Towards digital library service integration

Digital Library Service Integration (DLSI) aims to provide a systematic approach in integrating the services and collections of National Science and Digital Library. The National Science and Digital Library collections can share the services among themselves in a totally integrated environinent. Collections as such will require no change to plug into the DLSI architecture. Collections will keep using the services of NSDL in the similar manner as before. These services will in turn pass few parameters to the services of DLSI. With the help of these parameters, wrappers will fetch the details and priority of the users. These wrappers will be using the services of Search and Discovery module, Metadata Management services, and Access Management services. Users will see a totally integrated environment. They will see their digital library system just as before. In addition to that, they will find some extra link anchors on the document. These links serve to provide the supplemental information or arrange the information in the user preferred way. For this matter, the DLSI maintains basic user\u27s information and preferences. Other contributions include incorporating collaborative filtering for customizing large sets of links, and advance lexical analysis tool to identify the objects of interest in a document

An Automated System for Generating Situation-Specific Decision Support in Clinical Order Entry from Local Empirical Data

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Clinical Decision Support is one of the only aspects of health information technology that has demonstrated decreased costs and increased quality in healthcare delivery, yet it is extremely expensive and time-consuming to create, maintain, and localize. Consequently, a majority of health care systems do not utilize it, and even when it is available it is frequently incorrect. Therefore it is important to look beyond traditional guideline-based decision support to more readily available resources in order to bring this technology into widespread use. This study proposes that the wisdom of physicians within a practice is a rich, untapped knowledge source that can be harnessed for this purpose. I hypothesize and demonstrate that this wisdom is reflected by order entry data well enough to partially reconstruct the knowledge behind treatment decisions. Automated reconstruction of such knowledge is used to produce dynamic, situation-specific treatment suggestions, in a similar vein to Amazon.com shopping recommendations. This approach is appealing because: it is local (so it reflects local standards); it fits into workflow more readily than the traditional local-wisdom approach (viz. the curbside consult); and, it is free (the data are already being captured). This work develops several new machine-learning algorithms and novel applications of existing algorithms, focusing on an approach called Bayesian network structure learning. I develop: an approach to produce dynamic, rank-ordered situation-specific treatment menus from treatment data; statistical machinery to evaluate their accuracy using retrospective simulation; a novel algorithm which is an order of magnitude faster than existing algorithms; a principled approach to choosing smaller, more optimal, domain-specific subsystems; and a new method to discover temporal relationships in the data. The result is a comprehensive approach for extracting knowledge from order-entry data to produce situation-specific treatment menus, which is applied to order-entry data at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis. Retrospective simulations find that, in a large variety of clinical situations, a short menu will contain the clinicians' desired next actions. A prospective survey additionally finds that such menus aid physicians in writing order sets (in completeness and speed). This study demonstrates that clinical knowledge can be successfully extracted from treatment data for decision support

Integrating institutional repositories into the Semantic Web

The Web has changed the face of scientific communication; and the Semantic Web promises new ways of adding value to research material by making it more accessible to automatic discovery, linking, and analysis. Institutional repositories contain a wealth of information which could benefit from the application of this technology. In this thesis I describe the problems inherent in the informality of traditional repository metadata, and propose a data model based on the Semantic Web which will support more efficient use of this data, with the aim of streamlining scientific communication and promoting efficient use of institutional research output

A basic web-based distance education model

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2005Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 147)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxv, 201 leavesDuring the recent years, the rapid growth of the Web and multimedia technologies urged a shift of Computer-Based Educational Technology towards the Web. In the leading universities of the developed countries, studies on Web-Based Education have started and in an increasing manner are going strong. In the last few years, the leading universities of Turkey are also greatly interested in Web-Based Education and have started their re-structuring accordingly.The goal of this study is to design a basic model to be utilized by a university aiming to offer web-based distance education. In achieving this; by the use of system approach, a model comprising of three subsystems, namely system analysis, system design and evaluation&control, working in coordination with each other, has been tried to be proposed. There may be only one missing point of this study, that is; since preparing a lesson or program according to this model was not foreseen in this thesis, the effectiveness evaluations suggested in the evaluation&control subsystem could not be realized. It is recommended to realize such an evaluation in a further study to make it possible to reveal the effectiveness of web-based education by preparing a lesson or program according to this model.On the other hand, a survey has been conducted in Turkey in some of the universities either offering web-based education or are interested in studies in this field.The aim of this survey is to analyze from system design point of view the studies carried out in our universities on this matter and to get a picture of the existing situation.The directed questions aiming this were prepared by taking into consideration of the three stages of system design subsystem, i.e. administrative design, educational design, and technological design. It is intended for the result of this survey to shed light to the new-coming institutions in this field. As a matter of fact, each stage of this subsystem is a survey item itself and should be researched one by one in other studies.Furthermore, for individuals interested in distance education and web-based distance education and for people newly involved in this matter, this thesis is intended to be a reference material and to serve this purpose the sections are prepared containing the basic information accordingly. Nevertheless, since most of the information regarding system design are prepared without taking into consideration the disabled people, the relevant information are not complete. In another study, the offering of the web-based education to the disabled people, especially for deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired, and blind students, has to be investigated.Finally, in this thesis the proposed model for the Web-Based Distance Education, as being a basic and conceptual model, has a flexible structure; i.e., suitable for all the institutions and establishments intending to offer the web-based education.What is important here, is to exploit the potential sources within the institution that will display the required systematic approach

Knowledge Management approaches to model pathophysiological mechanisms and discover drug targets in Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases for which a cure is not yet available. MS is a complex disease for numerous reasons; its etiology is unknown, the diagnosis is not exclusive, the disease course is unpredictable and therapeutic response varies from patient to patient. There are four established subtypes of MS, which are segregated based on different characteristics. Many environmental and genetic factors are considered to play a role in MS etiology, including viral infection, vitamin D deficiency, epigenetical changes and some genes. Despite the large body of diverse scientific knowledge, from laboratory findings to clinical trials, no integrated model which portrays the underlying mechanisms of the disease state of MS is available. Contemporary therapies only provide reduction in the severity of the disease, and there is an unmet need of efficient drugs. The present thesis provides a knowledge-based rationale to model MS disease mechanisms and identify potential drug candidates by using systems biology approaches. Systems biology is an emerging field which utilizes the computational methods to integrate datasets of various granularities and simulate the disease outcome. It provides a framework to model molecular dynamics with their precise interaction and contextual details. The proposed approaches were used to extract knowledge from literature by state of the art text mining technologies, integrate it with proprietary data using semantic platforms, and build different models (molecular interactions map, agent based models to simulate disease outcome, and MS disease progression model with respect to time). For better information representation, disease ontology was also developed and a methodology of automatic enrichment was derived. The models provide an insight into the disease, and several pathways were explored by combining the therapeutics and the disease-specific prescriptions. The approaches and models developed in this work resulted in the identification of novel drug candidates that are backed up by existing experimental and clinical knowledge

Access Control and Service-Oriented Architectures.

Access Control and Service-Oriented Architectures" investigates in which way logical access control can be achieved effectively, in particular in highly dynamic environments such as service-oriented architectures (SOA's). The author combines state-of-the-art best-practice and projects these onto the SOA. In doing so, he identifies strengths of current approaches, but also pinpoints weaknesses. These weaknesses are subsequently mitigated by introducing an innovative new framework called EFSOC. The framework is validated empirically and preliminary implementations are discussed.

Remote maintenance of real time controller software over the internet

The aim of the work reported in this thesis is to investigate how to establish a standard platform for remote maintenance of controller software, which provides remote monitoring, remote fault identification and remote performance recovery services for geographically distributed controller software over the Internet. A Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller is used as the benchmark for the control performance assessment; the LQG benchmark variances are estimated based on the Lyapunov equation and subspace matrices. The LQG controller is also utilized as the reference model of the actual controller to detect the controller failures. Discrepancies between control signals of the LQG and the actual controller are employed to a General Likelihood Ratio (GLR) test and the controller failure detection is characterized to detect sudden jumping points in the mean or variance of the discrepancies. To restore the degraded control performance caused by the controller failures, a compensator is designed and inserted into the post-fault control loop, which serially links with the faulty controller and recovers the degraded control performance into an acceptable range. Techniques of controller performance monitoring, controller failure detection and maintenance are extended into the Internet environment. An Internet-based maintenance system for controller software is developed, which provides remote control performance assessment and recovery services, and remote fault identification service over the Internet for the geographically distributed controller software. The integration between the mobile agent technology and the controller software maintenance is investigated. A mobile agent based controller software maintenance system is established; the mobile agent structure is designed to be flexible and the travelling agents can be remotely updated over the Internet. Also, the issue of heavy data process and transfer over the Internet is probed and a novel data process and transfer scheme is introduced. All the proposed techniques are tested on sirnulations or a process control unit. Simulation and experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Visual analysis of anatomy ontologies and related genomic information

Challenges in scientific research include the difficulty in obtaining overviews of the large amount of data required for analysis, and in resolving the differences in terminology used to store and interpret information in multiple, independently created data sets. Ontologies provide one solution for analysis involving multiple data sources, improving cross-referencing and data integration. This thesis looks at harnessing advanced human perception to reduce the cognitive load in the analysis of the multiple, complex data sets the bioinformatics user group studied use in research, taking advantage also of users’ domain knowledge, to build mental models of data that map to its underlying structure. Guided by a user-centred approach, prototypes were developed to provide a visual method for exploring users’ information requirements and to identify solutions for these requirements. 2D and 3D node-link graphs were built to visualise the hierarchically structured ontology data, to improve analysis of individual and comparison of multiple data sets, by providing overviews of the data, followed by techniques for detailed analysis of regions of interest. Iterative, heuristic and structured user evaluations were used to assess and refine the options developed for the presentation and analysis of the ontology data. The evaluation results confirmed the advantages that visualisation provides over text-based analysis, and also highlighted the advantages of each of 2D and 3D for visual data analysis.Overseas Research Students Awards SchemeJames Watt Scholarshi