Towards a Platform for Widespread Embedded Intelligence - ERCIM

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R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
being able to obtain customised presentations
of statistics with guaranteed
accuracy and without the need for specialised
statistical tools or an advanced
expertise in statistical techniques.
For the sake of the reusability, it has
been preferred to build an integrated
platform rather than developing features
on top of existing tools. This approach
gives room for the integration of powerful
statistical tools and lets the user
perform online calculations according to
the data. With every single variable or
result are associated information types
such as the statistical measurement
(metric, ordinal, nominal), the population
concerned (individuals, households),
or the expected results for the
variable. Based on these types, the
system defines the statistical analysis
that can be performed in order to ensure
the coherence and soundness of the operations
delivered to the user. To guarantee
Digital Libraries
BELIEF: Bringing Europe's Electronic
Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers
by Federico Biagini, Pasquale Pagano and Franco Zoppi
BELIEF aims at creating a platform where e-infrastructure providers and users
can collaborate and exchange knowledge, thus bridging the gap separating the
research infrastructure providers from the users. A key role is played by the
BELIEF digital library, specifically designed to meet the needs of this community
and to guarantee wide dissemination of its results.
The BELIEF digital library (DL) offers
uniform access to multimedia documentation
(eg technical reports, presentations,
videos, manuals, on-line tutorials)
providing continuously updated information
on eInfrastructure-related projects,
initiatives and events. The contents
are harvested from different sources,
such as projects web sites, repositories
and databases. The DL provides services
to support the submission, description,
searching, browsing, retrieval, access,
preservation and visualization of multimedia
documents. Although designed to
meet the needs of a specific community,
the technology adopted by BELIEF can
ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006
the coherence of the results and to ensure
that they are correct with respect to the
interpretation criteria of the user, Sedo
also features an automatic calculation of
the actual sampling size after a sequence
of statistical operations.
From the programmer's point of view,
full latitude is allowed for the integration
of thesauruses and the customisation of
the search-engine. The system is also
characterised by a total freedom in the
choice and the management of the
databases.
With Sedo, the database server can be
distinct from the server where the client
requests are processed and the statistical
operations are performed. Thanks to this
independence of data storage and data
processing, Sedo is portable to any kind
of database. This separation is also
useful for protecting the confidentiality
of the data. In this case we must consider
be easily adapted to meet the information
and collaborative needs of other scientific
communities.
In the BELIEF DL, users can define the
information space they wish to search
or browse in terms of the collections (ie,
sets of documents) selected from those
managed by the DL. Different
search/browse options are offered:
Google-like or fielded (with fields
selected from a variety of known metadata
formats), with or without relevance
feedback. Users can search/browse any
information associated with digital documents
and their parts.
the different kind of users who will not
be entitled to the same access to the data.
It also minimises the volume of data
used during the calculations, because
only the data relevant to the requests is
extracted and passed on to the processing
phase.
Links:
http://sedo.ceps.lu
http://www.ceps.lu
http://www.lippmann.lu
Please contact:
Uwe Warner, Centre d'Etude de
Population, de Pauvreté et de Politiques
Socio-Economiques, Luxembourg
Tel: +352 58 58 55 554
E-mail: uwe.warner@ceps.lu
Thomas Tamisier, Centre de Recherche
Public - Gabriel Lippmann, Luxembourg
Tel: +352 47 02 61 622.
E-mail: tamisier@lippmann.lu
Supporting e-Infrastructure Projects
Projects can submit their documents
directly to the digital library: BELIEF
offers a Submission Interface and a
Document Hosting Service to host projects'
documents directly on the DL. To
ensure that all documentation can be
easily acquired, the DL stipulates a standard
description format.
Projects using the Document Hosting
Service do not need to bear any extra
cost for the development of tools or services
for their documents' submission,
collection and retrieval. Projects that
prefer to maintain their own documents
can make them available to the community
by simply providing a standard
access to their documents and metadata
so that they can be transparently 'harvested'
by the DL.