Elena García Barriocanal

• University of Alcalá

Recently proposed legal frameworks for Artificial Intelligence (AI) depart from some frameworks of concepts regarding ethical and trustworthy AI that provide the technical grounding for safety and risk. This is especially important in high-risk applications, such as those involved in decision-making support systems in the biomedical domain. Framewo...

Background: Syndromic surveillance with the use of Internet data has been used to track and forecast epidemics for the last two decades, using different sources from social media to search engine records. More recently, studies have addressed how the World Wide Web could be used as a valuable source for analysing the reactions of the public to out...

Steganography is the set of techniques aiming to hide information in messages as images. Recently, stenographic techniques have been combined with polyglot attacks to deliver exploits in Web browsers. Machine learning approaches have been proposed in previous works as a solution for detecting stenography in images, but the specifics of hiding explo...

Blockchain technologies have demonstrated the potential to build decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that are composable and interoperable. One of the envisioned applications of blockchains is that of becoming a platform for markets of greenhouse-gas emissions. KlimaDAO is one of the recently launched protocols that attempts to bridge existing v...

This chapter discusses prospects for the measurement of quantum software artifacts and processes, describing initial directions and reviewing the scattered and scarce literature on the topic. It examines potential differences and commonalities of classical and quantum software in the context of measurement and identifies future research directions...

Traceability is considered a key requirement for trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI), related to the need to maintain a complete account of the provenance of data, processes, and artifacts involved in the production of an AI model. Traceability in AI shares part of its scope with general purpose recommendations for provenance as W3C PROV, and...

Ontologies or databases describing occupations in terms of competences or skills are an important resource for a number of applications. Exploiting large knowledge graphs thus becomes a promising direction to update those ontologies with entities of the latter, which may be updated faster, especially in the case of crowd-sourced resources. Here we...

The Web of Linked Open Data (LOD) is a decentralized effort in publishing datasets using a set of conventions to make them accesssible, notably thought RDF and SPARQL. Links across nodes in published datasets are thus critical in getting value for the LOD cloud as a collective effort. Connectivity among the datasets can occur through these links. E...

The length of hospital stay and its implications have a significant economic and human impact. As a consequence, the prediction of that key parameter has been subject to previous research in recent years. Most previous work has analysed length of stay in particular hospital departments within specific study groups, which has resulted in successful...

Background In recent years new forms of syndromic surveillance that use data from the Internet have been proposed. These have been developed to assist the early prediction of epidemics in various cases and diseases. It has been found that these systems are accurate in monitoring and predicting outbreaks before these are observed in population and,...

A considerable number of high-level quantum programming languages have been proposed and implemented in the last years. This fact opens the possibility to study the structure of the source code of quantum software, using initially the same metrics typically used in classical software. Here we report a preliminary study in module structure and use o...

Data aggregators can leverage personal data for the benefit of their users in their role of mediators with enterprises that are willing to target qualified user segments with customized offerings. However, such type of transaction must comply with personal data protection regulation and provide a fair and auditable context for business partners. In...

Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time and are among the most sophisticated human-made systems. One of the oldest and most popular software package ecosystems is CRAN, the repository of packages of the statistical language R, which is also one of the most popular environments for statistical computing nowadays...

Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time and are among the most sophisticated human-made systems. One of the oldest and most popular software package ecosystems is CRAN, the repository of packages of the statistical language R, which is also one of the most popular environments for statistical computing nowadays...

Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time, but such collaborative development practice has surged in recent years. One of the oldest and most popular package ecosystems is Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), the repository of packages of the statistical language R, a popular statistical computing environment....

Twitter is undoubtedly one of the most widely used data sources to analyze human communication. The literature is full of examples where Twitter is accessed, and data are downloaded as the previous step to a more in-depth analysis in a wide variety of knowledge areas. Unfortunately, the extraction of relevant information from the opinions that user...

Internet technologies have demonstrated their value for the early detection and prediction of epidemics. In diverse cases, electronic surveillance systems can be created by obtaining and analyzing on-line data, complementing other existing monitoring resources. This paper reports the feasibility of building such a system with search engine and soci...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the current status of research on Wikidata and, in particular, of articles that either describe applications of Wikidata or provide empirical evidence, in order to uncover the topics of interest, the fields that are benefiting from its applications and which researchers and institutions are leading the...

The widespread of data science programming languages and libraries have raised new interest in teaching computational science coding in ways that leverage the capabilities of both single-computer and cluster-based computation infrastructures. Some of the programming patterns and idioms are converging, yet there are specialized uses and cases that r...

Advanced in technologies for the decentralization of applications have enabled micro-grid energy systems that do not rely on central control and optimization but are controlled by their owners. This may eventually enable consumers or intermediaries to specify concrete and diverse conditions on the supply that not only concern throughput, price and...

Ontologies are usually applied to drive intelligent applications and also as a resource for integrating or extracting information, as in the case of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Further, ontologies as the Gene Ontology (GO) are used as an artifact for very specific research aims. However, the value of ontologies for data analysis tasks...

Emergency response and management requires the coordination of agencies and different services in a complex evolving situation. This in turn, requires diverse models representing detailed knowledge about the types of adverse events, their potential impact and the means and resources that are best suited for an effective response. The basic formal i...

Persistent Identifier (PID) systems have evolved in the last decade to mitigate the problem of link rot and provide unique and resolvable identifiers for digital objects, becoming a key element in archival services. However, they still depend on centralized services which may either become unavailable or cease to behave or be managed as expected. D...

Nowadays there is a huge number of learning resources, covered different digital skills, on the Internet. In the framework of European Erasmus+ project: ‘Digital Skills Accelerator’ we developed dedicated to digital skills set of learning resources. Moreover, the test to analyses the level of user digital skills in form of the Online Self-Assessmen...

Digital skills are key enablers in a wide spectrum of jobs that require the use of digital tools for information search, communication and problem-solving. The interest on digital skills training has resulted in frameworks and offerings at different educational levels. However, there is a limited understanding on the relative importance of these sk...

Problem-based learning has been proved as a good method to teach Software Engineering, concretely when project development skills are involved. In those cases, project work departs from some stakeholder requirements that are often ill-defined, and the team progresses by analysis and design identifying the parts that the team can develop and which o...

The Web of Linked Data has emerged as the realization of a machine readable Web relying on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) language as a way to provide richer semantics to datasets. While the Web of Linked Data is based on similar principles as those of the original Web, being interlinking the principal mechanism to relate information, the...

The increasing concern for the availability of scientific data has resulted in a number of initiatives promoting the archival and curation of datasets as a legitimate research outcome. Among them, dataset repositories fill the gap of providing long-term preservation of diverse kinds of data along with its meta-descriptions, and support citation. Un...

Background: An extended discussion and research has been performed in recent years using data collected through search queries submitted via the Internet. It has been shown that the overall activity on the Internet is related to the number of cases of an infectious disease outbreak. Objective: The aim of the study was to define a similar correla...

Metadata repositories and services support the key functions required by the curation of digital resources, including description, management and provenance. They typically use conventional databases owned and managed by different kinds of organizations that are trusted by their users. Blockchains have emerged as a means to deploy decentralized dat...

Purpose The common understanding of Generalization / Specialization (gen-spec) relations assumes the relation to be equally strong between a classifier and any of its related classifiers and also at every level of the hierarchy. Assigning a grade of relative distance to represent the level of similarity between the related pairs of classifiers cou...

Predicting patterns to extract knowledge can be a tough task but it is worth. When you want to accomplish that task you have to take your time analysing all the data you have and you have to adapt it to the algorithms and technologies you are going to use after analysing. So you need to know the type of data that you own. When you have finished mak...

Intrusion detection relies on the analysis of flows of network and system events that are checked against signatures or models of normality to raise alerts. However, these alerts are often the result of having detected a single step in the unfolding sequence of activities of an attacker, and techniques relying on simple alerting fall short in recog...

Learning institutions can work in very different manners, but they all share many common and regularly repeated processes. The unambiguous specification of both the processes involved in educational activities and how to adapt such processes to different contexts have not been covered by standards and specifications up to now. Therefore, processes...

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a method of publishing machine-readable open data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic querying. The decentralized nature of the current LOD cloud relies on location-specific services, which is known to result in problems of availability and broken links. Current approaches to peer-to-peer...

In multicultural education and especially in the education of special groups (Roma, immigrants, etc.), the compatibility between educator and learners directly affects the efficiency and the outcome of the educational programs. This chapter presents a framework for the e-education of educators of special groups based on and aiming to improve their...

The increase of Linked Open Data (LOD) usage has grown in the last few years, and the number of datasets available is considerably higher. Taking this into account, another way to make data available is microdata, whose aim is to make information more understandable for search engines to give better results. The Schema.org vocabulary was created fo...

The engineering of ontologies in the information security domain have received some degree of attention in past years. Concretely, the use of ontologies has been proposed as a solution for a diversity of tasks related to that domain, from the modelling of cyber-attacks to easing the work of auditors or analysts. This has resulted in ontology artefa...

Purpose – Large terminologies usually contain a mix of terms that are either generic or domain specific, which makes the use of the terminology itself a difficult task that may limit the positive effects of these systems. The purpose of this paper is to systematically evaluate the degree of domain specificity of the AGROVOC controlled vocabulary te...

The use of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) in aggregated metadata collections facilitates the implementation of search mechanisms operating on the same term or keyphrase space, thus preparing the ground for improved browsing, more accurate retrieval and better user profiling. Automatic thesaurus-based keyphrase extraction appears to be an ine...

Software Process Improvement (SPI) activities aim at driving change in information technology development towards increased quality and productivity levels. The SPI Manifesto describes the key values and principles for a successful implementation of SPI. About two-thirds of its principles relate to human, social, and organizational aspects and one-...

Automation or semi-automation of learning scenario specifications is one of the least explored subjects in the e-learning research area. There is a need for a catalogue of learning scenarios and a technique to facilitate automated retrieval of stored specifications. This requires constructing an ontology with this goal and is justified in this pape...

In recent years the exposure of Linked Open Data (LOD) has become widespread, with an increasing number of datasets available and enabling new opportunities for interlinking. In parallel, microdata in several forms has also proliferated mainly as a means to improve the effectiveness of search engines. Concretely, Schema.org consists of a vocabulary...

In the area of eLearning the automation of processes from their specifications is still unfeasible. The reason may be the lack of standards and specifications to specify learning processes unambiguously. The work presented in this paper try to solve such problem with two main contributions: the creation of a OKI-OSID metamodel to specify learning p...

The Semantic Sensor Web (SSW) allows emergency response management (ERM) systems to consume sensor data and improve response time and effectiveness. It is also a fact that ERM must be carried out as a multiorganizational task to combine sensor data with human decisions and observations. A frequent problem in such scenarios is that current formats f...

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms are techniques used by recommender systems to predict the utility of items for users based on the similarity among their preferences and the preferences of other users. The enormous growth of learning objects on the internet and the availability of preferences of usage by the community of users in the existin...

Beyond the kind of processes dealt with the IMS LD specification, there are other kinds of processes, which are repeated periodically in learning environments that have not already been described yet due to the lack of mechanisms to describe them effectively. Inspired by the standard specification of language processes in the business area and taki...

In multicultural education and especially in the education of special groups (Roma, immigrants, etc.), the compatibility between educator and learners directly affects the efficiency and the outcome of the educational programs. This chapter presents a framework for the e-education of educators of special groups based on and aiming to improve their...

The use ofKnowledgeOrganizationSystems (KOS) as ontologies or terminologies forthedescriptionof scholarly contents requires a careful consideration ofthedomain and the KOS available. KOS inthe same domain may differ in several dimensions including purpose, level of formality, structure and language. In consequence, curators of scientific data face...

The notion of competency provides an observable account of concrete human capacities under specific work conditions. The fact that competencies are subject to concrete kinds of measurement entails that they are subject to some extent to comparison and even in some sense, calculus. Then, competency models and databases can be used to compute compete...

Achieving continuous innovation in organizations requires a balance between exploiting yet acquired knowledge and exploring new knowledge. In addition to having the adequate resources, change and innovation capabilities require specific management support and organizational structures. Recent research has pointed out the importance of social networ...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a set of principles and practices that encourages companies to be responsibile for the impact that their activities have on society. CSR positions are publicly communicated through information usually made available through corporate Web sites. Previous studies have shown that these are heterogeneous in the...

Research Information Systems (RIS) play a critical role in the sharing of scientific information and provide researchers, professionals and decision makers with the required data for their activities. Existing RIS standards have proposed data models to represent the main entities for storage and exchange. These account for the needs of multiple sta...

The folksonomies resulting from user-generated tag systems feature rapid adaptability, and reflect the information needs of their supporting user communities. However, they suffer from well-known problems, such as polysemy, heteronymy and lack of recall, which have been addressed in controlled vocabularies and ontologies, which in turn follow slowe...

Best practice frameworks focused on the integration of business and IT, such as ITIL, help organizations create and share effective service management. However, guidelines and models are commonly specified using natural language or graphical representations, both lacking the computational semantics needed to enable their automated validation, simul...

Recent research has shown the potential of Web queries as a source for syndromic surveillance, and existing studies show that these queries can be used as a basis for estimation and prediction of the development of a syndromic disease, such as influenza, using log linear (logit) statistical models. Two alternative models are applied to the relation...

The size of software project teams has been considered to be a driver of project productivity. Although there is a large literature on this, new pub-licly available software repositories allow us to empirically perform further research. In this paper we analyse the relationships between productivity, team size and other project variables using the...

Ontologies have been applied in previous research in an attempt to improve software engineering (SE) tools with computational semantics. In addition, ontology models have been applied to model and build supporting tools for IT service management (ITSM) processes, including the formal modeling of service-level agreements. Both the areas of concern s...

The specifications of automated learning scenarios can lead to advantages for virtual learning environments and important benefits for organizations, although research in this e-learning area has not addressed this issue. To achieve this goal, one requirement is to have an infrastructure able to support the execution of specifications of learning s...

The Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is an XML-based metadata specification developed for the description of datasets and their associated context in ecology. The conversion of EML metadata to an ontological form has been addressed in existing observation ontologies, which are able of providing a degree of computational semantics to the descripti...

Epigraphic databases store metadata and digital representations of inscriptions for information purposes, heritage conservation or scientific use. At present,there areseveral of such databases available, but our focus is on those that are part of the EAGLEconsortium, whichaims tomake available the epigraphy from the ancient classical civilization....

Journal impact factors continue to play an important role in research output assessment, in spite of the criticisms and debates around them. The impact factor rankings provided in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR™) database by Thompson Reuters have enjoyed a position of monopoly for many years. But this has recently changed with the availability o...

The on-line interaction of learners and tutors in activities with concrete objectives provides a valuable source of data that can be analyzed for different purposes. One of these purposes is the use of the information extracted from that interaction to aid tutors and learners in decision making about the configuration of further learning activities...

The continuously growth of learning resources available in on-line repositories has raised the concern for the development of automated methods for quality assessment. The current existence of on-line evaluations in such repositories has opened the possibility of searching for statistical profiles of highly-rated resources that can be used as prior...

Instructional theories have been defined as practice-oriented theories offering explicit guidance on how to help people learn that offer situation-specific methods. The descriptions of many instructional theories include recommendations or rules that can be subject to modeling in formal knowledge representation languages. Further, recent work in th...

Sharing of situation awareness is considered a fundamental capability for C4ISR systems, including decision support systems. However, the current evolution of information and communication technology stress this need even further, because of the fast changing environment and the need to perceive, analyse and understand a huge amount of data. The ad...

This paper proposes an expansion of queries based on formal domain ontologies in the context of the search for learning resources in repositories. The expansion process uses the relation types that are represented in these models; common ontological relations, and ontological relations specific to domain and traditional terminology relations, typic...

Learning object repositories (LOR) are digital collections of educational resources and/or metadata aimed at facilitating reuse of materials worldwide. In open repositories, resources are made available at no cost, representing a case of information sharing with an implicit and diffuse social context. In such settings, quality control is in many ca...

The specifications of automated learning scenarios can lead to advantages for virtual learning environments and important benefits for organizations, although research in this e-learning area has not addressed this issue. To achieve this goal, one requirement is to have an infrastructure able to support the execution of specifications of learning s...

Web 2.0 technologies can be considered a loosely defined set of Web application styles that foster a kind of media consumer more engaged, and usually active in creating and maintaining Internet contents. Thus, Web 2.0 applications have resulted in increased user participation and massive user-generated (or user-published) open multimedia content, s...

Sustainable or organic agriculture aims at harmonizing the efficient production of food with the preservation of the environmental conditions for continuing production in a sustained way. As such, it embodies a set of environmental values that are currently taught and learnt worldwide in specific courses or as part of broader programs or curricula....

Problem-based learning relies on the use of problems as the fundamental activity driving the learning process, focusing on the application of knowledge to realistic settings. Problems requiring students the design or evaluation of artifacts are a fundamental ingredient of engineering education in diverse fields. In those settings, the effectiveness...

This volume constitutes the selected papers of the 5th International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research, MTSR 2011, held in Izmir, Turkey, in October 2011. The 36 full papers presented together with 16 short papers and project reports were carefully reviewed and selected from 118 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections o...

Collaborative filtering (CF) techniques have proved to be effective in their application to e-commerce and other application domains. However, their applicability to the recommendation of learning resources deserve separate attention as seeking learning resources can be hypothesized to be substantially different from selecting information resources...

The diffusion of epigraphic data has evolved in the last years from printed catalogues to indexed digital databases shared through the Web. Recently, the open EpiDoc specifications have resulted in an XML-based schema for the interchange of ancient texts that uses XSLT to render typographic representations. However, these schemas and representation...

The Software & Systems Process Engineering meta-model (SPEM) allows the modelling of software processes using OMG (Object Management Group) standards such as the MOF (Meta-Object Facility) and UML (Unified Modelling Language) making it possible to represent software processes using tools compliant with UML. Process definition encompasses both the s...

Learning objects repositories have grown and matured in the last years, being currently a cornerstone for open education. Several current systems are offering metadata openly through mainstream harvesting protocols or providing standardized query interfaces. Also, the use of standardized vocabularies or ontologies is becoming more common to provide...

Several existing learning object repositories provide mechanisms for users to arrange personal collections with their selection of resources or to provide reviews and ratings for other's resources, creating a kind of community dynamics. The resulting information can be used to build structural prestige models for the creators of the resources. This...

As learning object repositories grow and accumulate resources and metadata, the concern for quality has increased, leading to several approaches for quality assessment. The availability of on-line evaluations in some repositories has opened the opportunity to examine the characteristics of learning objects that are evaluated positively, in search o...

Learning technology, through e-learning, allows adults to adapt learning to their own time, place and pace. On the other hand, the adults' specific characteristics as learners and the requirements for their effective learning must be integrated in the design and the development of any learning environment addressed to them. Adults in an online envi...

Engineering knowledge is a specific kind of knowledge that is oriented to the production of particular classes of artifacts, is typically related to disciplined design methods, and takes place in tool-intensive contexts. As a consequence, representing engineering knowledge requires the elaboration of complex models that combine functional and struc...

Classical collaborative filtering algorithms generate recommendations on the basis of ratings provided by users that express their subjective preference on concrete items. The correlation of ratings is used in such schemes as an implicit measure of common interest between users, that is used to predict ratings, so that these ratings determine recom...

Parametric software cost estimation models are based on mathematical relations, obtained from the study of historical software projects databases, that intend to be useful to estimate the effort and time required to develop a software product. Those databases often integrate data coming from projects of a heterogeneous nature. This entails that it...

Purpose The paper seeks to provide personalized learning objects to adults' educators of special groups (AESG) in a technology‐enhanced learning environment. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a definition of specific criteria by which personalization of learning objects is effected. An analysis under the scope of adult education and m...

With the use of new technologies in education, the barriers of time and place can be overcome and the cost can be reduced. The e-training of educators is an interesting and challenging field where personalized learning environments are offered to different groups of educators according to their particularities. This paper is dealing with educators...

Cultural tourism is linked to the art, social practices or particularities of concrete geographical areas. Cultural tourism offerings require thus considering both the cultural aspects but also a variety of operational constraints mainly related to the availability of services for the tourist. The design of this kind of offerings or the provision...

Recent standardization efforts in e-learning technology have resulted in a number of specifications, however , the automation process that is considered essential in a learning management system (LMS) is a less explored one. As learning technology becomes more widespread and more heterogeneous, there is a growing need to specify processes that cros...

Current efforts to standardize e-learning resources are centered on the notion of a learning object as a piece of content that can be reused in diverse educational contexts. Several specifications for the description of learning objects — converging in the LOM standard — have appeared in recent years, providing a common foundation for interoperabil...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe an attempt to provide a model for the description of the major aspects of historical interpersonal relationships between celebrities, with a focus on modelling different kinds of evidence about them, from documented and contrasted data to mere rumours. Design/methodology/approach – The approach ta...

The use of toolkits and reference frameworks for the design and evaluation of learning activities enables the systematic application of pedagogical criteria in the elaboration of learning resources and learning designs. Pedagogical classification as described in such frameworks is a major criterion for the retrieval of learning objects, since it se...

La automatización o semi-automatización de especificaciones de escenarios educativos es un tema prácticamente inexplorado en el ámbito de investigación del eLearning. Conseguir especificaciones ejecutables de los mismos implica disponer de una catalogación de escenarios y de una técnica que facilite tales especificaciones orientadas a la automatiza...

The emergence of Web technologies has made widespread the use of hypermedia systems as the underlying support for Information Systems in organizations. Hypermedia elements and their associated functionality in this context become organizational assets that are created, improved and delivered to users in an attempt to increase the overall value of t...