Papers by Alejandra Beltrán
PLANEACIÓN Y ORGANIZACIÓN DEL MUESTREO Y MANEJO INTEGRADO DE PLAGAS EN AGROECOSISTEMAS CON UN ENFOQUE DE AGRICULTURA SOSTENIBLE Sampling planning and organization, and integrated pest management in agroecosystems with a view towards sustainable agriculture
The limited knowledge of the distribution in time and space of pests and crop diseases, as well a... more The limited knowledge of the distribution in time and space of pests and crop diseases, as well as of their natural enemies, has lead to the inappropriate use of pesticides that has damaged the environment and human health. Key aspects of the planning and organisation of pest sampling are analysed, with the aim to provide the bases and the eco-entomological information relevant for an adequate use of pesticides, and to contribute to the generation of sustainable agriculture models. For sampling and pest monitoring programmes to be feasible, it is necessary to define two basic stages of the planning: (1) the operational geographic framework, and (2) the performing mechanism or operational instruments. Through this, the tasks and responsibilities of personnel are clearly defined, including involving dierent institutions and specialists of the region. Accordingly, proposals are made for an adequate planning and organisation of sampling for agricultural pests, resulting in an ecient pest control that is safe for the ecosystem. It is concluded that in order to gain a better coordination among researchers, agencies and institutions involved in the detection and control of pests, it is necessary: (1) to create inter-institutional, regional and international committees to monitor pests and analyse the factors related to the health status of agroecosystems, and (2) to design and develop specific projects for the short and long term solution of phyto-sanitary problems.
Establishing a knowledge trail from molecular experiments to clinical trials
New Biotechnology, 2011
During the development cycle of a new antibody therapy, the therapeutic agent will be tested on s... more During the development cycle of a new antibody therapy, the therapeutic agent will be tested on subsequently more biologically complex models. New experiments' designs are based upon data gathered from prior models. New researchers who inherit the data and researchers from groups with different cultures or expertise are often called upon to interpret these data. Experiments which are not recorded consistently or employ ambiguous terminology can make interpreting these results difficult. The researcher who had originally collected the data may not be at hand to correct any misunderstanding or offer clarification and data can be unknowingly misused. This introduces an element of risk into the therapy development process. We have developed a reporting guideline for recording therapy experiments. This guideline consists of a checklist of data to be recorded from antibody therapy experiments performed in molecular, cellular, animal and clinical model.
BMC Bioinformatics, 2009
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is developing caGrid as a means for sharing cancer-related da... more The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is developing caGrid as a means for sharing cancer-related data and services. As more data sets become available on caGrid, we need effective ways of accessing and integrating this information. Although the data models exposed on caGrid are semantically well annotated, it is currently up to the caGrid client to infer relationships between the different models and their classes. In this paper, we present a Semantic Web-based data warehouse (Corvus) for creating relationships among caGrid models. This is accomplished through the transformation of semantically-annotated caBIG® Unified Modeling Language (UML) information models into Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies that preserve those semantics. We demonstrate the validity of the approach by Semantic Extraction, Transformation and Loading (SETL) of data from two caGrid data sources, caTissue and caArray, as well as alignment and query of those sources in Corvus. We argue that semantic integration is necessary for integration of data from distributed web services and that Corvus is a useful way of accomplishing this. Our approach is generalizable and of broad utility to researchers facing similar integration challenges.
Biomedical scientists generate, access, validate and interpret multiple distributed and heterogen... more Biomedical scientists generate, access, validate and interpret multiple distributed and heterogeneous data sets. Semantic annotations for these data sets are paramount for exchanging and using the data, and take the form of concepts from a domain ontology. ONIX is a platform that facilitates the access to cancer research data resources and one of its goals is to interoperate with caGrid - a grid computing infrastructure for data sharing. In this paper, we present the ONIX approach to building a semantic layer with support for concept-based queries, which exploit semantic annotations of resources, focusing on caGrid resources. The main contributions of this work are: the automatic generation of OWL ontologies from resources' metadata; concept-based query construction and validation; rewriting and translation from concept-based queries to the caGrid query language.
Cancer registry information systems need to deal with several data sets annotated with different ... more Cancer registry information systems need to deal with several data sets annotated with different coding systems. Designing, maintaining and linking these datasets involves dealing with semantic issues, tackling the shortcomings exhibited by coding systems as well as considering an appropriate computing infrastructure. We argue that biomedical ontologies and a Grid service infrastructure, together with a clear separation between semantic and coding models, can prove beneficial to cancer registries in terms of accuracy of knowledge modelling, interoperability and knowledge sharing with other registries and related data sources, automation of information retrieval. A real-life example is illustrated and a brief review of related projects is provided. We conclude that a formal semantic layer, which is the basis of large scale meaning-oriented projects such as the Semantic Web, is the key to the provision of a uniform, science-based view across cancer registries and related systems.
The ever-increasing amount of data in biomedical research, and in cancer research in particular, ... more The ever-increasing amount of data in biomedical research, and in cancer research in particular, needs to be managed to support efficient data access, exchange and integration. Existing software infrastructures, such caGrid, support access to distributed information annotated with a domain ontology. However, caGrid's current querying functionality depends on the structure of individual data resources without exploiting the semantic annotations. In this paper, we present the design and development of an ontology-based querying functionality that consists of: the generation of OWL2 ontologies from the underlying data resources metadata and a query rewriting and translation process based on reasoning, which converts a query at the domain ontology level into queries at the software infrastructure level. We present a detailed analysis of our approach as well as an extensive performance evaluation. While the implementation and evaluation was performed for the caGrid infrastructure, the approach could be applicable to other model and metadata-driven environments for data sharing.
Computer Communications, 2008
The support for complex queries, such as range, prefix and aggregation queries, over structured p... more The support for complex queries, such as range, prefix and aggregation queries, over structured peer-to-peer systems is currently an active and significant topic of research. This paper demonstrates how Skip Tree Graph, as a novel structure, presents an efficient solution to that problem area through provision of a distributed search tree functionality on decentralised and dynamic environments. Since Skip Tree Graph is based on skip trees, a concurrent approach to skip lists, it constitutes an augmentation of skip graphs that extends its functionality and allows for important performance improvements. This work presents a thorough comparison between these two related peer-to-peer overlay networks, their construction, search algorithms and properties. Being based on tree structures, skip tree graphs supports aggregation queries and multicast/broadcast operations, which cannot be directly implemented in its predecessor. The repair mechanism for healing the structure in case of failures is more efficient and harnesses the parallelism inherent in P2P networks. Particular consideration is given to the performance of different range-query schemes over the two related structures. Theoretical and experimental results conclude that Skip Tree Graphs outperform skip graphs on both exact-match and range searches.
Skip Tree Graph is a novel, distributed, data structure for peer-to-peer systems that supports ex... more Skip Tree Graph is a novel, distributed, data structure for peer-to-peer systems that supports exact-match and order-based queries such as range queries efficiently. It is based on skip trees, which are randomised balanced search trees equivalent to skip lists and designed to provide improved concurrency. Skip tree graphs constitute an extension of skip graphs enhancing their performance in both, exact-match and range queries. Moreover, skip tree graph maintains the underlying balanced tree structures using randomization and local operations, which provides a greater degree of concurrency and scalability.
Efficient access to distributed and dynamic multidimensional data is vital for applications in la... more Efficient access to distributed and dynamic multidimensional data is vital for applications in large, heterogeneous, decentralised, resource-sharing environments such as Grids and Peer-to-Peer systems. Most systems providing this functionality assume homogeneous participants. This paper proposes HADAS, an access structure exploiting heterogeneity to build a self-aware adaptive information system.
El sentido de los ambientes de aprendizaje en el siglo XXI
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Papers by Alejandra Beltrán