Job advertisement: Predoc Scientist (f/m/d) – Information and Communication Systems

The Research Group Information and Communication Systems (ICS) of the Department of Informatics Systems is looking for a Predoc Scientist (f/m/d). The deadline for submission of the application ends on June 21^st, 2023. The position is for 3 years and the planned starting date is September 1^st, 2023.

More information on the job offer (in German) is available at the jobs web-site.

ICS – project BBMRI.at – publication “Metadata Quality for Biobanks”

The research paper “Metadata Quality for Biobanks“, written by the ICS – BBMRI.at project group members Dr. phil. Volodymyr Shekhovtsov and O.Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Johann Eder, is available on the following link:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/19/9578

The paper “Metadata Quality for Biobanks” has been published in applied sciences on the 23th of September 2022 and is available as free full-text on the link over it.

Abstract

The mission of biobanks is to provide biological material and data for medical research. Reproducible medical studies of high quality require material and data with established quality. Metadata, defined as data that provides information about other data, represents the content of biobank collections, particularly which data accompanies the stored samples and which quality the available data features. The quality of biobank metadata themselves, however, is currently neither properly defined nor investigated in depth. We list the properties of biobanks that are most important for metadata quality management and emphasize both the role of biobanks as data brokers, which are responsible not for the quality of the data itself but for the quality of its representation, and the importance of supporting the search for biobank collections when the sample data is not accessible. Based on an intensive review of metadata definitions and definitions of quality characteristics, we establish clear definitions of metadata quality attributes and their metrics in a design science approach. In particular, we discuss the quality measures accuracy, completeness, coverage, consistency, timeliness, provenance, reliability, accessibility, and conformance to expectations together with their respective metrics. These definitions are intended as a foundation for establishing metadata quality management systems for biobanks.

Keywords: metadata; data quality; biobank; quality metrics

The 34rd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE) was organized in Leuven, Belgium by the KU Leuven and the University of Ghent from June 5-10, 2022.

Franziska Hollauf, BSc. presented the paper Time-Cost Tradeoffs for Composed Services. A video recording of the presentation is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69EEJRtV7Y4&list=PLeTg059kuk7ZNfElGCEHYP3I0ROiFqMdC&index=27

Hollauf, Franziska S., Marco Franceschetti, and Johann Eder. “Time-Cost Tradeoffs for Composed Services.” International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Springer, Cham, 2022.

Abstract

Time and cost are crucial criteria in Service Level Agreements. Frequently, the time when and how long a service can be provided or used and the cost for utilizing a service are related and hence users are confronted with a trade-off between time and cost. Besides the fundamental direct and indirect proportional relationship between time and cost, composed services might also have more complex non-monotonic relationships. We introduce a novel way of expressing the trade-offs between time and cost in form of TC-Maps as a set of piece-wise linear functions. For calculating the duration, cost and their relation for service compositions, we introduce specific operations used in a bottom-up procedure resulting in an overall TC-Map. The proposed structure allows us to derive the minimum cost of a composed service given a duration limit, or for analyzing possible durations for a provided budget. TC-Maps offer the basis for optimizing the utilization of composed services according to user preferences, resources and objectives.

New Colleague @ ICS

We are very happy to welcome our new colleague Aron Sacherer, BSc in the Department of Informatics Systems. Aron Sacherer started his work in the Information and Communication Systems research group as scientific project staff in the BBMRI.at project in March, 2022.