Emanuele Bellini

Metadata Quality Assessment Tool for Open Access Cultural Heritage Institutional Repositories

Currently, the Metadata Quality in Cultural Heritage Institutional Repositories (IR) is an open issue. In fact, sometimes the value of the metadata fields contains typos, are out of standards, or are totally missing affecting the possibility of searching, discovering and obtaining the digital resource described. Goal of this work is to support institutions to assess the quality of their repository defining a Quality Profile for their metadata schema (e.g. Dublin core) and identifying the Completeness, Accuracy and Consistency as High level metrics. These metrics are translated in a number of computable Low level metrics (formulas) and measurement criteria. The quality measurement process has been implemented exploiting the Grid based AXMEDIS infrastructure to rise up the OAI-PMH harvesting and metadata processing performance. The quality profile metrics and the prototype have been tested on three Open Access Institution Repositories of Italian universities and the evaluation results are presented.

Tiered Approach to Resilience Assessment: Tiered Approach to Resilience Assessment

Regulatory agencies have long adopted a three-tier framework for risk assessment. We build on this structure to propose a tiered approach for resilience assessment that can be integrated into the existing regulatory processes. Comprehensive approaches to assessing resilience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity as needed with stakeholder needs and resources available, and ultimately creating actionable recommendations to enhance resilience are still lacking. Our proposed framework consists of tiers by which analysts can select resilience assessment and decision support tools to inform associated management actions relative to the scope and urgency of the risk and the capacity of resource managers to improve system resilience. The resilience management framework proposed is not intended to supplant either risk management or the many existing efforts of resilience quantification method development, but instead provide a guide to selecting tools that are appropriate for the given analytic need. The goal of this tiered approach is to intentionally parallel the tiered approach used in regulatory contexts so that resilience assessment might be more easily and quickly integrated into existing structures and with existing policies.

Interoperability Knowledge Base for Persistent Identifiers Interoperability Framework

In this paper, we propose a semantic web based solution to implement the Interoperability Framework (IF) for Persistent Identifiers (PI) developed within the context of APARSEN EU project. The IF provides a comprehensive, semantics-aware solution for interoperability of heterogeneous Persistent Identifier systems. Such a solution aims to provide added-value services built on an Interoperability Knowledge Base. The IF ontology refinement and the related prototype specifics have been designed adopting a bottom-up approach that starts from a) the analysis of metadata provided by Content Providers and b) the collection of functional and semantic requirements of Persistent Identifier Domains (PID to fostering ontology-based metadata translation among different bodies. Conclusions and intended future work close the paper.

Quantify Resilience Enhancement of UTS through Exploiting Connected Community and Internet of Everything Emerging Technologies

This work aims at investigating and quantifying the Urban Transport System (UTS) resilience enhancement enabled by the adoption of emerging technology such as Internet of Everything (IoE) and the new trend of the Connected Community (CC). A conceptual extension of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and its formalization have been proposed and used to model UTS complexity. The scope is to identify the system functions and their interdependencies with a particular focus on those that have a relation and impact on people and communities. Network analysis techniques have been applied to the FRAM model to identify and estimate the most critical community-related functions. The notion of Variability Rate (VR) has been defined as the amount of output variability generated by an upstream function that can be tolerated/absorbed by a downstream function, without significantly increasing of its subsequent output variability. A fuzzy-based quantification of the VR based on expert judgment has been developed when quantitative data are not available. Our approach has been applied to a critical scenario as flash flooding considering two cases: when UTS has CC and IoE implemented or not. However, the method can be applied in different scenarios and critical infrastructures. The results show a remarkable VR enhancement if CC and IoE are deployed.

Functional resonance analysis method based-decision support tool for urban transport system resilience management

Today, managing critical infrastructure resilience in smart city is a challenge that can be undertaken by adopting a new class of smart tools, which are able to integrate modeling capability with evidence driven decision support. The Resilience Decision Support tool, as presented in this article, is an innovative and powerful tool that aims at managing critical infrasctructure resilience through a more complex and expressive model based on the Functional Resonance Analysis Method and through the connection of such a model with a system thinking based decision support tool exploiting smart city data. Thanks to ResilienceDS, FRAM model becomes computable and the functional variability that is at the core of the resilience analysis can be quantified. Such quantification allows the decision support tool to compute specific strategies and recommendations for variability dampening at strategic, tactic and operational stage. The solution has been developed in the context of RESOLUTE H2020 project of the European Commission.

NBN: IT The Italian trusted persistent identifier infrastructure

This paper describes how the Italian national bibliography number (NBN) service has become a trusted infrastructure when it has been combined with digital stacks, the national digital preservation infrastructure. A suitable descriptive model, the bricks of trust, to assess the trustworthiness of the PI systems, has been provided. The Italian NBN has been positively assessed according to this model.

The Role of a Semantic Approach of Complex Statistical Information System Planning and Management

Tourism governance is a challenging target, for its implications on a multiplicity of socio-economical processes: in this perspective, the development of a robust informational environments in support of political decisions and social dialogue is in the main institutional agendas. This paper wants to address the problem of harmonizing the different stakeholders languages in the perspective of a shared information system acknowledged by all system actors.

EPICA: easy persistent identifier common architecture

Nowadays the World Wide Web has become the most important platform for publishing scientific materials. The first advantages of online publication are instant access and easy, low-cost, distribution and duplication. But of great impact in middle term success of electronic publication is the availability of systems that support citation and metrics to evaluate the performances of the different actors in the scientific sector. EPICA is an new infrastructure technology supporting integration of uniform and persistent naming systems and declarative expression of metrics used to asses performances. This way independent actors are allowed to cooperate in a common infrastructure. The key element to support this integration is the semantic mapping between metrics and scientific publications available in the Web. This paper discusses this vision and proposes preliminary results related to the definition of a Metrics Assessment Data Model to express this semantic mapping.

Semantics-Aware Resolution of Multi-part Persistent Indentifiers

In this paper, we outline the achievements of the NBN project w.r.t. persistent identification in the context of federated repositories and outline the capabilities of the current prototype. We describe the generalities on the approach adopted for PI assignment and resolution in the twofold modality of hierarchical and peer-to-peer request forwarding. The final implementation will enable each PI domain to communicate with other domains by using the same resolution interface. We also describe the advanced capabilities under development for the retrieval of complex objects by automated agents, combining the PMH interaction protocol with ORE data structures extended as to suit the purpose of digital preservation. We also sketch how to enable metadata interoperability by allowing clients to specify the native metadata format when interrogating a repository and translating proprietary descriptions accordingly.

The Development of Resilience Management Guidelines to Protect Critical Infrastructures in Europe

The capability to be resilient in the face of crises and disasters is a topic of highest political concern in Europe especially as far as critical infrastructures and urban environments are concerned. Critical infrastructures are systems or part of systems essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions, the disruption or destruction of which would have a significant impact on the well-being of people. Examples of them are transportation services, energy infrastructures, water and wastewater systems, health and emergency services, financial services, communication infrastructures, etc. The symposium focuses on the experience of four different projects funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme: DARWIN, RESILIENS, RESOLUTE, SMR. The projects are all dealing with the application of resilience engineering, community resilience and urban resilience concepts to concrete examples of crises and situations of emergency. Such principles are translated into guidelines covering different resilience abilities that the organizations managing critical infrastructure should possess.