Recent Papers

• S. Koby Taswell, Anousha Athreya, Madhavi Akella, and Carl Taswell, 2021, Truth in Science Brainiacs Journal 2021 Volume 2 Issue 1 Edoc M85EC99EE, also available at DOI 10.48085/M85EC99EE.

  Truth, honesty, and integrity remain crucial to the pursuit of science as a self-correcting discipline to explore, discover, and process information about the world around us. When following the scientific method, we hypothesize, experiment, and repeatedly retest our results, investigating whether or not those results can be confirmed as reproducible and valid. Conducting this process rigorously with unbiased and objective investigations enables greater confidence in obtaining results we consider more reliable and trustworthy. Such truthful information can be used to avoid harm and prevent injury by those who may wish to apply it in their daily lives in the form of a medicine, machine, or method of some kind. However, in recent years, some scientists and lay persons have violated these tenets of truth in science to further their professional or personal agenda by spreading false information in scientific literature and on social media. This misconduct can be evaluated by assessing the authors' awareness of the document's truthfulness prior to publishing it and their willingness to correct the mistakes and false information when brought to their attention. Identifying these key characteristics about incidents of scientific misconduct enables analysis and introduction of a consistent collection of definitions and criteria for the terms mis-information, dis-information, anti-information, caco-information, and mal-information. Clarifying different categories of misconduct in this manner should enable more effective interventions to remediate and/or prevent each one appropriately. Without adequate safeguards to maintain reproducible science as a self-correcting endeavor with retractions of publications when necessary, false information will continue to pollute the published literature and threaten the core of science.

• Adam Craig and Carl Taswell, 2021, PDP-DREAM Software for Integrating Multimedia Data with Interoperable Repositories Brainiacs Journal 2021 Volume 2 Issue 1 Edoc HA46280EF, also available at DOI 10.48085/HA46280EF.

  Integrating multimedia data in a meaningful way requires keeping track of the who, what, where, when, and how of many kinds of data and metadata in different formats. The PORTAL-DOORS-Project (PDP) was formed to design and build the Nexus-PORTAL-DOORS-Scribe (NPDS) cyberinfrastructure for managing and distributing resource data and metadata in a manner compatible with both the established lexical web and the developing semantic web. PDP-DREAM software, archived at github.com/bhavius/pdp-dream, represents the first publicly available, open-source implementation of NPDS. It provides RESTful web services for software agents and user-friendly web applications for human agents so that individuals and organizations can create and publish their own problem-oriented and domain-specific repositories customized for their own purposes. In this report, we also introduce the NpdsQuads format with an approach to formatting the comments of N-quads files as name-value pairs for content from NPDS records which can be exported from and imported to NPDS repositories. We then describe the use of these tools in the curation of the PDP-DREAM ontology, which serves as the foundational ontology for the NPDS cyberinfrastructure. Finally, we discuss the planned use of PDP-DREAM software in a medical imaging clinical trial for multiple sclerosis.

• Anousha Athreya, S. Koby Taswell, and Carl Taswell, 2021, Management Software for Monitoring Related Versions of Cultural Heritage Artifacts for Libraries and Museums also available at DOI 10.1002/pra2.526 presented November 2021 at the 84th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology in Salt Lake City, Utah.

  In cultural object conservation, tracking provenance has served as the foundational method of managing information for historical artifacts. To find data points, archivists identify related versions of an artifact at various time points. In this paper, we discuss four categories with versioned examples to display the importance of data points for identifying patterns over time through events in history, cultural heritage, performing arts, and fine arts. We describe our use of the Ashurbanipal diristry to document scholarly research regarding library tools and technologies for the preservation of cultural objects as well as the implementation of PORTAL-DOORS Project (PDP) utilities for tracing provenance and distribution of cultural objects and interoperability with bibliographic formats such as BIBFRAME and MARC from existing archival methods.

Other News

BHA Directors are pleased to announce the papers published by our 2021 BHAVI students.

If you are a student interested in applying for BHAVI 2022, information is now available at 2022 BHAVI programs.

All of us at Brain Health Alliance wish to thank our financial contributors for their donations, without whom our education and research work would not be possible.