PhD dissertation: Leonardo Lezcano

Last Monday IE member Leonardo Lezcano received his PhD degree, awarded cum laude by the University of Alcalá, after defending his four year research in a dissertation titled “COMBINING ONTOLOGIES AND RULES WITH CLINICAL ARCHETYPES”. The ceremony took place in the Faculty of Law of the University of Alcalá where a committee of experts chaired by Pythagoras Karampiperis evaluated the dissertation. From now on Lezcano will continue to develop his research lines, which are related to the Semantic Web as well as to Semantic Interoperability issues, Linked Data, Network Analysis and Knowledge Representation.

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SPDECE 2012 in Alicante

As every year by this time, several IE members are strongly involved in the new (9th) edition of SPDECE, a yearly conference aimed at providing an open forum for educators and computer specialists to present and discuss research on the different aspects of Technology-Enhanced Learning. Therefore, SPDECE will cover, but is not limited to: new teaching and learning environments, content standards and metadata, learning objects and learning designs and repositories of learning resources.

Streets of Alicante (photo courtesy of "where are the joneses' " and taken from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wherearethejoneses/905138906/)

SPDECE 2012 emphasizes inter-disciplinarity and multi-disciplinarity, fostering interchange between educational and learning sciences, computing and other disciplines. The event thus welcomes papers using a diversity of kinds of research methods, including but not limited to empirical studies, ICT developments, action research and experimental studies.

This year’s edition will be held in the mediterranean city of Alicante, in the eastern coast of Spain.

 

Online interface for the ADL2OWL translator

During the last three years the IE research unit has been developing a Java based translator framework to convert openEHR archetypes (ADL) to an OWL representation. Recently, an online interface that allows uploading an ADL file and executing the translation has been made available and, yesterday, the openEHR Foundation has acknowledge such new tool by adding a link on their official website.

 

3rd OpenHealth-Spain Symposium in Barcelona

Today, IE member Leonardo Lezcano gave a presentation at the third edition of the OpenHealth-Spain Symposium that is taking place these days at the Medicine School of the University of Barcelona. The IE group has been the organizer of this event for the last three years, aiming to encourage discussion and coordination of researchers, practitioners and stakeholders in the area of healthcare systems interoperability while looking for synergies that enhance the Health informatics.

This time Leonardo presented a research work titled “Connectivity and semantic patterns in automatically generated SNOMED-CT subsets” that proposes a series of graph-based methods to analyze and evaluate the fitness and expressiveness of automatically generated SNOMED-CT subsets vis-à-vis the clinical context they were generated for.

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Final Organic.Balkanet meeting and European workshop in Bucharest

This week the Organic.Balkanet project officially comes to an end. The final meeting is taking place in the University of Agronomical and Veterinary Sciences of Bucharest, Romania, where representatives of all project partners are joining forces to present the results of all work packages and establish the final tasks to achieve before the final report.

Panorama of our last joint dinner... we are all going to miss these good moments :')

As part of the activities, a European workshop called “Training challenges for Agricultural Professionals: the Organic.Balkanet experience” has been organized to disseminate project results and receive feedback from stakeholders and policy makers.

Panorama of the main conference room - European workshop

IE members Salvador Sanchez and Miguel Refusta are in Bucharest these days to present the results of work package 3 which was lead by our group, and also to contribute to the workshop with several presentations about the work of the group in e-courses administration, sustainability and other related efforts such as the VOA3R project.

 

agInfra meeting – at FAO, Rome

This week IE members Miguel Angel Sicilia and Leonardo Lezcano met the partners of the agInfra european project. The meeting was held at FAO premises in Rome, Italy. The IE group has previously collaborated in projects within the agricultural domain, like Organic.Edunet and VOA3R. Now the agInfra project is oriented to design and develop a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences.

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New book on ontologies by Emilia Curras

Our colleague Dr. Emilia Curras has recently published a new book full of insights for people working in ontologies from an interdisciplinary perspective. The book name is “Ontologies, Taxonomies and Thesauri in Systems Science and Systematics“. The book is highly recommendable as it is providing a fresh look into the field that brings together all the knowledge on Information Science of Emilia and the latest trends in ontology as formal artifacts.

 

2nd SOCIRES Meeting – at Mittelbiberach

The second meeting of the SOCIRES project is taking place at Mittlebiberach, a small location near Biberach, in southern Germany. Miguel Angel Sicilia was representing our research group in the project meeting sessions.

Miguel Angel and other participants posing outside the meeting venue

Concretely, the meeting is taking place at Graf Brandenstein-Zeppelin, the house of the Zeppelin family. We had the opportunity to visit the beautiful Chapel and the Zeppelin museum.

 

MTSR 2011 at Izmir, Turkey

Last week, several IE members (in fact almost a full delegation including 2 senior members and 2 PhD students) were in Izmir, Turkey, to attend the Fifth Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR 2011), an event for researchers in the area of metadata and semantics with an inter-disciplinary focus. This year’s edition was hosted by the YasarUniversity and IE was, as usual, involved in the Organization committee, Scientific committee and Proceedings edition (as in previous editions, MTSR2011 proceedings have been published in the Springer’s CCIS Series).

Below, two videos from from the opening ceremony…

1) Canzonetta sull’aria from Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro to end the short opening concert by 2 Arts School students:

2) Miguel Angel Sicilia introducing keynote tutorial speaker Nikos Korfiatis:

Also, some pictures taken during the event:

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The event could be followed in twitter (#mtsr2011) and continously updated via the MTSR group in Facebook.

 

4th VOA3R project meeting in Izmir, Turkey

Monday to Wednesday this week the VOA3R project consortium representatives gathered together in Izmir for the project 4th plenary meeting. This fourth VOA3R Project Meeting, hosted by Yasar University, formally discussed the next steps to be taken and planned for the project particularly surrounding systems integration, as well as metadata profile definition.

IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador attended the sessions as the University of Alcala is the coordinator partner. Below some pictures taken during these 3 fruitful days of  intensive work.

Different moments of the meeting