Keet blog

In a vain attempt to figure out what you, dear visitors, are most interested in when bothering to visit my blog, I have been collecting blog stats over the last 4 months (with a sampling once a month) of the blog posts I made in the past two years. The hope is to figure out

1) What’s hot and what not?

a. Are readers interested in posts about my research output (or about other topics)?

b. Is there a correlation between amount of visits and comments (barring me and pingbacks)?

2) Given the assumed short attention span of blog readers, do visits to older posts (age > 4 months) stagnate?

Results

The raw data set (xls) can be viewed here; 32 posts are included that were posted since April 2006, with an overall amount of 3254 page visits by 18-6-2008 according to the sum of individual post visits. This is different than the wordpress graph for monthly aggregates, shown here that counts more visits (6674 as of today).

Visitors care little about my main research topics (granularity, part-whole relations, formal conceptual data modelling), but there is slightly more interest in the side-topics with bio & reasoning. Topics that are not (or not yet) part of my research or are not about research at all but were fun writing about receive much more traffic.

There is no correlation between amount of visits and comments.

The answer to question 2 is inconclusive: some posts stagnate, some keep on being visited and steadily increasing in amount of hits. They generate about 51 % of the monthly page hits.

Discussion

Possible explanations are that I have not been able to write in an accessible manner about my research, or that, indeed, there are very few people can get excited about those topics, or, given the somewhat higher visits for bio & reasoning, the blog is not in the ‘right’ network for those topics (maybe there is none?) but it is at least to some extent linked with the bioinformaticians and therefore has relatively more visits in that area. As far as the visits to the, in my opinion, “fun topics” concerned: are you here to slack? Or maybe the general assumption of blogs is more about diversions and networking; but if it were, then why is there no correlation between visits and comments? Maybe my “fun topics” are another person’s daily research (e.g., sudokus, AI and cultural heritage).

The posts that stagnate are clearly out-of-sight-out-of-mind. For the posts that keep on being visited, my informed guess – based on random checks of the search terms – is that there has been a critical mass of visitors so that those pages made into the search engine rankings. An alternative explanation is that they are cross-linked on other blogs (such as Women in Science and Computational Biology News, and I made it once into the BioBlogs), which is only partially true, given that the ones about multitasking and that we are what we repeatedly do are not linked by other blogs, yet score among the top three.

Last, there may be problems with the data: (i) the data set may be too small with infrequent postings and/or (ii) the existence of the blog is too short, and/or (iii) the total amount of hits is insignificant anyway.

Conclusions

Based on post visits, posts about my research are deemed comparatively uninteresting. Older posts still can generate substantial traffic compared to the overall amount of visits.

Future work on deciding what to write about depends on the value system in place, and maybe other bloggers can do a similar analysis so as to obtain statistically significant conclusions. In a different light: the same does not hold for my home page visits (the causes of terrorism scores best by a large margin, but I actually did my MA thesis on terrorism, and several research papers are being accessed more than the “random topics”); why does this discrepancy between blog and homepage visits exist?

Who said this? No, it was neither Bush nor Brown, nor Blair, Berlusconi, Balkenende, or Benedict XVIth. It is a liberal translation of “El futuro de nuestra patria tiene que ser necessariamente un futuro de hombres de ciencia”. It was Fidel who said it, back in 1961. This phrase is not only on the front page of the science & tech section of the online version of the Cuban national newspaper, the Granma, but also painted on the first building of the ICA complex (see photo). The ICA—Instituto de Ciencia Animal [Animal Science Institute]—in San Jose de las Lajas, near Habana, is an integrated whole of science, technology, and society, quite different from the common university campuses with spin-offs close by in European and US’s cities’ peripheries. Maybe science researchers and philosophers of science can look into the matter if, and if yes how, this is a more sustainable and effective way of building a knowledge society (what the EU purports to build since the Lisbon Agenda in 2000) than the 3+2+3 streamlining in higher/university education and hidden research institutes. (The Venezuelan government thinks it is a good idea, and they are setting up similarly structured institutes in Venezuela.)

Aside from taking a few days off, I did visit the ICA again (the Agromatica department, headed by Abiel Roche), passed by the University of Havana—the oldest in Latin America that has a fantastic entrance with many stairs and an alma mater sitting at the top—and got informed about the Cuban policy decisions to invest in computer science. Regarding the latter, there’s since 2003 the UCI, the Universidad de Ciencias Informáticas [university of computer science], with some 10000 students, national programmes in computer literacy, and people are working on installing a fibre optics cable to increase bandwidth by some 3000 fold, to name but a few things. The latter obviously implies that, contrary to some ‘regular media’ reports, Cuba is already connected to the Internet and even Jo and Joanne Soap can email and browse the Web; they already could when I visited Cuba in 2004. Admitted, it is not cheap and relatively slow, but possible it is (be it at work, in an internet café, or at home with a modem).

Mobile phones are officially allowed since about 2 months and to my surprise, my lame 3-year old nokia-with-vodafone Italian phone automatically detected Cu_com so I could send messages all around the world (I did not try calling, which is probably mad expensive), which proved to be very useful for meeting with friends at some flexible timing in front of the capitolio, ensuring I made it safe home in Vedado coming from Alamar, and whatnot.

There can be many more things to write about, such as the detrimental effects of recent international biofuels policies and the entry of some of capitalism’s bugs through the tourism sector, but I will close with two announcements. One is for the computer science conference Informática 2009 next February with article submission deadline in August (for those of you who prefer to have an excuse to visit Cuba) and the timely book “The changing dynamic of Cuban civil society” (not that the notion of ‘civil society’ is alive and kicking in Cuba, but it certainly is worth a read nevertheless).

The first ever public PhD thesis defense final examination session at the Faculty of CS, UniBz, was held yesterday, and I successfully defended my thesis “A Formal Theory of Granularity”.

Thanks to the members of the examination committee and attendees for their effort and time.

I’ll go on holiday soon

Formal ontologies provide a mechanism to address the drawbacks of terminological ambiguity in ecology, and fill an important gap in the management of ecological data by facilitating powerful data discovery based on rigorously defined, scientifically meaningful terms. By clarifying the terms of scientific discourse, and annotating data and analyses with those terms, well defined, community-sanctioned, formal ontologies based on open standards will provide a much-needed foundation upon which to tackle crucial ecological research while taking full advantage of the growing repositories of data on the Internet.

Linking data to ontologies and, as natural next step, Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA)—i.e., using an ontology to mediate access to data, such as querying the data through an ontology—is one of those requirements from the field that took some time to address theoretically, but now the first working prototypes are available. In particular, there is now a combination of an ODBA-enabled reasoner (DIG-Mastro) at the back-end and an ODBA-plugin for Protégé to also have an editor front-end together in one coherent solution. The tools and latest accompanying papers [1,2,3] are in print and online accessible. For those of you who will go to OWLED 2008 or IIMAS’08 this week, you can see it working during the demo sessions, where they take the LUBM benchmark ontology together with the La Sapienza university database (27 tables and 250000 tuples) and two scenarios are worked out with the MiFID ontology and customer business processes.

The remainder of this post is a bit of a marketing exercise about it: the DIG-Mastro and OBDA-plugin for Protégé were developed in a collaboration between members of the KRDB group here at UniBz and the Romans from the DIS at “La Sapienza” university.

On the motivation side, the advantages of OBDA are that the ontology provides a semantic view of the application domain (as opposed to the gory details of the data), constraints expressed in the ontology can fix some incompleteness that tends to be present in especially legacy databases, and, in principle, it can provide the single-view for multiple databases underneath.

The engineers among you are probably well aware that an OWL-DL/OWL 1.1 type-level ontology in Protégé does not scale well if one wants to reason over it, let alone link it to data too to do, e.g., automated instance classification. In order to allow for a scalable system, the DL-lite family of Description Logic languages [4] was developed. Of this family, DL-liteA is used for the implementation (DL-LiteA is LogSpace in data complexity, just as efficient relational databases). The language’s features, i.e. what kind of things you can model, are described in [3,4] and summarized and compared with other ontology languages in [5] in table 1, which is almost the same as can be done with standard UML class diagrams and ER. In contrast to the more expressive DL-based ontology languages and accompanying reasoners, the DIG-Masto actually can deal with unions of conjunctive queries (UCQ) over large data sources and still have efficient reasoning.

A far from trivial issue is the question of how to link the data to the ontologies; the theoretical details can be found in [3]. The mappings do not look very nice for complex mappings (see fig.7 in [1] compared to the readable mappings in fig.1 in [2]), but the OBDA-plugin makes it a lot easier to make them—automation of this procedure is in the pipeline [6,7]—and once the GLAV mappings are defined, you can simply reuse them as often as you want. In short, the plugin allows you to describe the data sources, the mappings, send these descriptions to an OBDA-enabled reasoner, issue OBDA-specific queries, and view the results in the GUI. And yes, I’ve seen it working.

Here are two screenshots of part of the GUI in Protégé (copied from [2]), where the first shows RDBMS-to-Ontology mappings, and the second one a UCQ issued to the DIG-Mastro with query and results manageable through the OBDA-plugin (click to enlarge).

What else do you want?

[1] Mariano Rodriguez-Muro, Lina Lubyte, and Diego Calvanese. Realizing Ontology Based Data Access: A plug-in for Protégé. In Proc. of the Workshop on Information Integration Methods, Architectures, and Systems (IIMAS 2008 ), 2008. Cancun, Mexico.

[2] Antonella Poggi, Mariano Rodriguez-Muro, and Marco Ruzzi. Ontology-based database access with DIG-Mastro and the OBDA Plugin for Protégé (Demo). In Proceeding of the Workshop OWLED 2008. Washington DC, USA, 1-2 April 2008.

[3] Antonella Poggi, Domenico Lembo, Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini, and Riccardo Rosati. Linking Ontologies to Data. Journal on Data Semantics. X: 133-173, 2008.

[4] Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Domenico Lembo, Maurizio Lenzerini, and Riccardo Rosati. Tractable reasoning and efficient query answering in description logics: The DL-Lite family. Journal of Automated Reasoning, 2007, 39(3):385-429.

[5] C. Maria Keet and Mariano Rodriguez. Toward using biomedical ontologies: trade-offs between ontology languages. AAAI 2007 Workshop Semantic eScience (SeS 2007). 23 July 2007, Vancouver, Canada.

[6] Lina Lubyte and Sergio Tessaris. Extracting ontologies from relational databases. Proceedings of the 20^th International workshop on Description Logics (DL’07). Bressanone, Italy. CEUR-WS Vol-250, 387-394.

[7] L. Lubyte, S. Tessaris. Supporting the Design of Ontologies for Data Access. In Proc. of the 21st International Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2008 ). To appear.

As mentioned earlier, there is more in the pipeline about part-whole relations than only the taxonomy of types of part-whole relations and the RBox Compatibility service [1]. There are a lot of issues in representing parts, wholes, and part-whole relations—in particular in bio(medical) ontologies and conceptual data models. One of them is the distinction between the plain mandatory constraint on the participation of the part (whole) in the part-whole relation and the stronger notion of essential part (whole). Informally, they deal with representing that “the part must be part of some whole” versus “the part must be part of the same whole”. A classical example is the difference between how your heart is part of your body versus how your brain is part of your body: your heart is replaceable and as long as you have some heart in your body you’ll be fine (well, continue to exist), whereas this is different for your brain[1]. This, again, is different from parts that a whole normally has (or is supposed to have), such as two eyes and two kidneys in case of a human: without the eyes, you still can live healthily without medical intervention, whereas without the kidneys, you will die if there’s no possibility for regular dialysis—hence, there is somehow a difference in modality on the participation of the parts and wholes in the part-whole relation.

To represent this sort of difference, one can resort to adding existence and necessity [2], but also assess it along the temporal dimension. To say that a part is essential to a whole, then throughout its entire lifetime, the whole has exactly that part related through only that part-whole relation. This does not say anything about the part, though: that part might well have existed before the whole or continue to exist after the whole ceased to exist as a whole. Vice versa, if a whole is essential to the part, then that part cannot survive as is without that whole it is part of. Of course, this can be combined so that the part and the whole are mutually essential.

To represent this talk about “before”, “after”, and “during” in the setting of essential parts and wholes, one can add time t to the predicates, add an ordering over time points (chronons) t₁, …, t_n, and construct long formalizations to represent precisely the temporal constrains over the objects participating in the part-whole relation as well as over the part-whole relation itself. With an eye on potential for implementation, however, we chose to take the well-studied Description Logic language DLRus and its corresponding ERvt temporal conceptual data modeling language (see [3] for the latest comprehensive treatment of both) so as to capture succinctly the set of constraints for mandatory and essential parts and wholes. A rather dense, DL-readership-oriented, paper has just been accepted for DL’08 that presents this solution [4], which I’ll try to render in a brief digest-format in the following paragraph and give a few realistic examples afterward.

DLRus is an expressive temporal description logic with the Until and Since operators and can capture most of the common conceptual data modeling languages, such as n-aries, cardinality restrictions, sub-relations, disjointness, covering etc. ERvt is, roughly, EER with extra constructs for the time aspects and for each ERvt conceptual model, there is an equi-statisfiable DLRus knowledge base.

In [3] you will find explanation on inclusion of the notion of status classes (well-known in temporal information systems), where some instance o can be member of Scheduled-C, Active-C, Suspended-C, or Disabled-C, with Active-C denoting the usual class C in a conceptual model (or call it concept C in DL terminology, universal C in an OBO Foundry ontology, whichever). There is a range of implications to ensure correct behaviour of the status classes, such as if an object is member of Suspended-C then it first must have been member of C. If we entertain ourselves with a particular instance o1 of the Papilionoidae, then when o1 is member of Caterpillar, we might as well make o1 also member of the Scheduled-Butterfly class and of the Disabled-Egg class (if it is interesting to do so, is another topic). We can do the same for relations; i.e., in [4] we extend ERvt by introducing the notion of status relations (from §3 onwards, including an informal description). Applying that to the partof relation, we get Scheduled-partof, Active-partof, Suspended-partof, and Disabled-partof. For the axioms that deal with essential participation, we first have that the partof relation cannot be suspended, and subsequently add axioms to say that the lifetime of the part (or whole) either starts before that of the whole (or part) or at the same time, and if the part (whole) finishes at the same time or if the part (whole) can outlive the whole (part). Thus, there are eight combinations of the possible constraints, which are drawn in an illustrative figure as well (Fig.3): four for essential parts and four for essential wholes (theorems 1 and 2). That’s it.

With this addition of status relations, we can represent a lot more than only the distinction between mandatory and essential parts and wholes—for quite realistic information, actually. For instance, we would like to say in a medical ontology or conceptual data model intended for development of a transplant database that all transplanted hearts must have been part of some other human. Put differently, and at the instance-level for illustrative purpose, such a constraint would enforce that if a heart h1 as member of Heart is partof p2 that is member of class Human and this partof is member of Active-partof, then there must be a human p1 that is member of Disabled-Human (i.e., p1 has died, assuming that a person cannot live without having a heart) and there must be a relational instance (tuple) of partof that relates h1 and p1 that is member of Disabled-partof. For kidney transplants, we can amend this to say that p1 is member of either Human or Disabled-Human (one could have donated just one kidney). For planning purposes, we can have donors in the transplant database whose organs are scheduled to become part of another human, i.e., the parts and wholes are both in their respective active classes, but a partof relation is member of Scheduled-part of relating the organ to a prospective recipient. Further, if we drop the standard essential part (whole) to less restrictive cases so that the objects and relations may become suspended some time during their lifespan, we can keep track of, say, some car engine e1 at the car mechanic who has removed it from the car c1 for maintenance purposes, but this e1 surely is supposed to be reinstalled in that car c1. And so forth.

Now, before running off to go forth and play with, e.g., the temporalised relations in the RO [5], some of those (like derivation), as well as other options, have already been addressed in [3] under the heading of so-called “evolution constraints”. And a caveat is that the full DLRus is undecidable[2], but there’s ongoing work on temporalising the well-behaved computationally nice DL-lite and some subsets of DLRus are in Exptime (see the last section of [3] for a summary).

[1] Keet, C.M., Artale, A. Representing and Reasoning over a Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations. Applied Ontology, in print.
[2] Guizzardi, G. Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models. PhD Thesis, Telematica Institute, Twente University, Enschede, the Netherlands. 2005.
[3] Artale, A., Parent, C., Spaccapietra, S. Evolving objects in temporal information systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AMAI), 2007, 50(1-2), 5-38.
[4] Artale, A., Keet, C.M. Essential and mandatory part-whole relations in conceptual data models. 21st International Workshop on Description Logics (DL’08 ), 13-16 May 2008, Dresden, Germany.
[5] Smith, B., Ceusters, W., Klagges, B., Koehler, J., Kumar, A., Lomax, J., Mungall, C., Neuhaus, F., Rector, A.L., Rosse, C. (2005). Relations in biomedical ontologies. Genome Biology, 2005, 6:R46.

Some reader might think I’m heading towards a write up about the seemingly insurmountable simplicities of the PhD programme, but I still think that doing a PhD amounts to coping with surmountable difficulties. The ‘insurmountable simplicities’ is part of the title of a popular philosophy book, which has the full title in English, among the eight languages it is translated into: “Insurmountable simplicities—thirty-nine philosophical conundrums” by Achille Varzi and Roberto Casati. I just finished reading the 39 short stories and dialogues spread over 129 pages, and I can highly recommend it to anyone. It is written in a way that is easily accessible to the general public, yet the stories cover a wide range of philosophical puzzles that make you both laugh and, moreover, think. Else, if you have no life but occasionally have to socialize and don not know of anything else to talk about than to bore your conversation partner with your thesis topic/work, then any of the 39 stories will do to get a conversation going. I will summarize and comment some of them below; “Zombie Inc.”, “Partial Amnesia”, “Person transplant” and “My ice cream, your ice cream” are available online for free as appetizers.

The dialogue “Person transplant” has a man walking into a transplant clinic asking for a new brain. As donor, he can make his brain available to anyone interested and it costs him $10k but as receiver requesting a new brain he can get $10k from the clinic… or so begins the dialogue. Put differently: brain donor versus body receiver; i.e., is your brain you with a disposable body or your body you and your brain just like any organ that, at least in theory, could be transplanted like you heart, kidneys and so forth? And, by the way, is it really an either-or case? Staying for a bit with dialogues about medicine, there are some complications with the placebo effect, where a customer in a drug store asks for a placebo against his headache. After all, it has been shown that it works, so one might well ask for a little starch pill, which, of course, defeats the purpose. So, how to administer a placebo that is both effective and ethically correct (as the pharmacist cannot give a non-medicine knowing that better is readily available)?

In “The traveler’s pictionary”, a word may be worth a thousand pictures. Instead of going on holiday with a dictionary, the travel agent offers the traveller to Siberia a pictionary, so that she can point to the pictures instead of messing with Russian vocabulary and grammar. The pictionary has only pictures of things that can be depicted, such as for ‘buying’ (not uncontroversial) and a picture for ‘bicycle’, but can things like ‘wisdom’ or ‘inflation’ be drawn, or the negation of doing something? Moreover, and where the recurring personage “the meddler” chimes in, “a picture is itself something that requires an interpretation. And if a picture requires an interpretation, bringing it to mind can hardly help” (with a nudge to Wittgenstein). A practical example that many a biologist/bioinformatician has come across, is the derogatory term “[useless/informal/underspecified] cartoon” that computer scientists and software engineers regularly use for the very clear and explanatory colourful diagrams in biology textbooks; but then, they haven’t gotten the training in how to read such figures…

Prisoner K.J., the director of the penitentiary, the medical officer, and the Smiths are involved in a correspondence about that K.J. can neither recall the crimes he is convicted of nor the date of imprisonment due to irreversible amnesia (“Partial amnesia”). Should he be informed about it? He found out and considers himself responsible for the act he cannot remember. But given that he cannot remember it, does that affect one’s personal identity and if so, is he then really responsible for those crimes? The most interesting bit comes at the end though, with a note from the state legal office. The story does take for granted one knows the main principle of putting people in jail as punishment for having committed a crime (deny the right of free movement, reflect on the crime, learn from it so that recidivism does not occur upon release). This obviously does not include revoking the right to vote, nor for the effect as the George Jung character in the movie Blow said cynically about his first experience serving time in jail: that he went in with a bachelors in marihuana and got out with a PhD in cocaine. To name just a few ‘collateral effects’ of prison systems in several countries; but I’ll leave that for another post sometime because it has little to do with philosophy (or has it?).

Last, there is also a section with entertaining logic, such as “Interesting!”, although, of course, not everything can be interesting, for—in the case of the dialogue in the bookstore about intrinsically interesting books—“if all books are interesting, and if being interesting requires some original feature, then relative to the property of being interesting, all books would appear to be uninteresting. Which is to say: boring.” Casati and Varzi’s book is far from boring and contains many other stories covering, among others, causality, paradoxes of time and space, the notion of choice, and chance, which are narrated in settings ranging from birthdays for entering the museum for free, reducing majority voting to one person, playing lotto in reverse, to useless project proposals.

p.s.: Varzi’s publication page here has the links for all the languages the ‘insurmountable simplicities’ is translated in.

Last Thursday we had a trial-audit of the university’s BSc in Applied Computer Science degree by EUR-INF representatives. EUR-INF is a EU-funded project that aims to contribute to harmonization of computer science degrees across the EU through working out a skills set that any BSc graduate in a particular type of CS degree should have, to figure out a way to do reasonable audits, and to devise an optional accreditation. In the spirit of the Bologna Process and with a strong smell of the Lisbon Strategy, then with such an increased harmonization, worker mobility will be greatly facilitated and probably streamlines the hiring process in industry, too.

As anyone who has studied in one country but continues his/her studies, works, or has worked abroad, there is not always a seamless match between what one has learned and what is expected to be part of one’s baggage elsewhere. There are, of course, a myriad of explanatory reasons why this is so, such as a tradition of pragmatism versus theory-first, what knowledge and skills are perceived to be needed in the society where the universities are positioned, and, more fundamentally, what constitutes an academic education. These topics are good for a never-ending discussion and, given the diversity in Europe, a futile exercise to harmonize; or, to put it negatively: the already organized ones and those with the biggest mouths and most power and money are likely to call the shots[1] and, en passant, limit options for youth to study, which eventually percolates with a 10-20 year lag into a society changing toward boring conformity and lower average education. I won’t step on that soapbox now (see e.g. here), but I’d like to mention two points. One is that the Bologna Process with the 3+2(+3) system has resulted in less university education for students, because now that there is an artificially introduced drop-out point after three years, more people tend to take that instead of continuing with a masters degree whereas before-Bologna, one had to bite through the whole 4-5 years to obtain a degree. Second, which also received quite a bit of attention during the trial-audit, is the requirement to teach students “general skills”, like doing teamwork, planning, and reflection on effects of technology on society. Apparently, the latter made it into the BSc curriculum for applied CS. Gheez. Becoming technically competent in IT with a life-time baggage of knowledge and socially adequate in 3 x 60 ECTS credits. Yeah, right. Maybe I’m getting old, but in my younger days of the first study I did at WUR (a 5-year scheme), there were some of the general skills in there, but the study was about getting a solid foundation in the discipline and general skills you just did in your own time - like doing a language course, becoming member of a society for fun but that also helps to learn to collaborate, organize events, exchange ideas with students from different backgrounds and so forth. Now this has to be crammed in the official 3-year curriculum so as to receive official credit points for it. Allucinante. And it’s the students that are being duped by being cheated out of getting value for money at the university to obtain some decent foundation with knowledge that is not outdated after toiling a few years in the industrial workforce. Being more communicative from the start may get a graduate his first job more quickly for being a smooth talker, but he’s not going to keep it with too limited knowledge of the matter; after all, each year there’s a new batch of fresh cheap graduates with the latest short-term handy skills.

Notwithstanding the meagre chance of success for harmonization (simplification is easier to achieve…), I admit that the auditors did take a thorough and sensible approach with the trial-audit. Instead of silly bean-counting and statistics-only, they spoke with the programme coordinators, students, and the teaching body, and checked BSc theses and other students’ works, as well as paying a visit to the university’s support structures such as the library facilities, student secretariat and so forth in about 2 days. In general, their feedback was positive. Regarding the new EU-initiative for the minimum of two languages, that was, obviously, trivially met in a tri-lingual faculty and a quadri-lingual university[2].

The EUR-INF project finishes in August 2008, and I assume the final results of the harmonization and accreditation endeavours will be published on their website.

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[1] The present EUR-INF list for learning outcomes of BSc in CS programmes is a mix of existing accreditation systems from organizations like the ACM and country-specific ones, like those of the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.
[2] The two main official languages in which administrative documents are produced are German and Italian, then there’s the official third language Ladin in the Faculty of Education, and we have English across the university as well as being the official language of the CS MSc and PhD programmes.

May I recommend for the Friday afternoon/weekend reading: an article by Bletter, Reynertson, and Velazquez Runk in the journal Ethnobotany Research & Applications (vol. 5, 2007) on “The taxonomy, ecology, and ethnobotany of the Simulacraceae”, which has about 80 species divided in 17 genera, such as Plasticus, Textileria, and Papyroidia. Moreover,

This family is more than a botanical curiosity. It is a scientific conundrum, as the taxa:

1. lack genetic material,
2. appear virtually immortal and
3. have the ability to form intergeneric crosses with ease, despite the lack of any evident mechanism for cross-fertilization.

In this study, conducted over approximately six years, we elucidate the first full description and review of this fascinating taxon, heretofore named Simulacraceae.

To summarize, also in the words of the authors,

The eco­nomics, distribution, ecology, taxonomy, paleoethnobot­any, and phakochemistry of this widespread family are herein presented. We have recently made great strides in circumscribing this group, and collections indicate this cosmopolitan family has a varied ecology. … Despite being genomically challenged plants, an initial phylogeny is pro­posed. In an early attempt to determine the ecological re­lations of this family, a twenty-meter transect has been in­ventoried from a Plasticus rain forest in Nyack, New York, yielding 49 new species and the first species-area curve for this family.

The Simulacraceae collections—based on the principal method of “opportunistic sampling”—are deposited in the herbarium of the Foundation for Artificial Knowledge Education. Some of the open problems yet to investigate include simulacrapaleoethnobotany and simulacrapolitical ecology, and from an engineering perspective, the design of a Traditional Simulacraceae Knowledge/Teleological Simulation Knowledge base (dubbed acronym “TSK,TSK”, which would compete well with the yearly naming game for the NAR January database issue).

A short html version of the article is available online in the Jan/Feb issue of AIR, but also the full pdf file (about 6MB) in the Uni of Hawaii database with more information and colourful photos (openly accessible, of course). Enjoy!

Some of you have noticed the low volume of posts lately, which was due to thesis deadline back in December (the Italian system is fairly strict on those matters). Last Monday I had to give a presentation for the Collegio di Docenti (professors’ committee) of the faculty, who decided to admit me to the public defense in April 2008 (with another committee, composed of external examiners and headed by a UniBz prof.). HiHa!

In addition to a few day’s of sleep after the 21th of Dec., I’ve been on a real holiday to Sicily for a week (a few annotated photos) and I’m now diligently catching up and working on article writing – with deadlines that all seem to be in the first 2-3 months of the year – but I also have some “spare time” (relative to the last half a year) so that I can post/read/comment a bit more regularly. In case someone would like to read more contents right now already, you may want to have a look at the recently accepted journal article on representing part-whole relations and reasoning over it with a newly defined RBox Compatibility reasoning service:

Keet, C.M. and Artale, A. Representing and Reasoning over a Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations. Applied Ontology — Special Issue on Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Modelling, to appear.

More about part-whole relations is in the pipeline, but that for later.