Difficult to find, difficult to understand! Can we trust this information? How reliable are these data? Would these data or model serve my needs? Uncountable questions are now being raised by numerous end users, after the result of their search query returned some (or tons) of information on the web. TaToo tries to improve the success rate for reliable and understandable results on the web by a new and promising approach. TaToo is developing a semantic framework providing tools and services for information enrichment and discovery of environmental resources based on a service-oriented and semantically enhanced architecture. Having available semantic descriptions of environmental resources clearly facilitates the search and discovery of information, as semantics provide "meaning" to items, and allows the search engine to go beyond simple statistical searches, which often return unrelated hits. But this needs a lot of meta-information and semantic information someone would have to enter. The gap between the need for semantics and its general availability is what TaToo is addressing. TaToo facilitates the annotation of environmental resources by providing tagging tools and services so that related to the user's domain and expertise they could enter (tag, comment, rate, etc.) a specific item from the world wide information pool. At the same time TaToo offers discovery tools and services based on the previously entered semantic annotation, thus allowing to return to the user search results improved with quality, uncertainty and ranking information. TaToo relies on specially developed resource and semantic models, the Minimum Environmental Resource Model, called MERM, and the usage of bridge ontologies, in order to realize semantic interoperability between different environmental domains. Combined with several multilingual aspects TaToo will be able not only to cross-link information stemming from one language area but also from different ones. This paper describes the architecture and the ontology framework of TaToo, then it details how we address interoperability issues using the MERM model and bridge ontologies; finally it describes the user interaction with the TaToo framework, describing the TaToo portal as the TaToo entry point.

The vision of a Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment (SISE) requires seamless access to environmental resources, including data, models and services. Standardization organizations like OGC and OASIS have laid the foundations for interoperability on a syntactic level for many aspects of distributed environmental information systems (e.g. OGC SWE for sensor information). At the same time, the EC has undertaken a considerable effort to commit European stakeholders to offering their environmental information in such a way that it is accessible by interested parties, both on the scientific level by supporting research projects, like ORCHESTRA and SANY, and on the legal level by introducing directives (such as the INSPIRE directive). This development, amongst others, has led to the present situation in which a large number of environmental information sources are available. However, to implement the vision of the SISE it is not enough to publish resources. Environmental information must be discoverable, and it must be 'understandable' in different contexts in order to be used effectively by parties of various thematic domains. Therefore, in order to foster the implementation of SISE, semantic interoperability is a necessary element. Key to semantic interoperability is the presence of meta-information which describes the concepts of the environmental resources. Producing this meta-information puts a heavy technological burden on the individual resource providers such that it seems unlikely that enough semantic meta-information will ever be made available to reach semantic interoperability and thus accomplish the vision of SISE unless other ways to provide this essential meta-information are found. In this paper we introduce an architecture, developed in the FP7 project TaToo (247893), which tries to overcome the aforementioned obstacles by providing the possibility to easily annotate and rate environmental information resources, even by parties which do not own the resource, and transparently equipping this information with domain knowledge and thus enhancing discoverability and usability of resources with semantic technologies. The objective of the architecture is to seamlessly blend in with existing infrastructures by making use of de facto standards while offering support for discovery, annotation and validation of environmental resources through open interfaces.

This paper presents research on evaporation of droplets containing dissolved or dispersed solids. Experiments on evaporation kinetics of droplets of water, colloidal silica, sodium sulphate and skimmed milk were performed. The experimental procedure was similar to that proposed by Charlesworth and Marshall (1960, A.I.Ch.E.J.6, 9–23). Individual droplets were suspended in a controlled air stream and their weight and temperature were measured as evaporation progressed. Video recording of the size and appearance of the droplets was made with magnification close to 100. The temperature was followed by a micro-thermocouple, while the mass was measured by using the deflection of a calibrated glass filament balance. Experimental data were compared with a computer simulation based on a model of heat and mass transfer, both within the droplet and from the droplet surface to surrounding air. Analytical and numerical solution of the set of equations was tested. A good agreement between experimental results and the numerical predictions for a variety of evaporation regimes is reported. Diffusion coefficients for three tested materials are determined. The model includes all stages of evaporation: initial heating and evaporation, quasi-equilibrium evaporation, crust formation and growth, boiling, and porous particle drying. Stage transition criteria are defined.

It has been demonstrated that in the whole seires from acet- to decanaloxime, including iso-butyr- and iso-valeraldoximes, two stereoisomeric forms, a liquid and a solid one, exist. By use of column and thin-layer chromatography both forms were separated and characterized. A “factor of geometrical isomerism” has been calculated on the basis of the mutual relationship between the RM values of the liquid and solid isomers.