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Our work aims to make the arguments underlying a scientific controversy more clear and more understandable. A long-term goal of our research is to use argumentation theory to help improve science communication, and particularly to help reduce information disorders such as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (Wardle, 2018). We conduct a case study about one public controversy: whether masks can interrupt or reduce the spread of COVID-19. We are mapping this controversy using an argumentation theory called polylogue analysis (Lewiński and Aakhus, 2022). The polylogue diagrams resulting from our case study could be used in the future to determine whether argumentation theory can help improve the quality of communication about controversies in science. In the future, the landscape of a controversy could be used to determine the alignment of players and positions (for instance to highlight conflicts of interest); to help stimulate people’s critical thinking and analytic skills; and to elucidate the subtle positions in controversies., Funding: United States Institute of Museum and Library Services RE-250162-OLS-21, {"references":["Altmetric.com page for Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses: Overview of attention for article published in Cochrane database of systematic reviews, January 2023. (n.d.). Altmetric.com. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://cochrane.altmetric.com/details/141934282","Eysenbach, G. (2020). How to fight an infodemic: The four pillars of infodemic management. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(6), e21820. https://doi.org/10.2196/21820","Jefferson, T., Dooley, L., Ferroni, E., Al-Ansary, L. A., Driel, M. L. van, Bawazeer, G. A., Jones, M. A., Hoffmann, T. C., Clark, J., Beller, E. M., Glasziou, P. P., & Conly, J. M. (2023). Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 1. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6","Lewiński, M., & Aakhus, M. (2022). Argumentation in Complex Communication: Managing Disagreement in a Polylogue. Cambridge University Press.","Soares-Weiser, K. (2023, March 10). Statement on \"Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses\" review. Cochrane. https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses-review","van Eemeren, F. H., Garssen, B., Krabbe, E. C. W., Henkemans, A. F. S., Verheij, B., & Wagemans, J. H. M. (2014). Argumentation and Artificial Intelligence. In F. H. van Eemeren, B. Garssen, E. C. W. Krabbe, A. F. Snoeck Henkemans, B. Verheij, & J. H. M. Wagemans (Eds.), Handbook of Argumentation Theory (pp. 615–675). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9473-5_11","Wardle, C. (2018). The need for smarter definitions and practical, timely empirical research on information disorder. Digital Journalism, 6(8), 951–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1502047"]}

Humans constantly create narratives to provide explanations for how and why something happens. Designing systems able to build such narratives would therefore contribute to building more human-centric systems, and to support uses like decision-making processes. Here, a narrative is seen as a sequence of events. My thesis investigates how a narrative can be built computationally. Four research questions are identified: representation, construction, link prediction and evaluation. A case study on the French Revolution, based upon Wikidata and Wikipedia is presented. This prototype helps identifying the first challenges such as dynamic representation and evaluation of a narrative.

Ontology Alignment (OA) is generally performed by requesting two parties to provide their complete knowledge to a third party that suggests potential schema alignments. This might however not always be possible or helpful, as for example, when two organisations want to query each other’s knowledge, and none of them is willing to share their schema due to information privacy considerations. This Ph.D. explores how to allow multi-agent communication in cases where agents operate using different ontologies that cannot be fully exposed or shared. Our preliminary experiments focus on the case where agents’ knowledge is describing a common set of entities and has the form of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). The suggested methodology is based on the grounded naming game, where agents are forced to develop their own language in order to refer to corresponding schema concepts of different ontologies. This way, agents that use different ontologies can still communicate successfully for a task at hand, without revealing any private information. We have performed some proof of concept experiments applying our suggested method on artificial cases and we are on the process of extending our methodology so that it can be applied in real-world KGs.

Systematic reviews are extremely time-consuming. The goal of this work is to assess work savings and recall for a publication type filtering strategy that uses the output of two machine learning models, Multi-Tagger and web RCT Tagger, applied retrospectively to 10 systematic reviews on drug effectiveness. Our filtering strategy resulted in mean work savings of 33.6% and recall of 98.3%. Of 363 articles finally included in any of the systematic reviews, 7 were filtered out by our strategy, but 1 "error" was actually an article using a publication type that the SR team had not pre-specified as relevant for inclusion. Our analysis suggests that automated publication type filtering can potentially provide substantial work savings with minimal loss of included articles. Publication type filtering should be personalized for each systematic review and might be combined with other filtering or ranking methods to provide additional work savings for manual triage.

Additional file 1. Online Supplement Description: Further description of RISRS workshops and excerpts from 2 surveys of workshop participants.

Slides from “Misinformation and truth: from fake news to retractions to preprints"Description: Connecting the dots: A cross-industry discussion on retracted researchIssues around the capturing, acknowledgement, classification, and tracking of retracted research are shared by academic institutions, publishing organizations, and the technology providers who support them. This cross-industry panel, moderated by a researcher and comprised of representatives from a non-profit publisher, an academic library, and a publishing platform provider, will examine shared obstacles and opportunities in processing, documenting, and communicating retractions, and will provide practical strategies for cross-industry collaboration. The panel will be moderated by Jodi Schneider, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jodi and other members of her research team have been spending significant time in 2020 bringing together representatives from all areas of the scholarly communication ecosystem as part of a Sloan-funded agenda-setting project. This moderated conversation will be one deliverable from a series of multiple workshops, interviews, and white papers.

In this research we aim to demonstrate that an ontology-based system can categorize potential drug-drug interaction (PDDI) evidence items into complex types based on a small set of simple questions. Such a method could increase the transparency and reliability of PDDI evidence evaluation, while also reducing the variations in content and seriousness ratings present in PDDI knowledge bases. We extended the DIDEO ontology with 44 formal evidence type definitions. We then manually annotated the evidence types of 30 evidence items. We tested an RDF/OWL representation of answers to a small number of simple questions about each of these 30 evidence items and showed that automatic inference can determine the detailed evidence types based on this small number of simpler questions. These results show proof-of-concept for a decision support infrastructure that frees the evidence evaluator from mastering relatively complex written evidence type definitions.

During July 2009, a one-month measurement campaign was performed in the megacity of Paris. Amongst other measurement platforms, three stationary sites distributed over an area of 40 km in diameter in the greater Paris region enabled a detailed characterization of the aerosol particle and gas phase. Simulation results from the FLEXPART dispersion model were used to distinguish between different types of air masses sampled. It was found that the origin of air masses had a large influence on measured mass concentrations of the secondary species particulate sulphate, nitrate, ammonium, and oxygenated organic aerosol measured with the Aerodyne aerosol mass spectrometer in the submicron particle size range: particularly high concentrations of these species (about 4 μg m−3, 2 μg m−3, 2 μg m−3, and 7 μg m−3, respectively) were measured when aged material was advected from continental Europe, while for air masses originating from the Atlantic, much lower mass concentrations of these species were observed (about 1 μg m−3, 0.2 μg m−3, 0.4 μg m−3, and 1–3 μg m−3, respectively). For the primary emission tracers hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol, black carbon, and NOx it was found that apart from diurnal source strength variations and proximity to emission sources, local meteorology had the largest influence on measured concentrations, with higher wind speeds leading to larger dilution and therefore smaller measured concentrations. Also the shape of particle size distributions was affected by wind speed and air mass origin. Quasi-Lagrangian measurements performed under connected flow conditions between the three stationary sites were used to estimate the influence of the Paris emission plume onto its surroundings, which was found to be rather small. Rough estimates for the impact of the Paris emission plume on the suburban areas can be inferred from these measurements: Volume mixing ratios of 1–14 ppb of NOx, and upper limits for mass concentrations of about 1.5 μg m−3 of black carbon and of about 3 μg m−3 of hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol can be deduced which originate from both, local emissions and the overall Paris emission plume. The secondary aerosol particle phase species were found to be not significantly influenced by the Paris megacity, indicating their regional origin. The submicron aerosol mass concentrations of particulate sulphate, nitrate, and ammonium measured during time periods when air masses were advected from eastern central Europe were found to be similar to what has been found from other measurement campaigns in Paris and south-central France for this type of air mass origin, indicating that the results presented here are also more generally valid.

A huge amount of human time and effort is spent in "keeping up" with the explosion of trials and papers. Policymakers and scientists need to quickly access what is known on a given topic at the present time. In this project, part of the “Addressing Gaps in Clinically Useful Evidence on Drug-Drug Interactions”, an NLM R01 grant, we are exploring new methods for abstracting and indexing deep knowledge about medication safety. Potential drug-drug interactions are a significant source of preventable drug-related harm. Unfortunately, most drug information sources disagree substantially in their content. One contributing factor is that there is no standard way to represent PDDI knowledge claims and associated evidence in a computable form. Our approach is to (1) construct both an evidence base and a knowledge base (2) model knowledge with ontologies; and (3) annotate the scientific literature and other source documents. Annotations stored in the evidence base (as micropublications) can be filtered to generate a knowledge base (published in the nanopublication format). Ontologies and data models that we use include: * Micropublications Ontology http://purl.org/mp * Nanopublications Ontology http://nanopub.org/ * Open Annotation Data Model http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/ * The Potential Drug-drug Interaction and Potential Drug-drug Interaction Evidence Ontology https://github.com/DIDEO/DIDEO Code and data from the project is available at Related papers have been published at workshops of the International Semantic Web Conference, BDM2I 2015 at ISWC 2015 http://jodischneider.com/pubs/bdm2i.pdf and LISC 2014 at ISWC 2014 http://jodischneider.com/pubs/lisc2014.pdf

This poster describes a proposal for a conference of stakeholders, "Toward a Diagnosis Driven Profession" regarding dental diagnostic terminologies.

Teacher's Guide: Knot theory is a relatively new field of mathematics, initiated only at the end of the last century. Although much progress has occurred, a multitude of fascinating unanswered questions remains. Whereas some of these questions are very complex, others are simple enough to be explored by high school students and their teachers.

'Beyond the PDF' brought together around 80 people to the University of California San Diego to discuss scholarly communication, primarily in the sciences. The main topic: How can we apply emergent technologies to improve measurably the way that scholarship is conveyed and comprehended? The group included domain scientists, researchers and software developers, librarians, funders, publishers, journal editors - a mix which organiser Phil Bourne described as 'visionaries, developers, consumers, and conveyors' of scholarship. The workshop's vision was to identify key issues that must be overcome in order to satisfy consumers, create a plan (including responsible parties, a timeline, and deliverables), and to find a way to keep momentum. peer-reviewed

peer-reviewed

Argumentative discussions are common in Web 2.0 applications, but the social Web still offers limited or no explicit support for argumentation. As Web 2.0 applications become more popular, modeling argumentation happening in these systems becomes important, to enable reuse and further understanding of online discussions. After reviewing four genres of online conversations¿Web bulletin boards,Wiki talk pages, blog comments, and microblogs¿and four current Web 2.0 argumentation systems, the paper suggests how Semantic Web technologies can be used to provide an interoperability layer for argumentation modeling across applications peer-reviewed

In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to find planets of less than 10 MEarth (so called Super-Earths) that may potentially be habitable. How can we characterize those planets and assess if they are habitable? The new field of extrasolar planet search has shown an extraordinary ability to combine research by astrophysics, chemistry, biology and geophysics into a new and exciting interdisciplinary approach to understand our place in the universe. The results of a first generation mission will most likely result in an amazing scope of diverse planets that will set planet formation, evolution as well as our planet in an overall context., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, Astrobiology, 10, 1, 2010

The Super-Earth Explorer is an Off-Axis Space Telescope (SEE-COAST) designed for high contrast imaging. Its scientific objective is to make the physico-chemical characterization of exoplanets possibly down to 2 Earth radii >. For that purpose it will analyze the spectral and polarimetric properties of the parent starlight reflected by the planets, in the wavelength range 400-1250 nm, Accepted in Experimental Astronomy

28 pages; International audience; The Lodève Permian synrift sequence is represented by thick stacked climate-controled playa cycles which have been constrained by structural, sedimentological, geochemical and paleontological processes. The present paper merges the different results in order to better constrain the dynamics and palaeoecologycal evolution of the playa system from Late Cisuralian to Early Lopingian time. In this depositional environment, thining upwards sheet-flood sequences represent flooding events; they are relayed by ephemeral ponding, suspension settling and limited carbonate precipitation accompanied by large amounts of shallow to subaerial sedimentary structures (current and wind ripples, desiccation cracks, rain drops, etc.). The aridity of the climate contrasts with the surprising abundance of the fauna encountered into carbonate-rich silty-clay playa-lake deposits. Ephemeral pools are colonized by numerous shellfish: Choncostraca, Triopsids, and Insects, which led to intense burrowing of the overbank deposits (Scoyenia facies). Tetrapods are common and dominated by several types of reptiles after footprints: Pelycosauria, Parareptilia and Lepidosauria in the Rabejac Fm, and Mammalian reptiles (Therapsida) on the top of the fluvial deposits of the Salagou Fm near La Lieude farm. In addition, elements of a weighty herbivorous Pelycosaurian and a small amphibian Tupilakosaurid, only described in the Triassic before, have been also found in the Upper part of the Permian series of this sector.

International audience; Closed (non-steady state) chambers are widely used for quantifying carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes between soils or low-stature canopies and the atmosphere. It is well recognised that covering a soil or vegetation by a closed chamber inherently disturbs the natural CO2 fluxes by altering the concentration gradients between the soil, the vegetation and the overlying air. Thus, the driving factors of CO2 fluxes are not constant during the closed chamber experiment, and no linear increase or decrease of CO2 concentration over time within the chamber headspace can be expected. Nevertheless, linear regression has been applied for calculating CO2 fluxes in many recent, partly influential, studies. This approach has been justified by keeping the closure time short and assuming the concentration change over time to be in the linear range. Here, we test if the application of linear regression is really appropriate for estimating CO2 fluxes using closed chambers over short closure times and if the application of nonlinear regression is necessary. We developed a nonlinear exponential regression model from diffusion and photosynthesis theory. This exponential model was tested with four different datasets of CO2 flux measurements (total number: 1764) conducted at three peatlands sites in Finland and a tundra site in Siberia. Thorough analyses of residuals demonstrated that linear regression was frequently not appropriate for the determination of CO2 fluxes by closed-chamber methods, even if closure times were kept short. The developed exponential model was well suited for nonlinear regression of the concentration over time c(t) evolution in the chamber headspace and estimation of the initial CO2 fluxes at closure time for the majority of experiments. However, a rather large percentage of the exponential regression functions showed curvatures not consistent with the theoretical model which is considered to be caused by violations of the underlying model assumptions. Especially the effects of turbulence and pressure disturbances by the chamber deployment are suspected to have caused unexplainable curvatures. CO2 flux estimates by linear regression can be as low as 40% of the flux estimates of exponential regression for closure times of only two minutes. The degree of underestimation increased with increasing CO2 flux strength and was dependent on soil and vegetation conditions which can disturb not only the quantitative but also the qualitative evaluation of CO2 flux dynamics. The underestimation effect by linear regression was observed to be different for CO2 uptake and release situations which can lead to stronger bias in the daily, seasonal and annual CO2 balances than in the individual fluxes. To avoid serious bias of CO2 flux estimates based on closed chamber experiments, we suggest further tests using published datasets and recommend the use of nonlinear regression models for future closed chamber studies.

We discuss a series of Earthshine spectra obtained with the NTT/EMMI instrument between 320nm and 1020nm with a resolution of R~450 in the blue and R~250 in the red. These ascending and descending Moon's Earthshine spectra taken from Chile give disk-averaged spectra for two different Earth's phases. The spectra show the ozone (Huggins and Chappuis bands), oxygen and water vapour absorption bands, and also the stronger Rayleigh scattering in the blue. Removing the known telluric absorptions reveals a spectral feature around 700nm which is attributed to the vegetation stronger reflectivity in the near-IR, so-called vegetation red-edge., Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, proceedings from a poster at 'Semaine de l'Astrophysique Francaise', 27th june-1st july 2005, Strasbourg

International audience; A detailed study of the levels, the temporal and diurnal variability of the main compounds involved in the biogenic sulfur cycle was carried out in Crete (Eastern Mediterranean) during the Mediterranean Intensive Oxidant Study (MINOS) field experiment in July-August 2001. Intensive measurements of gaseous dimethylsulfide (DMS), dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), sulfur dioxide (SO2), sulfuric (H2SO4) and methanesulfonic acids (MSA) and particulate sulfate (SO42-) and methanesulfonate (MS-) have been performed during the campaign. Dimethylsulfide (DMS) levels ranged from 2.9 to 136 pmol·mol-1 (mean value of 21.7 pmol·mol-1) and showed a clear diurnal variation with daytime maximum. During nighttime DMS levels fall close or below the detection limit of 2 pmol·mol-1. Concurrent measurements of OH and NO3 radicals during the campaign indicate that NO3 levels can explain most of the observed diurnal variation of DMS. Dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) ranged between 0.02 and 10.1 pmol·mol-1 (mean value of 1.7 pmol·mol-1) and presents a diurnal variation similar to that of DMS. SO2 levels ranged from 220 to 2970 pmol·mol-1 (mean value of 1030 pmol·mol-1), while nss-SO42- and MS- ranged from 330 to 7100 pmol·mol-1, (mean value of 1440 pmol·mol-1) and 1.1 to 37.5 pmol·mol-1 (mean value of 11.5 pmol·mol-1) respectively. Of particular interest are the measurements of gaseous MSA and H2SO4. MSA ranged from below the detection limit (3x104) to 3.7x107 molecules cm-3, whereas H2SO4 ranged between 1x105 and 9.0x107 molecules cm-3. The measured H2SO4 maxima are among the highest reported in literature and can be attributed to high insolation, absence of precipitation and increased SO2 levels in the area. From the concurrent SO2, OH, and H2SO4 measurements a sticking coefficient of 0.52±0.28 was calculated for H2SO4. From the concurrent MSA, OH, and DMS measurements the yield of gaseous MSA from the OH-initiated oxidation of DMS was calculated to range between 0.1-0.4%. This low MSA yield implies that gaseous MSA levels can not account for the observed MS- levels. Heterogeneous reactions of DMSO on aerosols should be considered to explain the observed levels of MS-.

International audience; We have performed a three-year series of routine lidar measurements at preselected times. The measurements were performed between 1 December 1997, and 30 November 2000, at Kühlungsborn, Germany (54°07' N, 11°46' E). Using a Rayleigh/Mie/Raman lidar system, we measured the aerosol backscatter coefficients at three wavelengths and the extinction coefficient at one wavelength. The present data analysis focuses on after-sunset Raman measurements obtained on cloud-free days. Aerosol backscatter profiles are available for altitudes above 100 m, while the majority of the extinction measurements has been restricted to heights above the residual layer. The residual layer shows an annual cycle with its maximum height in summer (2000 m) and minimum height in winter (850 m). The backscatter coefficients in the residual layer were found to be about 10 times higher than above. The mean aerosol optical depth above the residual layer and below 5 km is 0.3(±1.0) x10-2 in summer, and 1.5(±1.0) x10-2 in winter, which almost is negligible compared to values measured in during daytime in the planetary boundary layer. A cluster analysis of the backward trajectories yielded two major directions of air mass origin above the residual layer and 4 major directions inside. A marked difference between the aerosol properties dependent on the air mass origin could be found for air masses originating from the west and travelling at high wind speeds. Comparing the measured spectral dependence of the backscatter coefficients with data from the Global Aerosol Data Set, we found a general agreement, but only a few conclusions with respect to the aerosol type could be drawn due to the high variability of the measured backscatter coefficients.