Bolzano Traffic: An Example of Open ITS Deployment for Advanced Traveller Information Services

This paper aims to present the experience gathered in the Italian alpine city of Bolzano within the project“Bolzano Traffic”whose goal is the introduction of an experimental open ITS platform for local service providers,fostering the diffusion of advanced traveller information services and the future deployment of cooperative mobility systems in the region.Several end-users applications targeted to the needs of different user groups have been developed in collaboration with local companies and research centers;a partnership with the EU Co-Cities project has been activated as well.The implemented services rely on real-time travel and traffic information collected by urban traffic monitoring systems or published by local stakeholders(e.g.public transportation operators).An active involvement of end-users,who have recently started testing these demo applications for free,is actually on-going.

Characterization of Small-Scale Farmers and Assessment of Their Access to Crop Production Information in Selected Counties of Kenya

Small-scale farming accounts for 78% of total agricultural production in Kenya and contributes to 23.5% of the country’s GDP. Their crop production activities are mostly rainfed subsistence with any surplus being sold to bring in some income. Timely decisions on farm practices such as farm preparation and planting are critical determinants of the seasonal outcomes. In Kenya, most small-scale farmers have no reliable source of information that would help them make timely and accurate decisions. County governments have extension officers who are mandated with giving farmers advisory services to farmers but they are not able to reach most farmers due to facilitation constraints. The mode and format of sharing information is also critical since it’s important to ensure that it’s timely, well-understood and usable. This study sought to assess access to geospatial derived and other crop production information by farmers in four selected counties of Kenya. Specific objectives were to determine the profile of small-scale farmers in terms of age, education and farm size;to determine the type of information that is made available to them by County and Sub-County extension officers including the format and mode of provision;and to determine if the information provided was useful in terms of accuracy, timeliness and adequacy. The results indicated that over 80% of the farmers were over 35 years of age and over 56% were male. Majority had attained primary education (34%) or secondary education (29%) and most farmers in all the counties grew maize (71%). Notably, fellow farmers were a source of information (71%) with the frequency of sharing information being mostly seasonal (37%) and when information was available (43%). Over 66% of interviewed farmers indicating that they faced challenges while using provided information. The results from the study are insightful and helpful in determining effective ways of providing farmers with useful information to ensure maximum benefits.

Chaining Distributed Geographic Information Web Services Based on Ontology

To solve the problem of chaining distributed geographic information Web services （GI Web services）, this paper provides an ontology-based method. With this method, semantic service description can be achieved by semantic annotation of the elements in a Web service description language（WSDL） document with concepts of geographic ontology, and then a common under-standing about service semantics between customers and providers of Web services is built. Based on the decomposition and formalization of customer requirements, the discovery, composition and execution of GI Web services are explained in detail, and then a chaining of GI Web services is built and used to achieve the customer＇s requirement. Finally, an example based on Web ontology language for service （OWL-S） is provided for testing the feasibility of this method.

The college students' response to customized information services based on Library2.0 technologies at universities in Nanjing

Through a questionnaire survey of students’ response from 6 universities in Nanjing, this paper aims to determine their varying degrees of satisfaction about the customized information service based on Library2.0 technologies. In so doing, the authors carefully examined the data collected from the returned questionnaires about such key issues as the students’ perceptions about the customized information service via a Library2.0platform, self-initiated use experience of such a mechanism, their achieved information searching results vis-à-vis their expectations, etc. In addition, the authors also made a comparative study between information providers(i.e. librarians) and information consumers(i.e. students) at Chinese and American academic libraries.

Semantic QoS Ontology and Semantic Service Ranking Approach for IoT services

Due to a rapid increase in the number of functionally equivalent web services at open and dynamic Io T service environment,Qo S has become a major discrimination factor to reflect the user's expectation and experience of using a service.There are different languages and models for expressing Qo S advertisements and requirements among service providers and consumers.Therefore,it leads to the issues of semantic interoperability of Qo S information and semantic similarity match between a semantic description of the service being requested by the service consumer,and a formal description of the service being offered by the service provider.In this paper,we propose a hierarchical two-layer semantic Qo S ontology to promote the description and declaration of Qo S-based service information in detail for any domain and application.And,we develop a semantic matchmaking algorithm to compare the web services according to their Qo S information and adopt analytical hierarchy process( AHP) to make decision for the ranked services depending on the Qo S criteria.The comparison study and experimental result show that our proposed system is superior to other service ranking approaches.

China's Information Consultancy Services

China’s opening,reform and economicdevelopment,as well as the worldinformation technology revolution,hasenhanced China’s information consultancyservice.Before 1978,China’s economy wasa product economy governed by a highly-centralized planning system with economicinformation basically based on statisticscollected from lower levels and planningcommands to lower levels.The annual productexchange meetings sponsored by specialeconomic departments became the mainchannels for information exchange,soinformation services basically failed to meetneeds.In 1979,China’s economy began itstransfer from a planned to a market one。

Development of university Document Resources Construction for the background of information services

The arrival of the information age, especially development and popularization of digital and network, which fundamentally changes the development process of the library, the library＇ s status as Literature Resource Center has been hit. As the core work of the Library Document Resources Construction in concepts, content structure and evaluation etc. also undergone profound changes, a series of new problems have taken out, which we need to think and solve. In this passage, we discussed from the problem facing of Document Resources Construction work in the digital environment and how to deal with these challenges.

China Telecom Forging An Empire of Comprehensive Information Services

The transformation of China Telecom starts from late 2004. General Manager Wang Xiaochu put forward the strategy of transforming into a comprehensive information services provider soon after he took the post and defined transformation as the core mission in the next several years in 2005.

A New Start for the Library and Information Services at CAS

The new modern library of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), situated in the central area of Science Town in Zhongguancun, Beijing, has just been put into operation. As the largest specialized library in China, the library has become one of paradises for China' s avid readers,offering a central repository and global gateway for the collection and dissemination of scientific and technical information.……

A Personalized Adverse Drug Reaction Early Warning Method Based on Contextual Ontology and Rules Learning

Background: The fatality of adverse drug reactions (ADR) has become one of the major causes of the non-natural disease deaths globally, with the issue of drug safety emerging as a common topic of concern. Objective: The personalized ADR early warning method, based on contextual ontology and rule learning, proposed in this study aims to provide a reference method for personalized health and medical information services. Methods: First, the patient data is formalized, and the user contextual ontology is constructed, reflecting the characteristics of the patient population. The concept of ontology rule learning is then proposed, which is to mine the rules contained in the data set through machine learning to improve the efficiency and scientificity of ontology rule generation. Based on the contextual ontology of ADR, the high-level context information is identified and predicted by means of reasoning, so the occurrence of the specific adverse reaction in patients from different populations is extracted. Results: Finally, using diabetes drugs as an example, contextual information is identified and predicted through reasoning, to mine the occurrence of specific adverse reactions in different patient populations, and realize personalized medication decision-making and early warning of ADR.

Research and Practice of Online Service Hall in Colleges and Universities

The needs of teachers and students, the requirements of educational modernization and informatization and the development of information technology promote the online service hall to become an important part of the smart campus. The online service hall is also a hot spot of information construction in universities in recent years. Taking China University of Geosciences (Beijing) for example, this paper probes into the problems and causes of the current difficulties of teachers and students in complicated school’s business process and puts forward the construction goal and ideas of the online service hall. A four-layer architecture which includes data layer, business service support layer, business service layer and presentation layer for service e-hall is designed and the organization and implementation steps of the online service hall are expounded. In addition, the extended applications such as integrated self-service printing terminal and electronic signature are considered. This paper can be used for reference for the construction and implementation of online service hall in other universities.

Resource management framework for manufacturing grid

Based on open grid service architecture (OGSA) and Globus Toolkit 3. 0 (GT3), a manufacturing grid (MG) is proposed to realize resource sharing and collaborative working among manufacturing enterprises. Nevertheless, resource management in MG is much more complicated than that in other grid applications due to the geographically distributed manufacturing resources, which range from CAD, CAPP and CAE to various kinds of machine tools. With the interaction of manufacturing grid information service (MGIS, developed by ourselves) and globus resource allocation manager (GRAM, provided by GT3), a resource management framework is presented to perform the functions of resource encapsulation, registry, discovery and monitoring. Furthermore, the application architecture and an example are depicted to illustrate the utilization of the resource management system.

Information service platform of forest pest forecast based on WebGIS

Taking Linkou Forestry Bureau, Heilongjiang Province, China as the demonstration plot and Dendrolimus pinidiatrea as an example, we developed a WebGIS-based information service platform for forest pest forecast using J2EE and ArcGIS Server technology. The service platform is able to predict the occurrence period, amount of pest, occurrence tendency, and pest zones in the B/S environment and realized the display, querying, analysis and editing of the spatial data and the automatically integrated control of multilevel Data,. Additionaly, the service platform offers the visualization of geographic service and predicted results. It provides a solution for prediction of forest pest and forest resource management.

信息集成服务发展战略

From the development strategy point of view,this article gives a basic knowledge of information integrated service,and summarizes some basic ideas of providing information integrated service.

Information service platform of forest pest forecast based on WebGIS

Taking Linkou Forestry Bureau, Heilongjiang Province, China as the demonstration plot and Dendrolimus pinidiatrea as an example, we developed a WebGIS-based information service platform for forest pest forecast using J2EE and ArcGIS Server technology. The service platform is able to predict the occurrence period, amount of pest, occurrence tendency, and pest zones in the B/S environment and realized the display, querying, analysis and editing of the spatial data and the automatically integrated control of multilevel Data,. Additionaly, the service platform offers the visualization of geographic service and predicted results. It provides a solution for prediction of forest pest and forest resource management.

A Tailor-made Data Quality Approach for Higher Educational Data

Purpose: This paper relates the definition of data quality procedures for knowledge organizations such as Higher Education Institutions. The main purpose is to present the flexible approach developed for monitoring the data quality of the European Tertiary Education Register(ETER) database, illustrating its functioning and highlighting the main challenges that still have to be faced in this domain.Design/methodology/approach: The proposed data quality methodology is based on two kinds of checks, one to assess the consistency of cross-sectional data and the other to evaluate the stability of multiannual data. This methodology has an operational and empirical orientation. This means that the proposed checks do not assume any theoretical distribution for the determination of the threshold parameters that identify potential outliers, inconsistencies, and errors in the data. Findings: We show that the proposed cross-sectional checks and multiannual checks are helpful to identify outliers, extreme observations and to detect ontological inconsistencies not described in the available meta-data. For this reason, they may be a useful complement to integrate the processing of the available information.Research limitations: The coverage of the study is limited to European Higher Education Institutions. The cross-sectional and multiannual checks are not yet completely integrated.Practical implications: The consideration of the quality of the available data and information is important to enhance data quality-aware empirical investigations, highlighting problems, and areas where to invest for improving the coverage and interoperability of data in future data collection initiatives.Originality/value: The data-driven quality checks proposed in this paper may be useful as a reference for building and monitoring the data quality of new databases or of existing databases available for other countries or systems characterized by high heterogeneity and complexity of the units of analysis without relying on pre-specified theoretical distributions.

Exploring the Potentialities of Automatic Extraction of University Webometric Information

Purpose:The main objective of this work is to show the potentialities of recently developed approaches for automatic knowledge extraction directly from the universities’websites.The information automatically extracted can be potentially updated with a frequency higher than once per year,and be safe from manipulations or misinterpretations.Moreover,this approach allows us flexibility in collecting indicators about the efficiency of universities’websites and their effectiveness in disseminating key contents.These new indicators can complement traditional indicators of scientific research(e.g.number of articles and number of citations)and teaching(e.g.number of students and graduates)by introducing further dimensions to allow new insights for“profiling”the analyzed universities.Design/methodology/approach:Webometrics relies on web mining methods and techniques to perform quantitative analyses of the web.This study implements an advanced application of the webometric approach,exploiting all the three categories of web mining:web content mining;web structure mining;web usage mining.The information to compute our indicators has been extracted from the universities’websites by using web scraping and text mining techniques.The scraped information has been stored in a NoSQL DB according to a semistructured form to allow for retrieving information efficiently by text mining techniques.This provides increased flexibility in the design of new indicators,opening the door to new types of analyses.Some data have also been collected by means of batch interrogations of search engines(Bing,www.bing.com)or from a leading provider of Web analytics(SimilarWeb,http://www.similarweb.com).The information extracted from the Web has been combined with the University structural information taken from the European Tertiary Education Register(https://eter.joanneum.at/#/home),a database collecting information on Higher Education Institutions(HEIs)at European level.All the above was used to perform a clusterization of 79 Italian universities based on structural and digital indicators.Findings:The main findings of this study concern the evaluation of the potential in digitalization of universities,in particular by presenting techniques for the automatic extraction of information from the web to build indicators of quality and impact of universities’websites.These indicators can complement traditional indicators and can be used to identify groups of universities with common features using clustering techniques working with the above indicators.Research limitations:The results reported in this study refers to Italian universities only,but the approach could be extended to other university systems abroad.Practical implications:The approach proposed in this study and its illustration on Italian universities show the usefulness of recently introduced automatic data extraction and web scraping approaches and its practical relevance for characterizing and profiling the activities of universities on the basis of their websites.The approach could be applied to other university systems.Originality/value:This work applies for the first time to university websites some recently introduced techniques for automatic knowledge extraction based on web scraping,optical character recognition and nontrivial text mining operations(Bruni&Bianchi,2020).

Theory and Application of Multi-robot Service-oriented Architecture

In order to solve the problem of heterogeneity in multi-robot cooperation, a new service-oriented architecture is proposed for multi-robot cooperation. Service provision and energy consumption are the basic cooperative behaviors. A set of basic concepts of robot service are proposed. A layered multi-robot service-oriented architecture is designed. Finally, the experiments illustrate the superiority of the proposed architecture which makes robot's underlying functional components be transparently encapsulated and the services in upper layer be transparently invoked, which will effectively avoid the impact of heterogeneous characteristics in multi-robot cooperation and facilitate the system construction, expansion, restructuring and maintenance. © 2014 Chinese Association of Automation.

An Integrated and Layered Architecture for Location-Aware Computing

This paper gives an overall introduction to the basic concept of LAC(location-aware computing) and its development status, puts forward an integrated location-aware computing architecture which is useful for designing the reasonable logical model of LBS(location-based service). Finally, a brief introduction is conducted on a LAC experimental prototype, which acts as a mobile urban tourism assistant.