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ELIXIR is a pan-European intergovernmental organisation for life science that aims to coordinate bioinformatics resources in a single infrastructure across Europe; bioinformatics training is central to its strategy, which aims to develop a training community that spans all ELIXIR member states. In an evidence-based approach for strengthening bioinformatics training programmes across Europe, the ELIXIR Training Platform, led by the ELIXIR EXCELERATE Quality and Impact Assessment Subtask in collaboration with the ELIXIR Training Coordinators Group, has implemented an assessment strategy to measure quality and impact of its entire training portfolio. Here, we present ELIXIR’s framework for assessing training quality and impact, which includes the following: specifying assessment aims, determining what data to collect in order to address these aims, and our strategy for centralised data collection to allow for ELIXIR-wide analyses. In addition, we present an overview of the ELIXIR training data collected over the past 4 years. We highlight the importance of a coordinated and consistent data collection approach and the relevance of defining specific metrics and answer scales for consortium-wide analyses as well as for comparison of data across iterations of the same course. ELIXIR-EXCELERATE is funded by the European Commission within the Research Infrastructures programme of Horizon 2020, grant agreement number 676559 (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/area/researchinfrastructures). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

The article reviews the motivation behind the development of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) – a relatively new area of information retrieval in multilingual textual databases, defines its objectives and position among the research disciplines dealing with various aspects of processing electronic texts. A short historical overview is followed by a description of the most important methodologies (document translation and query translation) and language resources used in connection with them. Regarding the resources, attention is focused on the two- and multilingual ontologies (thesauri,transfer lexicons and similarity thesauri), corpora, their construction and use with the CLIR experiments. The article primarily aims at illustrating the various methodological approaches, while the functioning of particular systems is less prominent. There are no references to the condition of CLIR in Slovenia or to the existence of language resources suitable for processing Slovenian texts in CLIR systems, since this topic calls for a separate review.

In this paper, we focused on selected problems of integrating and presenting medical images organised in a World Wide Web (WWW) database. To solve these problems we developed a prototype of a bilingual (Slovenian and English) WWW database of medical images for the field of dermatology. This dermatology database includes a graphic interface with four modes of access: (1) browsing, (2) searching, (3) comparison of images, and (4) self-testing. The quantity and quality of requests to this WWW database was estimated with log file analysis. There was a steady increase in the number of users and volume of data transferred from the dermatology WWW database.

The article presents various techniques of stemming, arguing that they are the most important phase in preparing the text for inclusion into full-text databases, especially those using non-Boolean search models. Stemming is a process of text processing us¬ing stemming algorithms, the purpose of which is an automated selection of indexing terms used for content description. The article presents a statistic approach to stemming, morphological and semantical aspects of stemming, and several stemming algorithms. The authors also speak about evaluation criteria and linguistic dependence of such algorithms. At the end, they give more detailed descriptions of some stemming algorithms developed for English, Slovene, French, Japanese and Arabic languages.

The paper describes the creation of the bibliographical collection called Biomedicina Slovenica (BS) and its connection to the COBISS system. BS is a specialised bibliographical collection for the area of biomedcine in the process of development by the Institute of Biomedical Informatics of the Faculty of Medicine in Ljubljana since 1976. At the end of 2007, the BS contained nearly 130,000 bibliographic records, of which 91,955 were also integrated into COBISS. An automatic transfer of records from the BS collection to COBISS has been available for ten years and 97 percent of the records created by IBMI have been added to the COBISS system this way. In the recent period, we have developed tools for automatic downloading of records from the COBISS.SI system and PubMed, yet this currently constitutes only 0.5 percent of all the records entered in the BS. We have contributed 3.4 percent of records to the COBISS system. V prispevku je prikazana gradnja bibliografske zbirke Biomedicina Slovenica (BS) in njena povezanost s sistemom COBISS. BS je specializirana bibliografskazbirka za področje biomedicine, ki jo Inštitut za bimedicinsko informatiko Medicinske fakultete v Ljubljani gradi že od leta 1976. V BS je bilo konec leta 2007 vključenih skoraj 130.000 bibliografskih zapisov, od tegajih je bilo 91.955 vključenih tudi v COBISS. Že deset let imamo razvit avtomatiziran prenos zapisov iz zbirke BS v COBISS in 97 odstotkov zapisov, kijih je kreiral IBMI, smo v sistem COBISS dodali na ta način. V zadnjem času razvijamo orodja za avtomatsko prevzemanje zapisov iz sistema COBISS.SI ter PubMed, a to trenutno predstavlja le 0,5 odstotka vseh zapisov, vnesenih v BS. V sistem COBISS smo prispevali 3,4 odstotka zapisov.

The paper presents Eureth.net network's web-based database information system (IS) used by project partners from EU New Member States (NMS) to collect bibliographic records from bioethics domains. The IS development was focused mainly on: records compatibility with other Eureth.net databases; support for all European character sets; minimalisation of network traffic; security issues and low establishment and maintenance costs.

The paper presents a web-based application, developed as a part of the Eurethnet database network, which is being used by project partners from EU New Member States to collect bibliographic records from bioethics domains. The application development was focused mainly on records compatibility with other Eurethnet databases, support for all European character sets, minimalisation of network traffic, and security issues. The time window available for the system development was very small and this problem was solved with our own software for automatic application generation.