New Mexico State University Library

Almost all information professionals agree that the web needs to move to a semantic structure. While work is proceeding in this area, movements to get individual web authors to use semantic markup tools have also been on the rise. This author argues that such efforts are ill conceived and he proposes an automated alternative.

Semantic technologies are in the process of revolutionizing the way we store, access, and communicate digital information. It is vital that information professionals be conversant in the foundational concepts upon which these technologies are based. This article uses two implementations of semantic technologies, the semantic web and the semantic medline project, to introduce the key ideas of semantic technologies to readers.

In 2015, two librarians at the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Iowa turned their dreams into a reality and secured funding to build a zombie-themed evidence-based medicine game. The game features a "choose your own adventure" style that takes students through a scenario where a disease outbreak is taking place and a resident is asked to use evidence-based medicine skills to select a screening and diagnostic tool to use on potentially infected patients. Feedback on the game has been positive, and future plans include building additional modules on therapy, harm, and prognosis.

As with any shared format for serializing data, Primo’s PNX records have limits on the types of data which they pass along from the source records and into the Primo tool. As a result of these limitations, PNX records do not currently have a provision for harvesting and transferring rights information about HathiTrust holdings that the Kansas State University (KSU) Library system indexes through Primo. This created a problem, since Primo was defaulting to indicate that all HathiTrust materials were available to KSU Libraries (K-State Libraries) patrons, when only a limited portion of them actually were. This disconnect was infuriating some library users, and creating difficulties for the public services librarians. There was a library-wide discussion about removing HathiTrust holdings from Primo altogether, but it was decided that such a solution was an overreaction. As a consequence, the library IT department began a crash program to attempt to find a solution to the problem. The r...

In the past scientists reported summaries of their findings; they did not provide their original data collections. Many stakeholders (e.g., funding agencies) are now requesting that such data be made publicly available. This mandate is being adopted to facilitate further discovery, and to mitigate waste and deficits in the research process. At the same time, the necessary infrastructure for data curation (e.g., repositories) has been evolving. The current target is to make research products FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), resulting in data that are curated and archived to be both human and machine compatible. However, most scientists have little training in data curation. Specifically, they are ill-equipped to annotate their data collections at a level that facilitates discoverability, aggregation, and broad reuse in a context separate from their creation or sub-field. To circumvent these deficits data architects may collaborate with scientists to transform and curate data. This paper's example of a data collection describes the electrical properties of outer hair cells isolated from the mammalian cochlea. The data is expressed with a variant of The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), mirrored to provide the metadata and nested data architecture used within the Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5) format. Each digital specimen is displayed in a tree configuration (like directories in a computer) and consists of six main branches based on the ontology classes. The data collections, scripts, and ontological OWL file (OBI based Inner Ear Electrophysiology (OBI_IEE)) are deposited in three repositories. We discuss the impediments to producing such data collections for public use, and the tools and processes required for effective implementation. This work illustrates the impact that small collaborations can have on the curation of our publicly-funded collections, and is particularly salient for fields where data is sparse, throughput is low, and sacrifice of animals is required for discovery.

Strategies to improve the preservation, searchability, and discoverability of research data are a priority. To facilitate these efforts in cell electrophysiology and biophysics we propose that ontologies be used to design and annotate data, as they provide a substantive metadata structure, with reasoned-definitions arranged in a logical, hierarchal structure where the meaning of data are unambiguously assigned. We illustrate this by describing our cell electrophysiology data with an ontology. We then make this hierarchal structure with definitions the basis of the data architecture which is implemented upon transforming the data into the storage format: Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5). Keywords— big data, data management, HDF5, auditory, outer hair cell, OHC, application ontology

While metadata is a key ingredient of machine-semantic technologies, it also suffers from drawbacks. As it is currently formed, metadata lacks dynamic responsiveness and requires top down system modeling. The author proposes a schema and process of emergent metadata which will, if successful, allow metadata to respond to environmental conditions dynamically and exhibit self-organizational features.

Almost all information professionals agree that the web needs to move to a semantic structure. While work is proceeding in this area, movements to get individual web authors to use semantic markup tools have also been on the rise. This author argues that such efforts are ill conceived and he proposes an automated alternative.

Almost all information professionals agree that the web needs to move to a semantic structure. While work is proceeding in this area, movements to get individual web authors to use semantic markup tools have also been on the rise. This author argues that such efforts are ill conceived and he proposes an automated alternative

This study examines changes over time in 40 different Sherlock Holmes films and 39 television series and movies spanning from 1900 to 2017. Quantitative observations were mixed with a qualitative examination. Perceptions of law enforcement became more positive over time, the types of crime did not vary, and representation of race and gender improved over time with incrementally positive changes in the representation of queer, mentally ill, and physically handicapped individuals. The exact nature of these trends is discussed. Additionally, the trends of different decades are explored and compared. Sherlock Holmes is mostly used as a vehicle for storytelling rather than for the salacious crimes that he solves, making the identification of perceptions of crime in different decades difficult. The reasons for why different Sherlock Holmes projects were created in different eras and for different purposes are discussed.