PrefaceHypersonic flight and aerothermodynamics are fascinating topics. Design problems and aerothermodynamic phenomena are partly very different for the various kinds of hypersonic flight vehicles. These are-and will be in the future-winged and non-winged re-entry vehicles as well as airbreathing cruise and acceleration and also ascent and re-entry vehicles.Both authors of the book worked for almost four decades in hypersonics: at the German aerospace research establishment (DVL/DFVLR, now DLR) to the end of the 1970s, then in industry (MBB/Dasa, now EADS). They were involved in many major technology programs and projects. First, in the early 1970s, the German ART program (Association for Re-Entry Technologies), and, in the 1980s, the European (ESA) HERMES project and the German Hypersonics Technology (SÄNGER) program. Then followed, in the 1990s, the Future European Space Transportation Investigations program (FESTIP), the Manned Space Transportation program (MSTP) with the Atmospheric Re-Entry Demonstrator (ARD), the X-CRV Project with the X-38 vehicle and, later, the German technology programs TETRA (Technologies for Future Space Transportation Systems), ASTRA (Selected Systems and Technologies for Future Space Transportation Systems Applications), and IMENS (Integrated Multidisciplinary Design of Hot Structures for Space Vehicles).Research in the 1960s and 1970s placed great emphasis on low-density flows, high temperature real gas effects in ground-simulation facilities and, already, on discrete numerical computation methods. After the first flights of the Space Shuttle Orbiter with its generally very good aerodynamic performance, interest in low-density problems diminished. The layout of the thermal protection systems highlighted the importance of high temperature real gas effects, surface catalycity and laminar-turbulent transition. Numerical methods received a large boost first during post-flight analyses of the Orbiter flights and then, in particular in Europe, during the research and development activities accompanying the HERMES project.A serious problem showed up during the first Orbiter flight, viz., the hypersonic pitching moment anomaly, which gave rise to grave concerns in the HERMES project. This new vehicle had a shape totally different to that of the Orbiter. The question was whether similar or other problems-undetected in VI Preface the vehicle design-would become manifest during flight. Because the hypersonic pitching moment anomaly was obviously a ground facility simulation problem, much emphasis was put on the development and application of numerical methods and their validation. Consequently, an experimental vehicle was proposed, the 1:6 down-scaled MAIA. The first author of this book was deeply involved in the definition of its scientific payload although neither MAIA nor HERMES actually flew.Work in the SÄNGER program revealed that viscous effects dominate airbreathing hypersonic flight rather than pressure or compressibility effects as is the case in re-entry flight. Viscous thermal su...

Herbaria worldwide are housing a treasure of 100s of millions of herbarium specimens, which are increasingly being digitized in recent years and thereby made more easily accessible to the scientific community. At the same time, deep learning algorithms are rapidly improving pattern recognition from images and these techniques are more and more being applied to biological objects. We are using digital images of herbarium specimens in order to identify taxa and traits of these collection objects by applying convolutional neural networks (CNN). Images of the 1000 species most frequently documented by herbarium specimens on GBIF have been downloaded and combined with morphological trait data, preprocessed and divided into training and test datasets for species and trait recognition. Good performance in both domains is promising to use this approach in future tools supporting taxonomy and natural history collection management.

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BackgroundThe systematic analysis of a large number of comparable plant trait data can support investigations into phylogenetics and ecological adaptation, with broad applications in evolutionary biology, agriculture, conservation, and the functioning of ecosystems. Floras, i.e., books collecting the information on all known plant species found within a region, are a potentially rich source of such plant trait data. Floras describe plant traits with a focus on morphology and other traits relevant for species identification in addition to other characteristics of plant species, such as ecological affinities, distribution, economic value, health applications, traditional uses, and so on. However, a key limitation in systematically analyzing information in Floras is the lack of a standardized vocabulary for the described traits as well as the difficulties in extracting structured information from free text.ResultsWe have developed the Flora Phenotype Ontology (FLOPO), an ontology for describing traits of plant species found in Floras. We used the Plant Ontology (PO) and the Phenotype And Trait Ontology (PATO) to extract entity-quality relationships from digitized taxon descriptions in Floras, and used a formal ontological approach based on phenotype description patterns and automated reasoning to generate the FLOPO. The resulting ontology consists of 25,407 classes and is based on the PO and PATO. The classified ontology closely follows the structure of Plant Ontology in that the primary axis of classification is the observed plant anatomical structure, and more specific traits are then classified based on parthood and subclass relations between anatomical structures as well as subclass relations between phenotypic qualities.ConclusionsThe FLOPO is primarily intended as a framework based on which plant traits can be integrated computationally across all species and higher taxa of flowering plants. Importantly, it is not intended to replace established vocabularies or ontologies, but rather serve as an overarching framework based on which different application- and domain-specific ontologies, thesauri and vocabularies of phenotypes observed in flowering plants can be integrated.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-016-0107-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Despite great strides in the development and wide acceptance of standards for exchanging structured information about genomic variants, there is no corresponding standard for exchanging phenotypic data, and this has impeded the sharing of phenotypic information for computational analysis. Here, we introduce the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Phenopacket schema, which supports exchange of computable longitudinal case-level phenotypic information for diagnosis and research of all types of disease including Mendelian and complex genetic diseases, cancer, and infectious diseases. To support translational research, diagnostics, and personalized healthcare, phenopackets are designed to be used across a comprehensive landscape of applications including biobanks, databases and registries, clinical information systems such as Electronic Health Records, genomic matchmaking, diagnostic laboratories, and computational tools. The Phenopacket schema is a freely available, community-driven standard that streamlines exchange and systematic use of phenotypic data and will facilitate sophisticated computational analysis of both clinical and genomic information to help improve our understanding of diseases and our ability to manage them.