's metacognition - their thinking about thinking) and the INTERpersonal (how they relate to the other). The NL conference and this past week at #ICIC2016 have helped me realise that this project may also possess this property*. As an intraproject and interproject (?) subjects (students) may engage at any of the following levels:
  • Not engage in design questions at all / Read the intro materials on Hodges' model
  • Read the intro materials / use the site for their case study purposes
Drupal can (I believe and have seen demonstrated) provide a great deal of web analytics from logs and reports. There is the prospect of taking this further using web analytics to inform the specific site locations subjects have visited. (For Hodges' model visual tracking would be an excellent measure but that is beyond me). There is a potential escalator of sorts here:
  • Use the site for their case study purposes / comment on the usability of h2cm and the site
  • Comment on the usability of h2cm and the site / See their web analytics data and my conclusions about this 
  • See their web analytics data and my (other student's!) conclusions about this / Use their experience, knowledge and this feedback to respond to design questions
These design questions would then socio-technically span their nursing care learning and TEL. The project as a whole represents at its core the intra, its about the student's reflection and being reflexive. It could be that the project can progress to group and community. As posted previously I have highlighted the functionality of Drupal with respect to the semantic web. I mentioned Drupal in the discussion. The conceptual (and semantic) dimension that can be found within Hodges' model, the curriculum, the learner's vocabulary and development might facilitate that transition from individual to group? Since 2008 I've followed the development of RDF, semantic web in Drupal and the longevity of contributed modules and Drupal projects that have used them. Framing these observations with an emergent lens is fascinating in terms of the challenges, opportunities and tensions in nurse education, TEL and furthering Hodges' model.

I added the asterisk above as what follows from that point seems a long winded description of what is basically an experiment, with the attendant risks... I need to forget about the INTER and concentrate on the INTRA and yet both clamour for attention. Whatever follows must deliver something tangible for subjects# to mitigate the risk and translate experiment into (some resemblance of) workflow? It can't be quod cum fit, however long 'after' may be...

(The terms intra-project and inter-project are not novel, see for example: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/31946/ )

The symposium paper

Simonson, M. (2006). DESIGN-BASED RESEARCH Applications for Distance Education. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 7(1), pp. vii–viii.

Wang, F. & Hannafin, M. (2005). Design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(4), 5-23.

# students, subjects, users - all these terms may be applicable.

Friday, November 06, 2015

RDF in the Political Domain: c/o Narayana, S., Varma, G.P.S. & Govardhan, A. (2013)

individual
|
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic --------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
|
group









"Consider the scenario where user wishes to find semantic associations between two persons in the domain of ‘Politics’. Then concepts such as ‘Politician’, ‘Political Organization’, ‘Government Organization’ and ‘Legislation’ are considered to be more relevant whereas the concepts such as ‘Financial Organization’ and ‘Terrorist Organization’ are considered to be less relevant. So, user is provided facilities to define his context by selecting his interested regions from the ontology, and based on this context the associations are ranked. As an example consider the RDF graph shown in Figure 2. It shows that, the user has selected three regions belonging to ‘Political Organization’, ‘Politician’, and ‘Legislation’" (p.97).


Figure 2 is copied below.

Reference and Acknowledgement:
Narayana, S., Varma, G.P.S. & Govardhan, A. (2013) An Improved Technique for Ranking Semantic Associations. International Journal of Web & Semantic Technology. 4, 93–106. doi:10.5121/ijwest.2013.4407


Part of RDF graph: DOI : 10.5121/ijwest.2013.4407


Friday, June 12, 2015

Sharing of Knowledge: Culture, Community, Conceptual Spaces and Economics (Gärdenfors)

"Culture, in the form of interaction between people, may in itself generate constraints on conceptual spaces. For example, Freyd (1983) puts forward the intriguing proposal that conceptual spaces may evolve as a representational form in a community just because people have to share knowledge (Freyd 1983, pp. 193–194):

There have been a number of different approaches towards analyzing the structures in semantic domains, but what these approaches have in common is the goal of discovering constraints on knowledge representation. I argue that the structures the different semantic analyses uncover may stem from shareability constraints on knowledge representation. [. . . ] So, if a set of terms can be shown to behave as if they are represented in a three-dimensional space, one inference that is often made is that there is both some psychological reality to the spatial reality (or some formally equivalent formulation) and some innate necessity to it. But it might be that the structural properties of the knowledge domain came about because such structural properties provide for the most efficient sharing of concepts. That is, we cannot be sure that the regularities tell us anything about how the brain can represent things, or even “prefer” to, if it didn’t have to share concepts with other brains.
Here Freyd hints at an economic explanation of why we have conceptual spaces: they facilitate the sharing of knowledge." p.17.

From: Gärdenfors, P. (2004) Conceptual Spaces as a Framework for Knowledge Representation. Mind and Matter. Vol. 2(2), pp. 9–27.



Monday, January 20, 2014

ERCIM News No. 96 Special theme: "Linked Open Data"

Dear ERCIM News Reader,

ERCIM News No. 96 has just been published at
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en96

Special Theme: "Linked Open Data"
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en96/special/
Guest editors
: Irini Fundulaki (Institute of Computer Science, FORTH) and Sören Auer (University of Bonn and Fraunhofer IAIS)

http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en96
Keynote: "Linked Data: The Quiet Revolution" by Wendy Hall

This issue for download
pdf
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN96/EN96-web.pdf
epub: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN96/EN96.epub

Next issue: No. 97, April 2014 - Special Theme: "Cyber-Physical Systems"
(see the call at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/call)

Thank you for your interest in ERCIM News.
Feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.

Best regards,
Peter Kunz
ERCIM News central editor

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Sunday, December 22, 2013

mEDucator 3.0 | Open Linked Education - Melina+ (Drupal)


http://www.meducator3.net/melinaplus/

Checking through links yesterday I came across the mEDucator initiative and Melina+ [no longer available] which is part and noticed it is built using Drupal.

There is a thread on Drupal.org on science applications:

https://groups.drupal.org/science-applications

I posted in 2009 about the Science Collaboration Framework - SCF (for creating biomedical resources).

The link to SCF no longer works; there is an archive of this and other work that was part of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC).

So it's important to consider these initiatives at least in terms of their longevity, their scale and number of participants, as examples of funded research and as Drupal projects.

Friday, November 01, 2013

A book chapter: Spatial semantics - definitions...

This book would appear to be an essential reference in respect of h2cm, the following is from chapter 13:

Spatial semantics is the study of the meaning of spatial language, but what is to be regarded as ‘spatial language’? A moment’s reflection suffices to show that the answer to this question is anything but trivial, since SPACE is not a self-contained ‘semantic field’, but rather constitutes an important part of the background for all conceptualization and meaning (Kant [1787] 1964). Furthermore, the term ‘space’ has been used all too often in an extended, metaphorical sense in Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Science, e.g., ‘Space Grammar’ (Langacker 1982), ‘Mental Spaces’ (Fauconnier 1985), ‘Conceptual Spaces’ (Gärdenfors 2000). Hence, an unrestricted interpretation of the term ‘space’ might lead us to think that ‘all semantics is spatial semantics’, a conclusion that not even cognitive linguists would find too attractive. Therefore, the scope of spatial semantics needs to be restricted, and this can and has been done in at least three different ways: by form class, by semantic category, and by communicative function. The three definitions based on these restrictions do not coincide, however, and each leaves something to be desired.

Jordan Zlatev (2007) Spatial Semantics, Chapter 13. In. Hubert Cuyckens and Dirk Geeraerts (eds.) Handbook in Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

ERCIM News No. 95 Special theme: "Image Understanding"

Dear ERCIM News Reader,

ERCIM News No. 95 has just been published at
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en95

Special Theme: "Image Understanding"
Guest editors: Michal Haindl, Institute of Information Theory and Automation, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en95/special/

Keynote: "Image Understanding – An EU Perspective"
by Libor Král, Head of Unit A2 – Robotics in Directorate General Communication Networks, Content & Technology, European Commission

This issue for download
pdf
: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN95/EN95-web.pdf
epub: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN95/EN95.epub

Next issue: No. 96, January 2014 - Special Theme: "Linked Open Data"
(see Call at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/call)

Thank you for your interest in ERCIM News.
Feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.

Best regards,
Peter Kunz
ERCIM News central editor

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ERCIM offers fellowships for PhD holders from all over the world. The next round is open!
Next deadline 31 October 2013
http://fellowship.ercim.eu/

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Drupalcon Prague: sessions, missed ops, leaflets and old contacts - renewed

The structure of Drupalcons provide a range of sources for learning, networking and information. The main sessions are the most obvious source, plus there are many vendors providing and marketing various services from development, hosting to specialist services. Less formal there are the Birds of a Feather BoFs, core conversations. I did not get to any BoFs, it is always difficult when these things run concurrently.

I'll list here some things that stood out from leaflets left on the coffee tables to BoFs that clashed (I've revisited the program). First up is a BoF that points to a useful bundled project:

Creating Graphs and Maps with SearchAPI

BoFs, being informal are quite dynamic so the lesson for me is to check the program for additions and things you may have missed. I missed a BoF on e-learning in Drupal, the Quiz and related modules - H5P that I posted about last May. Gutted for sure, as I can envisage how I could use these tools beyond the old HTML multiple choice form.

The above BoF included a demo of Opigno an LMS - learning management system.

As to companies, the Semantic Web Company offers Drupal services. This lead was a flyer I picked up on the last day and another prompt to revisit Neologism a Drupal project I came across in Drupalcon Szeged, Hungary in 2008 and posted about. The introductory text from the DERI Neologism website reads:

Neologism is a vocabulary publishing platform for the Web of Data, with a focus on ease of use and compatibility with Linked Data principles. Neologism is free and Open Source.
With Neologism, you can create RDF classes and properties, which are needed to publish on the Web of Data. Neologism makes creating and publishing vocabularies easy and fast. It supports the RDFS standard, and a part of OWL.
Among a great many people, I met Alan Burke in Szeged back in '08 and he re-introduced himself this week in Prague. He is now full-time dedicated to Drupal and was pleased to learn that as an 'enthusiast' I am still engaged. I qualified this - with a website still to do; but yes, I'm very much still on-board. I really appreciate Alan's coming over during the break and hearing of his progress and that of his colleagues.

Scalability is a common discussion in software. Scale is an issue for new businesses also. One of the sessions in Prague (several probably) drew attention to the complexity of the 'Drupal stack'. Is it possible for an end-user to fully master it? In our quick chat it became apparent that this was partly why Alan was pleased to learn that I am still climbing the curve. Scalability can be a problem for individuals too, as in making sense of the commercial offerings, whether semantic services or hosting.

There was a BoF on data visualization too - but again I was elsewhere. Dataseed sounds an interesting fusion. I also followed sessions on creating multilingual sites, Drupal 8, Symfony, plus Twig the new templating system for Drupal 8. All in all it was a great event with some sight seeing last Monday. The greatest source though is the community!

Friday, December 21, 2012

International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13) & Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

Call for Papers
5th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13)
+
6th International Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)
Organized as One Full Day Workshop
Acronym: KR4HC’13 / ProHealth’13
Murcia, Spain –  June 1st, 2013
In conjunction with the 14th Conference on
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME'13)

Web site: ...
Important Dates

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 8 March 2013
Notification of Acceptance: 9 April 2013
Camera-ready version: 7 May 2013
KR4HC/ProHealth Workshop: 1 June 2013

Workshop Goals

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high quality services to their patients at affordable costs. These challenges become more prominent with the growth in the aging population with chronic diseases and the rise of healthcare costs. High degree of specialization of medical disciplines, huge amounts of medical knowledge and patient data to be consulted in order to provide evidence-based recommendations, and the need for personalized healthcare are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situation necessitates computer-based support of healthcare process & knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making.

This workshop brings together researchers from two communities who have been addressing these challenges from two different perspectives. The knowledge-representation for healthcare community, which is part of the larger medical informatics community, has been focusing on knowledge representation and reasoning to support knowledge management and clinical decision-making. This community has been developing efficient representations, technologies, and tools for integrating all the important elements that health care providers work with: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and healthcare information systems, clinical practice guidelines, and standardized medical vocabularies. The process-oriented information systems in healthcare community, which is part of the larger business process management (BPM) community, has been studying ways to adopt BPM technology in order to provide effective solutions for healthcare process management. BPM technology has been successfully used in other sectors for establishing process-aware enterprise information systems (vs. collections of stand-alone systems for different departments in the organization). Adopting BPM technology in the healthcare sector is starting to address some of the unique characteristics of healthcare processes, including their high degree of flexibility, the integration with EMRs and shared semantics of healthcare domain concepts, and the need for tight cooperation and communication among medical care teams.

This joint workshop brings together two approaches: healthcare process support, as addressed in previous ProHealth workshops, and healthcare knowledge representation as dealt with in previous KR4HC workshops. The workshop shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of the two approaches for supporting healthcare process & healthcare knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making. It shall further provide a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized knowledge-based clinical process support can be debated. We want to bring together researchers and practitioners from these different, yet similar fields to improve the understanding of domain specific requirements, methods and theories, tools and techniques, and the gaps between IT support and healthcare processes yet to be closed. This forum also provides an opportunity to explore how the approaches from the two communities could be better integrated.

History of the Joint Workshop 

Providing computer-based support in healthcare is a topic that has been picking up speed for more than two decades. We are witnessing a plethora of different workshops devoted to various topics involving computer applications for healthcare. Our goal has been to try to join forces with other communities in order to learn from each other, advance science, and create a stronger and larger community. In 2012, the two workshops, KR4HC and ProHealth held a joint workshop, which proved to be very successful. This year, we are aiming to continue the collaboration initiative and hold another joint workshop.

The two workshops have quite a long history, as briefly described below.

The first KR4HC workshop, held in conjunction with the 12th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine conference (AIME'09), brought together members of two existing communities: the clinical guidelines and protocols community, who held a line of four workshops (European Workshop on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols (CPG'2000, CPG'2004); AI Techniques in Health Care: Evidence-based Guidelines and Protocols 2006; Computer-based Clinical Guidelines and Protocols 2008) and a related community who held a series of three workshops / special tracks devoted to the formalization, organization, and deployment of procedural knowledge in healthcare (CBMS’07 Special Track on Machine Learning and Management of Health Care Procedural Knowledge 2007; From Medical Knowledge to Global Health Care 2007; Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures 2008). Since then, two more KR4HC workshops have been held, in conjunction with the ECAI’10 and the AIME’11 conferences.

The first ProHealth workshop took place in the context of the 5th Int’l Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) in 2007. The next three ProHealth Workshops were also held in conjunction with BPM conferences (BPM'08, BPM’09, and BPM’11). The aim of ProHealth has been to bring together researchers from the BPM and the Medical Informatics communities. As the workshop was associated with the BPM conference that had never been attended by researchers from the Medical Informatics community, we had included Medical Informatics researchers as keynote speakers of the workshop, members of the program committee, and to our delight, saw a number of researchers from the Medical Informatics community actively participating in ProHealth workshops. Following the keynote talk given by Manfred Reichert from the BPM community at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2011 (AIME’11) conference, where KR4HC was held, the organizers of ProHealth and KR4HC workshops have shown their interest to hold their workshops in conjunction as part of the BPM'12 conference, which marks a landmark in the collaboration between the two communities. We are continuing the efforts that started four years ago by members of the Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC) community to strengthen the collaboration between the ProHealth and SEHC communities.

Workshop Theme

Original contributions are sought, regarding the development of theory, techniques, and use cases of Artificial Intelligence and / or process management in the area of healthcare, particularly connected to patient data, clinical guidelines and healthcare processes.

Submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to the goals of the workshop. The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to the following areas:

• Process modeling in healthcare
• Computer-interpretable clinical guidelines / protocols and decision support
• Workflow management in healthcare
• Semantic integration of healthcare processes with electronic medical records
• Knowledge representation and ontologies for healthcare processes
• Temporal knowledge representations and exploitation
• Facilitating knowledge-acquisition of healthcare processes
• Visualization, monitoring and mining healthcare processes
• Knowledge extraction from healthcare databases and EPRs
• Knowledge combination, personalization and adaptation of healthcare processes
• Compliance of healthcare processes
• Evaluation of quality and safety of careflow systems
• Managing flexibility and exceptions in healthcare processes
• Process optimization and simulation in healthcare organizations and healthcare networks
• Experiences in deploying knowledge-based tools in healthcare
• Patient empowerment in healthcare
• Linking clinical care and clinical research
• Lifecycle management for healthcare processes
• Context-aware healthcare processes
• Ambient intelligence & smart processes in healthcare
• Mobile process support in healthcare
• Process interoperability & standards in healthcare
• Process-oriented system architectures in healthcare


Format of the Workshop

The 1-day workshop will comprise accepted long and short papers, tool presentations, and 1 keynote. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. An informal proceedings will be available during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper. The selected best long (full) papers will be included in the formal proceedings, which are expected to be published as part of the LNAI Springer series, as it was done in all previous editions of the workshop.

Paper Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Three types of submissions are possible: (1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting mature research results, (2) position papers reporting research that may be in preliminary stage not yet been evaluated, and (3) tool reports. Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.
Papers should be submitted in the LNCS format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper, position paper, or tool report). Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the Easychair system ...