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    Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web
    (ACM, 2008-07-01) Hendler, James A.; Shadbolt, Nigel; Hall, Wendy; Berners-Lee, Tim; Weitzner, Danny
    Despite the web’s great success as a technology and the significant amount of computing infrastructure on which it is built, it remains, as an entity, surprisingly unstudied. Here, we look at some of the technical and social challenges that must be overcome to model the Web as a whole, keep it growing, and understand its continuing social impact. A systems approach, in the sense of “systems biology,” is needed if we are to be able to understand and engineer the future Web.
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    Supporting Limits on Copyright Exclusivity in a Rights Expression Language Standard
    (Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic (Univ. of California, Berkeley), 2002-08-13) Mulligan, Deirdre K.; Burstein, Aaron; Erickson, John S.
    Copyright law grants certain rights to purchasers and other users of copyrighted works. It is neither a legal nor a practical requirement for users to declare (or claim) these rights explicitly in order to enjoy them. While the public's legal rights cannot be altered by Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems per se, we can imagine scenarios in which DRM systems may require users to make these kinds of declarations, in order to work around inherent technical limitations. It is therefore essential that a rights expression language (REL) provide the vocabulary necessary for individuals to express, in a straightforward way, the rights that copyright law grants them to use materials. The user's claim of right would provide the essential information for a usage-rights issuing agency to give the user the technical capability to use the work in a particular way.
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    Fair Use, Drm, and Trusted Computing
    (ACM, 2003-04-01) Erickson, John S.
    The migration of trusted computing principles into end-user systems promises to increase the practical application of and market demand for digital rights management (DRM) technologies. Trusted computing platforms and the integration of DRM components into the operating system will likely make controlled, conditional access to content and services attractive for providers of copyrighted resources, and an increasingly common—if not always popular or desirable—part of the end-user experience. The ability of providers to reliably and deterministically impose rules on the end-user experience raises the question of who sets the rules dictating how users interact with digital information on their personal systems. Will the social policies and common practices that have traditionally influenced the copyright process be replaced by rules privately constructed by content owners and software providers? Will they be privately enforced by operating systems and DRM technologies? Conversely, can these emerging architectures help protect the limitations on copyright owners’ exclusive rights, preserving the flexible fair use doctrine? Here, I explore how access-control policies are evaluated, especially in the case of two rights expression languages—the eXtensible rights Markup Language (XrML; see xrml.org) and the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML; see www.xacml.org). Since the expression and interpretation of policies is but one layer of the general problem of asserting and protecting copyright with computer code, I emphasize the role of trusted systems in ensuring that computing agents interpret policies in reliable and deterministic ways. I also weigh the challenges inherent in expressing and enforcing policies that mimic social policies. Engineers often seek to simplify problems, but when the problem involves implementing legal statutes (such as copyright) with executable code, simplifications might actually do damage, especially if the solution gives either party more power to assert control than the law entitles.
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    Complex Semantic Tabular Interpretation using SDD-Gen
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2024) Johnson, Matthew; Stingone, Jeanette; Bengoa, Sofia; Masters, James; McGuinness, Deborah
    Knowledge graphs have become an essential technology for both businesses and governments. They enable a wide variety of critical tasks, such as aligning diverse datasets, improving the capabilities of search engines, supporting error checking, and generating explanations using inference engines. However, populating, augmenting, and/or validating a knowledge graph can be challenging because developers need domain knowledge to understand their data and experience in ontology modeling to align concepts properly as well as experience with conflict detection and truth maintenance tools. Previous efforts have explored automatically integrating simple tabular data into knowledge graphs to lower the barrier to entry. These methods heavily rely on named entity overlap and require that tables are similar to relational tables in third normal form. While these methods have been successful under competition, these limitations make them impractical for general usage. In this paper, we introduce the semantic data dictionary generator (SDD-Gen), an algorithm that aligns complex tabular data to ontological terms for knowledge graph generation. Our methodology leverages context information from data dictionaries to make alignments, enabling us to align complex tables with few named entities and multiple subject columns.
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    Eat4Genes: a bioinformatic rational gene targeting app and prototype model for improving human health
    (Frontiers in Nutrition, 2023-05-26) Ford, Morgan L.; Cooley, Jessica M.; Sripada, Veda; Xu, Zhengwen; Erickson, John S.; Bennett, Kristin P.; Crawford, Dana R.
    Introduction and aimsDietary Rational Gene Targeting (DRGT) is a therapeutic dietary strategy that uses healthy dietary agents to modulate the expression of disease-causing genes back toward the normal. Here we use the DRGT approach to (1) identify human studies assessing gene expression after ingestion of healthy dietary agents with an emphasis on whole foods, and (2) use this data to construct an online dietary guide app prototype toward eventually aiding patients, healthcare providers, community and researchers in treating and preventing numerous health conditions. MethodsWe used the keywords "human", "gene expression" and separately, 51 different dietary agents with reported health benefits to search GEO, PubMed, Google Scholar, Clinical trials, Cochrane library, and EMBL-EBI databases for related studies. Studies meeting qualifying criteria were assessed for gene modulations. The R-Shiny platform was utilized to construct an interactive app called "Eat4Genes". ResultsFifty-one human ingestion studies (37 whole food related) and 96 key risk genes were identified. Human gene expression studies were found for 18 of 41 searched whole foods or extracts. App construction included the option to select either specific conditions/diseases or genes followed by food guide suggestions, key target genes, data sources and links, dietary suggestion rankings, bar chart or bubble chart visualization, optional full report, and nutrient categories. We also present user scenarios from physician and researcher perspectives. ConclusionIn conclusion, an interactive dietary guide app prototype has been constructed as a first step towards eventually translating our DRGT strategy into an innovative, low-cost, healthy, and readily translatable public resource to improve health.