1,721,025 research outputs found
Investigation on semantics to improve the COVAX system
No full textThe purpose of COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML) financed by the European Commission in IST Programme was to analyse and draw up the technical solutions required to provide access through the Internet to homogeneously-encoded document descriptions of archive, library and museum collections based on the application of XML. The project demonstrated its feasibility through a prototype containing a meaningful sample of all the different types of documents to build a global system for search and retrieval. The aim of this paper is to create in the COVAX system a new presentation of the documents. A system capable of processing markup semantics declarations can act as an interactive environment for testing conjectures and validating hypotheses. Semantics is one of the ways of improving information retrieval performances; we will explore this problem in the COVAX case study. We will investigate the possibility to derive a semantic knowledge from COVAX repositories, in order to improve the site analysis process and the query answering process
Towards an ontology for art and colours
No full textTo meet a variety of needs in information modeling, software development and integration as well as knowledge management and reuse, various groups within industry, academia, and government have been developing and deploying sharable and reusable models known as ontologies. Ontologies play an important role in knowledge representation. In this paper, we address the problem of capturing knowledge needed for indexing and retrieving art resources. We describe a case study in which we attempt to construct an ontology for a subset of art. The aim of the present ontology is to build an extensible repository of knowledge and information about artists, their works and materials used in artistic creations. Influenced by the recent interest in colours and colouring materials, mainly shared by French researchers and linguists, an ontology prototype has been developed using Protégé. It allows to organize and catalogue information about artists, art works, colouring materials and related colours
Primers on nutrigenetics and nutri(epi)genomics: Origins and development of precision nutrition
Full text linkUnderstanding the relationship between genotype and phenotype is a central goal not just for genetics but also for medicine and biological sciences. Despite outstanding technological progresses, genetics alone is not able to completely explain phenotypes, in particular for complex diseases. Given the existence of a “missing heritability”, growing attention has been given to non-mendelian mechanisms of inheritance and to the role of the environment. The study of interaction between gene and environment represents a challenging but also a promising field with high potential for health prevention, and epigenetics has been suggested as one of the best candidate to mediate environmental effects on the genome. Among environmental factors able to interact with both genome and epigenome, nutrition is one of the most impacting. Not just our genome influences the responsiveness to food and nutrients, but vice versa, nutrition can also modify gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms. In this complex picture, nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics represent appealing disciplines aimed to define new prospectives of personalized nutrition. This review introduces to the study of gene-environment interactions and describes how nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics modulate health, promoting or affecting healthiness through life-style, thus playing a pivotal role in modulating the effect of genetic predispositions
Developing a semantic content analyzer for L'Aquila social urban network
No full textThis paper7 presents the preliminary results of a joint research project about Smart Cities. This project is adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that combines artificial intelligence techniques with psychology research to monitor the current state of the city of L'Aquila after the dreadful earthquake of April 2009. This work focuses on the description of a semantic content analysis module. This component, integrated into L'Aquila Social Urban Network (SUN), combines Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deeply analyze the content produced by citizens on social platforms in order to map social data with social indicators such as cohesion, sense of belonging and so on. The research carries on the insight that social data can supply a lot of information about latent people feelings, opinion and sentiments. Within the project, this trustworthy snapshot of the city is used by community promoters to proactively propose initiatives aiming at empowering the social capital of the city and recovering the urban structure which has been disrupted after the 'diaspora' of citizens in the so called "new towns"
The Role of Nutri(epi)genomics in Achieving the Body's Full Potential in Physical Activity.
Full text linkPhysical activity represents a powerful tool to achieve optimal health. The overall activation of several molecular pathways is associated with many beneficial effects, mainly converging towards a reduced systemic inflammation. Not surprisingly, regular activity can contribute to lowering the "epigenetic age", acting as a modulator of risk toward several diseases and enhancing longevity. Behind this, there are complex molecular mechanisms induced by exercise, which modulate gene expression, also through epigenetic modifications. The exercise-induced epigenetic imprint can be transient or permanent and contributes to the muscle memory, which allows the skeletal muscle adaptation to environmental stimuli previously encountered. Nutrition, through key macro- and micronutrients with antioxidant properties, can play an important role in supporting skeletal muscle trophism and those molecular pathways triggering the beneficial effects of physical activity. Nutrients and antioxidant food components, reversibly altering the epigenetic imprint, have a big impact on the phenotype. This assigns a role of primary importance to nutri(epi)genomics, not only in optimizing physical performance, but also in promoting long term health. The crosstalk between physical activity and nutrition represents a major environmental pressure able to shape human genotypes and phenotypes, thus, choosing the right combination of lifestyle factors ensures health and longevity
Mitochondrial DNA and Neurodegeneration: Any Role for Dietary Antioxidants?
Full text linkThe maintenance of the mitochondrial function is essential in preventing and counteracting neurodegeneration. In particular, mitochondria of neuronal cells play a pivotal role in sustaining the high energetic metabolism of these cells and are especially prone to oxidative damage. Since overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is involved in the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration, dietary antioxidants have been suggested to counteract the detrimental effects of ROS and to preserve the mitochondrial function, thus slowing the progression and limiting the extent of neuronal cell loss in neurodegenerative disorders. In addition to their role in the redox-system homeostasis, mitochondria are unique organelles in that they contain their own genome (mtDNA), which acts at the interface between environmental exposures and the molecular triggers of neurodegeneration. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that mtDNA (including both genetics and, from recent evidence, epigenetics) might play relevant roles in modulating the risk for neurodegenerative disorders. This mini-review describes the link between the mitochondrial genome and cellular oxidative status, with a particular focus on neurodegeneration; moreover, it provides an overview on potential beneficial effects of antioxidants in preserving mitochondrial functions through the protection of mtDNA
The neglected nutrigenomics of milk: What is the role of inter-species transfer of small non-coding RNA?
Full text linkThe characterization of small non-coding RNA (sncRNA) in food has become part of the field of nutrigenomics. Milk contains sncRNA that are protected by extracellular vesicles which makes them resistant to digestive processes and possibly absorbable by the human gut. Due to the high conservation of sncRNA, these molecules might mediate inter-species gene expression regulations, opening numerous applications in the field of human nutrition. These include the modulation of sncRNA milk profile through diet, both in humans and dairy animals, livestock rearing methods, food technology, but also the production of infant formulas or the usage of sncRNA as biomarkers. SncRNA contained in milk might contribute to the elucidation of the long-term effects of milk consumption in the human diet, confirming the application of nutrigenomics in both health promotion and food production areas. The main aim of this review is to introduce this aspect of nutrigenomics, showing both promising aspects and pitfalls
Mitochondrial DNA methylation and copy number predict body composition in a young female population
Full text linkBackground: Since both genomic and environmental factors are involved in obesity etiology, several studies about the infuence of adiposity on both nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA methylation patterns have been carried out. Nevertheless, few evidences exploring the usage of buccal swab samples to study mitochondrial DNA epigenetics can be found in literature. Methods: In this study, mitochondrial DNA from buccal swabs collected from a young Caucasian population (n=69) have been used to examine potential correlation between mitochondrial DNA copy number and methylation with body composition (BMI, WHtR and bioimpedance measurements). Results: A negative correlation between mitochondrial DNA copy number and BMI was measured in females (p=0.028), but not in males. The mean percentage of D-loop methylation is signifcantly higher in overweight than in lean female subjects (p=0.003), and a specifc CpG located in the D-loop shows per se an association with impaired body composition (p=0.004). Body composition impairment is predicted by a combined variable including mtDNA copy number and the D-loop methylation (AUC=0.785; p=0.009). Conclusions: This study corroborates the hypothesis that mitochondrial DNA carries relevant information about body composition. However, wider investigations able to validate the usage of mtDNA methylation from buccal swabs as a biomarker are warrante
Data Compression Approach to monolingual GIRT Task: an agnostic point of view
No full textIn this paper we present a data- compression oriented approach to the information retrieval task in the scientific collection of GIRT. For this purpose we use a recently proposed general scheme for context recognition and context classification of strings of characters (in particular texts) or other coded information. Based on data-compression techniques, the key point of the method is the computation of a suitable measure of remoteness of two strings of characters. This measure of remoteness only reflects the distance in information between the two strings, i.e. the differences between the syntactic/structural elements of the sequences. The question we address is whether the informatic measure of remoteness between two sequences could account for their semantic distance. We have focused in particular on the monolingual GIRT tasks for German and English and we present here the results. It is worth stressing the generality and versatility of our information-theoretic method. It applies, in fact, to any kind of corpora of character strings, independent of the type of coding behind them. For texts, it is then language independent since it prescinds from any linguistic knowledge
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