Pasquale Pagano

• Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the Department of Information Engineering: Electronics, Information Theory, Telecommunications of the University of Pisa
• Senior Researcher at Italian National Research Council

The United Nations forecast a significant shift in global population distribution by 2050, with rural populations projected to decline. This decline will particularly challenge mountain areas’ cultural heritage, well-being, and economic sustainability. Understanding the economic, environmental, and societal effects of rural population decline is pa...

The paper presents the Story Map Building and Visualizing Tool (SMBVT) that allows users to create story maps within a collaborative environment and a usable Web interface. It is entirely open-source and published as a free-to-use solution. It uses Semantic Web technologies in the back-end system to represent stories through a reference ontology fo...

Digital maps greatly support storytelling about territories, especially when enriched with data describing cultural , societal, and ecological aspects, conveying emotional messages that describe the territory as a whole. Story maps are interactive online digital narratives that can describe a territory beyond its map by enriching the map with text,...

L’articolo racconta l’esperienza del D4GNA - Dataset per il Geoportale Nazionale dell’Archeologia nato nell’ambito del progetto ARIADNEplus (Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe - plus), conclusosi lo scorso 31 dicembre. Il contributo parte dal contesto più ampio del progetto europeo per addentrarsi nel m...

Today, complex research challenges, often based on the analysis of a large amount of data, require multidisciplinary collaboration and appropriate communication and sharing of data, processes and outcomes. Technologies and large-scale infrastructures provide stakeholders with computing capacity and data services to perform unprecedented levels of d...

Digital maps greatly support storytelling about territories, especially when enriched with data describing cultural, societal, and ecological aspects, conveying emotional messages that describe the territory as a whole. Story maps are interactive online digital narratives that can describe a territory beyond its map by enriching the map with text,...

NAVIGATOR is an Italian regional project boosting precision medicine in oncology with the aim of making it more predictive, preventive, and personalised by advancing translational research based on quantitative imaging and integrative omics analyses. The project’s goal is to develop an open imaging biobank for the collection and preservation of a l...

Virtual research environments are systems called to serve the needs of their designated communities of practice. Every community of practice is a group of people dynamically aggregated by the willingness to collaborate to address a given research question. The Virtual Research Environment provides its users with seamless access to the resources of...

Vessel tracking data help study the potential impact of fisheries on biodiversity and produce risk assessments. Existing workflows process vessel tracks to identify fishing activity and integrate information on species vulnerability. However, there are significant data integration challenges across the data sources needed for an integrated impact a...

This paper shows data science’s potential for disruptive innovation in science, industry, policy, and people’s lives. We present how data science impacts science and society at large in the coming years, including ethical problems in managing human behavior data and considering the quantitative expectations of data science economic impact. We intro...

Service composition and supporting transactions across composed services are among the major challenges characterizing service-oriented computing. REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is one of the approaches used for implementing Web services that is gaining momentum thanks to its features making it suitable for cloud computing and microservices...

p>The enhancements in IT solutions and the open science movement are injecting changes in the practices dealing with data collection, collation, processing and analytics, and publishing in all the domains, including agri-food. However, in implementing these changes one of the major issues faced by the agri-food researchers is the fragmentation of t...

The enhancements in IT solutions and the open science movement are injecting changes in the practices dealing with data collection, collation, processing, analytics, and publishing in all the domains, including agri-food. However, in implementing these changes one of the major issues faced by the agri-food researchers is the fragmentation of the "a...

Text mining involves a set of processes that analyze text to extract high-quality information. Among its large number of applications, there are experiments that tackle big data challenges using complex system architectures. However, text mining approaches are neither easy to discover and use nor easily combinable by end-users. Furthermore, they sh...

The development of data processing and analytics tools is heavily driven by applications, which results in a great variety of software solutions, which often address specific needs. It is difficult to imagine a single solution that is universally suitable for all (or even most) application scenarios and contexts. This chapter describes the data ana...

Text mining (TM) techniques can extract high-quality information from big data through complex system architectures. However, these techniques are usually difficult to discover, install, and combine. Further, modern approaches to Science (e.g. Open Science) introduce new requirements to guarantee reproducibility, repeatability, and re-usability of...

The open science movement is promising to revolutionise the way science is conducted with the goal to make it more fair, solid and democratic. This revolution is destined to remain just a wish if it is not supported by changes in culture and practices as well as in enabling technologies. This paper describes the D4Science offerings to enact open sc...

The collation of information for the monitoring of fish stocks and fisheries is a difficult and time-consuming task, as the information is scattered across different databases and is modelled using different formats and semantics. Our purpose is to offer a unified view of the existing stocks and fisheries information harvested from three different...

Forecasting environmental parameters in the distant future requires complex modelling and large computational resources. Due to the sensitivity and complexity of forecast models, long-term parameter forecasts (e.g. up to 2100) are uncommon and only produced by a few organisations, in heterogeneous formats and based on different assumptions of green...

Many research communities in a great variety of fields are interested in accessing collections of reliable environmental data. These data are typically used in environmental monitoring systems, data processing workflows, ecological models, societal and economical analyses, etc. Research communities need to carry out their studies in a fast and effi...

Sets of two dimensional images are insufficient to capture the development in time and space of three-dimensional structures. The 2D ‘flattening’ of photographs results in a significant loss of features especially if the photos were taken by one person. Automatically collecting and aligning photos in order to render 3D structures from 2D images wit...

Important changes have characterised research and knowledge production in recent decades. These changes are associated with developments in information technologies and infrastructures. The processes characterising research and knowledge production are changing through the digitalisation of science, the virtualisation of research communities and ne...

Many research communities working in biology and related fields are deeply interested in having a wide collection of environmental and species distribution data. Obviously, for these communities to be able to carry out their studies in a fast and efficient manner, these data need to be well organized, meticulously described and possibly represented...

Invasive species from the Suez Canal, also named "Lessepsian species", often have an ecological and financial impact on marine life, fisheries, human well-being and health in the Mediterranean Sea. Among these, the silver-cheeked toad-fish Lagocephalus sceleratus (Gmelin, 1789) has rapidly colonised the eastern Mediterranean basin and is currently...

Research Data represent a valuable assets in science as well as in our society. Their management requires the development and operation of Research Data Infrastructures, i.e. complex and distributed systems specifically conceived to address the needs arising in Research Data collection, collation, processing and publishing. The development of such...

Digital Humanities Infrastructures (DHIs) are research infrastructures supporting researchers in the field of humanities by providing ICT tools and facilities for performing their studies and investigation activities. A DHI typically serves either researchers of one specific sector of humanities (e.g. history, archaeology) or focused research group...

New Science paradigms have recently evolved to promote open publication of scientific findings as well as multi-disciplinary collaborative approaches to scientific experimentation. These approaches can face modern scientific challenges but must deal with large quantities of data produced by industrial and scientific experiments. These data, so-call...

The Open Science movement is promising to revolutionise the way science is conducted with the goal to make it more fair, solid and democratic. This revolution is destined to remain just a wish if it is not supported by changes inculture and practices as well as in enabling technologies. This paper describes the gCube offering to enact Open Science-...

During the last 35 years, data management principles such as physical and logical independence, declarative querying and cost-based optimization have led to profound pervasiveness of relational databases in any kind of organization. More importantly, these technical advances have enabled the first round of business intelligence applications and...

Prototype scripting is the base of most models in computational biology and environmental sciences. Scientists making prototype scripts (e.g. using R and Matlab) often need to share results and make their models used also by other scientists on new data. To this aim, one way is to publish scripts as-a-Service, possibly under a recognized standard (...

Among its devastating effects, ocean acidification harms organisms whose life depends on shells and on coral reefs. Therefore, it affects important marine ecosytems hosting high biodiversity and food availability. A recent paper published on Nature has highlighted the decrease of calcification of a very important planktonic mollusc, the sea butterf...

Science is in continuous evolution and so are the methodologies and approaches scientists tend to apply by calling for appropriate supporting environments. This is in part due to the limitations of the existing practices and in part due to the new possibilities offered by technology advances. gCube is a software system promoting elastic and seamles...

Science is in continuous evolution and so are the methodologies and approaches scientists tend to apply by calling for appropriate supporting environments. This is in part due to the limitations of the existing practices and in part due to the new possibilities offered by technology advances. gCube is a software system promoting elastic and seamles...

Organising and sharing geothermal data was recognized by the Geothermal ERA-NET partner countries as playing an important role in facilitating geothermal energy development in Europe. In particular, one of the aims of the Geothermal ERA-NET project 1 is dedicated to an assessment and feasibility study of the implementation of a European Geothermal...

Catch and fishing effort time series are used by managers to safeguard the availability of resources in the future. Fisheries organisations estimate the status of a stock and the levels for sustainable harvest. Based on these indicators, regulations are developed to guarantee the availability of food and sustain economic growth. For example, tuna s...

Catch and fishing effort time series are used by managers to safeguard the availability of resources in the future. Fisheries organizations estimate the status of a stock and the levels for sustainable harvest. Based on these indicators, regulations are developed to guarantee the availability of food and sustain economic growth. For example, tuna s...

Habitat modifications driven by human impact and climate change may influence species distribution, particularly in aquatic environments. Niche-based models are commonly used to evaluate the availability and suitability of habitat and assess the consequences of future climate scenarios on a species range and shifting edges of its distribution. Toge...

Geothermal data are published using different IT services, formats and content representations, and can refer to both regional and global scale information. Geothermal stakeholders search for information with different aims. E-Infrastructures are collaborative platforms that address this diversity of aims and data representations. In this paper, we...

Information and communication technology (ICT) advances in research infrastructures are continuously changing the way research and scientific communication are performed. Scientists, funders, and organizations are moving the paradigm of "research publishing" well beyond traditional articles. The aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishin...

Species commonness is often related to abundance and species conservation status. Intuitively, a “common species” is a species that is abundant in a certain area, widespread and at low risk of extinction. Analysing and classifying species commonness can help discovering indicators of ecosystem status and can prevent sudden changes in biodiversity....

In the domain of biological classification there are several taxon name matching services that can search for a species scientific name in a large collection of taxonomic names. Many of these services are available online, and many others run on computers of individual scientists. While these systems may work very well, most suffer from the fact th...

The giant squid (Architeuthis) has been reported since even before the 16th century, and has recently been observed live in its habitat for the first time. Among the species belonging to this genus, Architeuthis dux has received special attention from biologists. The distribution of this species is poorly understood, as most of our information stem...

Information and communication technology (ICT) advances in research infrastructures are continuously changing the way research and scientific communication are performed. Scientists, funders, and organizations are moving the paradigm of "research publishing" well beyond traditional articles. The aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishin...

The purpose of data publishing is to release research data for others to use. However, its implementation remains an open issue. 'Science 2.0 Repositories' (SciRepos) address the publishing requirements arising in Science 2.0 by blurring the distinction between research life-cycle and research publishing. SciRepos interface with the ICT services of...

Estimating absence locations of a species is important in conservation biology and conservation planning. For instance, using reliable absence as much as presence information, species distribution models can enhance their performance and produce more accurate predictions of the distribution of a species. Unfortunately, estimating reliable absence l...

Data mining is being increasingly used in biology. Biologists are adopting prototyping languages, like R and Matlab, to facilitate the application of data mining algorithms to their data. As a result, their scripts are becoming increasingly complex, and also require frequent updates. Application to large datasets becomes impractical and the time-to...

Modern science tend to be more than ever multidisciplinary, collaborative and demanding. Scientific investigations span the boundaries of single institutions, disciplines, and countries. In order to serve these scenarios innovative working environments are needed. In this paper it is presented an innovative environment consisting of an Hybrid Data...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-...

Automated comparison of heterogeneous geographical distribution maps detects statistical or punctual differences between these maps. The maps contents are heterogeneous; they can differ in format, resolution and scale. In this paper the comparison is applied to species distributions in geographic areas. We present an automatic procedure to compare...

During the last years, considerable progresses have been made in developing on-line species occurrence databases. These are crucial in environmental and agricultural challenges, e.g., they are a basic element in the generation of species distribution models. Unfortunately, their exploitation is still difficult and time consuming for many scientists...

Species data are scattered among several databases and information systems. During the last years, considerable pro-gresses have been made in developing on-line species databases. However, there is no single database that can claim to host, and make available in a seamless way, all the species data needed by the communities willing to have access t...

ENVRI is an FP7 EU project specifically conceived to provide a cluster of Environmental Research Infrastructures (EISCAT 3D, EMSO, EPOS, Euro-Argo, ICOS, and LifeWatch) with a collaborative framework to develop common components and services. The ENVRI services contribute to realise a Spatial Data Infrastructure offering facilities to publish, disc...

EUBrazilOpenBio is a collaborative initiative addressing strategic barriers in biodiversity research by integrating open access data and user-friendly tools widely available in Brazil and Europe. The project deploys the EU-Brazil Hybrid Data Infrastructure that allows the sharing of hardware, software and data on-demand. This infrastructure provide...

Modern science calls for innovative practices to facilitate research collaborations spanning institutions, disciplines, and countries. Paradigms such as cloud computing and social computing represent a new opportunity for individuals with scant resources, to participate in science. The D4Science.org Hybrid Data Infrastructure combines these two par...

Modern science calls for innovative practices to facilitate research collaborations that span institutions, disciplines, and countries. Scientists and practitioners are called to produce enhanced forms of scientific communication thus to make it possible for others to identify errors, to support, reject or refine theories and to reuse data for furt...

The order Coelacanthiformes, once thought extinct, is much studied mainly because it contains species that share characteristics with lungfishes and tetrapods. Only a few years ago living specimens were discovered to science, and observations are so rare that the species are considered to be critically endangered. Observations include Latimeria cha...

Nowadays both data owners and data consumers are very conscious of how the availability of “data” in contexts different from where it was produced benefits science and society at large. Hence there is a larger availability of data, also across domains, that potentially opens the way to new types of scientific practices, e.g. experiments, analysis,...

In computational statistics, the continuous design of algorithms for implementing statistical analysis procedures is producing rather a lot of specialized statistical software applications. At the same time, domain experts need environments in which they can easily manipulate data and run experiments by themselves. This is the case of computational...

The United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/63/111) expressed its serious concern over the current and projected adverse effects of climate change, pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction on the marine environment and marine biodiversity. As a result, the UN established a Regular Process for Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the...

Virtual Research Environments are innovative, web-based, community-oriented, comprehensive, flexible, and secure working environments conceived to serve the needs of modern science. We overview the existing initiatives developing these environments by highlighting the major distinguishing features. We envisage a future where regardless of geographi...

Species distribution modeling is a process aiming at computationally predicting the distribution of species in geographic areas on the basis of environmental parameters including climate data. Such a quantitative approach has a lot of potentialities in many areas that include setting up conservation priorities, testing biogeographic hypotheses, ass...

Data interoperability continues to be a significant challenge for researchers to address several issues. The 'data' and 'interoperability' concepts are difficult to be fully perceived and actually lead to different perceptions in diverse communities. This problem is further amplified when considered in the context of research data infrastructures t...

Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMSs) are mainly meant to monitor and control fishing activity in ocean areas. VMSs have been realized and used in many ways, their principal aim being the monitoring, controlling and surveillance of fishing activity. The term VMS may refer to electronic or software systems aiming at those scopes. VMSs often rely on infor...

The over-exploitation of marine resources could lead to the extinction of some species and to the reduction of the food availability for several countries. In order to avoid such situation, a supervision of the fishing activity is required. In order to support this monitoring feature the Networked Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory (NeMIS) o...

A certain species’ niche, i.e. those environmental conditions and resources which permit that species can survive and reproduce, is a basic piece of knowledge for monitoring ocean’s populousness from both commercial point of view (to steer fishery activities to defined areas) and from the biological one (to monitor dying species). In the context of...

Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) is a branch of biology that uses algorithms to predict the distribution of species in a geographic area on the basis of a numerical representation of their preferred habitat and environment. Algorithmic maps can be produced for suitable or native habitats and require a review by human experts. During the review opera...

The European ENVRI project (Common operations of Environmental Research Infrastructures) is addressing common ICT solutions for the research infrastructures as selected in the ESFRI Roadmap. More specifically, the project is looking for solutions that will assist interdisciplinary users who want to benefit from the data and other services of more t...

Many scientific and industrial environments show lively interest in the capability of analyzing climate changes and how these changes affect marine species. In the context of the European VENUS-C project, the Networked Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory of the Institute of information Science and Technology “Alessandro Faedo” (ISTI) has deve...

Species distribution modeling is a process aiming at computationally predicting the distribution of species in geographic areas on the basis of environmental parameters including climate data. In order to further promote the diffusion of such an approach it is fundamental to develop a flexible, comprehensive, and robust environment enabling practit...

Digital Libraries continue to evolve towards research envi- ronments supporting access and management of multiform Information Objects spread across multiple data sources and organizational domains. This evolution has introduced the need to deal with Information Ob- jects having traits different from those characterizing Digital Libraries at their...

Digital Libraries have evolved from a digital counterpart of traditional libraries to highly dynamic environments conceived to provide a community with the data and services needed to accomplish its tasks. This trend is particularly frequent in the context of scientific research communities, whose members are scattered among multiple organizations...

EUBrazilOpenBio is a collaborative initiative addressing strategic barriers in biodiversity research by integrating open access data and user-friendly tools widely available in Brazil and Europe. The project deploys the EU-Brazil cloudbased e-infrastructure that allows the sharing of hardware, software and data on-demand. This e-Infrastructure prov...

Modern science communication requires innovative environment and means for providing stakeholders with scientific outcomes. Research objects are emerging as replacements of traditional "documents" in scientific communication. These objects are multi-media and multi-part objects that aggregate all the "pieces" that contribute to a research result. S...

Modern science call for innovative practices to facilitate research collaborations that span institutions, disciplines, and coun- tries. Scientists and practitioners are called to produce enhanced forms of scientific communication thus to make it possible for others to identify errors, to support, reject or refine theories and to reuse data for fur...

Virtual Research Environments are internet-based working environments tailored to serve needs of diverse and evolving user communities. These environments are oriented to promote new ways of dealing with modern research tasks. Their realization requires user interfaces that are dynamically built to provide their clients with organised views on the...

Nowadays science is highly multidisciplinary and requires innovative research environments. Such research environments, also known as Virtual Research Environments, should be powerful and flexible enough to help researchers in all disciplines to manage the complex range of tasks involved in carrying out eScience activities. Such research environmen...

Digital Libraries have achieved a fundamental role in our knowledge society. By making the wealth of material contained in libraries, museum, archives and any knowledge repository worldwide available they are giving citizens in every place of the world the opportunity to appreciate their global cultural heritage and use it for study, work or leisur...

Aggregative Digital Library Systems (ADLSs) provide end users with web portals to operate over an information space of descriptive metadata records, collected and aggregated from a pool of possibly heterogeneous repositories. Due to the costs of software realization and system maintenance, existing "traditional" ADLS solutions are not easily sustai...

Provenance is intended as the description of the origin and/or of the descendant line of data. In the last decade, keeping track of provenance has become crucial for the correct exploitation of data in a wide variety of application domains. The rapid evolution of digital libraries, which have become today advanced systems for the integration and ma...