Organisms should invest more in gathering information when the pay-off from finding a profitable resource is likely to be greater. Here, we ask whether animal societies put more effort in scouting for a new nest when their current one is of low quality. We measured the scouting behaviour of Temnothorax albipennis ant colonies when they inhabit nest-sites with different combinations of desirable...

Shahin, M.A. and Symons, S.J. 2003. Lentil type identification using machine vision. Canadian Biosystems Engineering/Le génie des biosystèmes au Canada 45: 3.5-3.11. A machine vision system (TrueGrade) was used to identify the type (variety) of Canadian lentils from bulk samples. The samples were presented to the instrument in a clear transparent sample tray, and the sample was imaged using a l...

DEFINITION Web harvesting describes the process of gathering and integrating data from various heterogeneous web sources. Necessary input is an appropriate knowledge representation of the domain of interest (e.g. an ontology), together with example instances of concepts or relationships (seed knowledge). Output is structured data (e.g. in the form of a relational database) that is gathered from...