IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.

Theory of traces

Abstract The theory of traces , originated by A. Mazurkiewicz in 1977, is an attempt to provide a mathematical description of the behavior of concurrent systems. Its aim is to reconcile the sequential nature of observations of the system behavior on the one hand and the nonsequential nature of causality between the actions of the system on the other hand. One can see the theory of traces to be rooted in formal string language theory with the notion of partial commutativity playing the central role. Alternatively one can see the theory of traces to be rooted in the theory of labeled acyclic directed graphs (or even in the theory of labeled partial orders). This paper attempts to present a major portion of the theory of traces in a unified way. However, it is not a survey in the sense that a number of new notions are introduced and a number of new results are proved. Although traditionally most of the development in the theory of traces follows the string-language-theoretic line, we try to demonstrate to the reader that the graph-theoretic point of view may be more appropriate. The paper essentially consists of two parts. The first one (Sections 1 through 4) is concerned with the basic theory of traces. The second one (Section 5) presents applications of the theory of traces to the theory of the behavior of concurrent systems, where the basic system model we have chosen is the condition/event system introduced by C.A. Petri.

Incremental relevance feedback

Although relevance feedback techniques have been investigated for more than 20 years, hardly any of these techniques has been implemented in a commercial full-text document retrieval system. In addition to pure performance problems, this is due to the fact that the application of relevance feedback techniques increases the complexity of the user interface and thus also the use of a document retrieval system. In this paper we concentrate on a relevance feedback technique that allows easily understandable and manageable user interfaces, and at the same time provides high-quality retrieval results. Moreover, the relevance feedback technique introduced unifies as well as improves other well-known relevance feedback techniques.

Characterizations of the decidability of some problems for regular trace languages

The decidability of the equivalence problem and the disjointness problem for regular trace languages is considered. By describing the structure of the independence relations involved, precise characterizations are given of those concurrency alphabets for which these problems are decidable. In fact, the first problem is decidable if and only if the independence relation is transitive, while the second problem is decidable if and only if the independence relation is a so-called transitive forest.

A document retrieval model based on term frequency ranks

This paper introduces a new full-text document retrieval model that is based on comparing occurrence frequency rank numbers of terms in queries and documents.

Traces, dependency graphs and DNLC grammars

Abstract We point out the use of graph grammars for specifying (generating) languages of dependency graphs that arise in theoretical studies of concurrent systems.

Elsevier's Article of the Future enhancing the user experience and integrating data through applications

In a world where our levels of knowledge advance rapidly, so should the communication of research. In partnership with the worlds research community, Elsevier investigates the future of research communication with the ‘Article of the Future’. An intuitive online article format, this proposes the next generation in research publishing, with a simple-to-read online layout and enriched content, allowing true immersion in the subject matter. In addition, through the use of SciVerse® Applications, the Article of the Future connects the formal scientific record with associated external data sets and other contextual information that is available elsewhere on the web. In this article, we present the outcomes of the second phase of the Article of the Future project, with an emphasis on its final designs, user feedback collected, and how the Article of the Future handles the rising need of connecting the formal scientific record with associated discipline-specific data sets.

High-quality and high-performance full-text document retrieval: the Parallel InfoGuide System

Describes the InfoGuide full-text document retrieval system, developed at the Philips Research Laboratories. InfoGuide combines high retrieval quality with high retrieval performance. The high quality is due to the use of the vector-space retrieval model, and the high performance originates from the implementation on the parallel POOMA machine. Implementation aspects as well as evaluation figures are presented, and it is concluded that a 200-term query can be matched against 1,500,000 documents within 3 seconds.<<ETX>>

Posting compression in dynamic retrieval environments

This paper describes a posting compression technique to be used in dynamic full-text document retrieval environments. The compression technique being presented is applicable in main-memory document retrieval systems, and consists of two parts. First there is the efficient use of auxiliary tables, and second there is the application of the well-known rankfrequency law of Zipf. It is shown that on the basis of this law term weights can be approximated, and thus that their explicit storage can be avoided.

InfoGuide: A Full-Text Document Retrieval System

This paper describes a full-text document retrieval system developed at the Philips Research Laboratories. The system is implemented on the POOMA machine, a parallel computer with a large main memory, and offers fast as well as high-quality retrieval on very large document bases.