Defining interoperability standards: A case study of public health observatory websites

The Association of Public Health Observatories (APHO) is a group of region-based health-information providers. Each PHO publishes health-related data for their specific region. Each observatory has taken a national lead in one or more key health area - such as 'cancer' or Obesity'. In 2003, a project was initiated to develop 'interoperability' between public health observatory websites, so the national resources published by one lead observatory could be found on the websites for each other PHO. The APHO interoperability project defined a set of requirements for each PHO - websites should comply with the current government data standards and provide webservices to allow data to be searched in real-time between different PHOs. This thesis describes the production of an interoperable website for the North East Public Health Observatory (NEPHO) and the problems faced during implementation to comply with the APHO interoperability requirements. The areas of interoperability, e-Government and metadata were investigated specifically in suitability for NEPHO and an action list of tasks necessary to achieve the project aims was drawn up. This project has resulted in the successful introduction of a new NEPHO website that complies with the APHO and e-Govemment requirements, however interoperability with other organisations has been difficult to achieve. This thesis describes how other organisations approached the same APHO interoperability criteria and questions whether the national project governance could be improved

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Metadata management services for spatial data infrastructure

Am Geographischen Institut der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin wird täglich mit räumlichen Daten gearbeitet. Die erfolgreiche Arbeit von Forschungsgruppen, Lehrtätigen und Studenten basiert auf brauchbaren Datengrundlagen. Um diese Fülle von Ressourcen überschaubar zu organisieren wird seit einigen Jahren eine Geodateninfrastruktur unterhalten. Sie verfügt - neben anderen Anwendungen - über ein Geoportal, das dem Benutzer erlaubt auf die Geodatenbanken des Instituts zuzugreifen. Die Geodateninfrastruktur erlaubt dem Benutzer Ressourcen institutsweit zu suchen, anzuzeigen und (wieder) zu benutzen. Durch dieses kooperative Netzwerk sollen Synergieeffekte erzielt werden da Beschaffungskosten für Neudaten entfallen. Zusätzlich kann die Geodateninfrastruktur Lehrtätigkeit unterstützen und als praktisches Beispiel in den Lehrplan integriert werden. Kernstück dieses virtuellen Netzwerks sind Metadaten. Sie ermöglichen die umfassende Beschreibung der Ressourcen des Instituts, sowie Suche und Identifikation von Ressourcen durch das Geoportal. Der Metadaten Katalog des Instituts dient der Organisation dieser Metadaten in standardisierter Form. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, ein neues Metadaten Management Systems für die Geodateninfrastruktur des Geographischen Instituts zu implementieren. Der am Ende stehende funktionsfähige Prototyp soll vom Leitbild des „user-centric SDI“ Ansatzes geprägt sein. Dieses Konzept repräsentiert die nunmehr dritte Generation von Geodatenbanken und rückt den Benutzer in das Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit - und dies von Beginn des Implementierungsprozesses an. Der gesamte Arbeitsfluss soll demzufolge stark vom Feedback der späteren Benutzer und deren Anforderungen geprägt sein. Mit „Joint Application Design“ und „Rapid Prototyping“ wurden Methoden gewählt, die diese Art von Software Entwicklung unter aktivem Nutzerengagement unterstützen. Als Folge nehmen Nutzerbefragungen, Präsentations- und Informationsveranstaltungen sowie Fragebogendesign und Auswertung in dieser Arbeit prominente Stellungen ein. Viele Weichen in der Softwareentwicklung wurden nach Auswertung von Nutzerbefragungen gestellt. Im Vorfeld wurde eine Unterteilung der Institutsmitglieder in „Experten“ und (potentielle zukünftige) „Nutzer“ getroffen. Wenige Experten wurden für grundlegende Entscheidungen herangezogen; die Nutzergemeinschaft wurde zu Informationsveranstaltungen eingeladen und mittels Fragebogen zum Thema Interface Design und der optimalen Bedienbarkeit des Geoportals befragt. Diese Veranstaltungen sollten über die Vorteile der Geodateninfrastruktur informieren, und durch aktive Beteiligung die Nutzergemeinschaft zu stärken und zu vergrößern. Jede GDI basiert auf Kommunikations- und Kooperationsprozessen, weshalb diese Aktivitäten Garanten für eine langfristig erfolgreiche Initiative darstellen. Eine vorangegangene Software Evaluation ließ, unter Berücksichtigung der gesammelten Nutzeranforderungen, für das Softwarepacket GeoNetwork open source entscheiden. Die Technische Entwicklung und die Gestaltung der Computer-Nutzer-Schnittstellen des GeoNetwork Prototypen wurden in sich wiederholenden Feedbackschleifen geplant. Abwechselnd soll die Generierung neuer Prototypen auf erneute Präsentationen inklusive Nutzerbefragungen folgen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Befragungen geben die Richtung für weitere Arbeit am Prototyp vor. Als methodischer Rahmen diente der „Rapid Prototyping“ Ansatz. Diskussionen in der Runde der Experten sowie die ständige Einbindung dieser in wichtige Entscheidungen rund um die GDI soll Teambildung fördern und die Mitglieder der Expertenrunde an das Projekt binden. Sie sind es, die später Verantwortlichkeiten für Metadaten übernehmen und delegieren können und damit einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Wartung und Instanthaltung der Infrastruktur leisten. Vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt Planung, Umsetzung und Ergebnis des Implementierungsprozesses dieses Prototyps unter Anwendung spezieller, auf Benutzer Partizipation und Feedback aufbauender Methoden. Es wird am Beispiel der speziellen Fallstudie diskutiert wie weit die gewählten Methoden im Sinne des Konzept des „unser-centric SDI“ eingesetzt werden und wie diese Praxis nachhaltig die Benutzerzufriedenheit steigert und zum Erfolg einer GDI langfristig beiträgt. Die Arbeit schließt mit einem Ausblick in die nahe und ferne Zukunft der möglichen Weiterentwicklung der GDI des Geographischen Instituts.Working with spatial data is “daily bread” at the Department of Geography at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. The success of research projects, staff members’ work and students’ university routines depends on high quality data and resources. A couple of years ago the department’s own Spatial Data Infrastructure was founded to organize and publish these resources and corresponding metadata. This virtual infrastructure offers a geoportal that allows the user to discover, visualize and (re-)use the department’s spatial and aspatial resources. Maintaining this cooperative network aims at synergy effects like reduction of costs for the acquirement of new resources. Moreover, SDI can be used to support teaching activities and serve as a practical example in the curriculum. Central for SDI are metadata; they represent a comprehensive structured description of the department’s resources and are a core piece of the geoportal’s functionalities to discover and identify data. The department’s Metadata Catalogue serves as a container for structured organization of metadata. This project goal is the implementation of a new metadata management system for the department’s Spatial Data Infrastructure. The resulting prototype should be developed following the user-centric SDI (third generation SDI) paradigm. This approach considers the (possible future) user community’s requirements and feedback as highly important and suggests an implementation process with continuous user participation. Both methods, “Joint Application Design” and “Rapid Prototyping”, rely on active user participation and were chosen and applied to support this concept. As a consequence, user assessments, information and dissemination activities and design and analysis of questionnaires occupied a prominent part of this study; the most important decisions during the implementation process were based on user feedback. In the forefront, users were distinguished between (possible future) “users” and “experts”. A small group of experts was asked to discuss and make fundamental decisions about the department’s SDI development, and the community of users was invited to informative events and to participate by filling out a questionnaire about the geoportal’s usability and interface design. These events were expected to raise user interest, foster a user community and user participation and to provide information about usage and benefits of the department’s SDI. SDI, as a communication and cooperation network, benefits from these activities in the long run. A preliminary software evaluation and the assessment of user requirements led to the decision that GeoNetwork open source was the most promising software to replace the department’s current metadata management system. Technical development and implementation of GeoNetwork prototype and its interfaces was accompanied by continuous feedback loops in accordance with the concept of “Rapid Prototyping”. The development of each new version of the prototype is followed by the presentation to users and collection of feedback. This feedback sets the agenda for further developments. Members of the expert group were constantly invited to participate in the SDI implementation process. Discussions regarding elemental SDI issues should foster team building and should bind experts to the project. They are the ones who are needed to take over custodianship for resources and metadata and to therefore play central roles in maintaining the department’s SDI. The thesis at hand describes the planning, design, realization and results of the implementation of a metadata management system prototype, by facilitating special, user participation methods. Using the example of this special case it discusses the combination of these methods with a user-centric SDI approach and implications in terms of user satisfaction and long-term SDI success. The final chapter offers a discussion about the implementation process and closes with an outlook on the possible short and long term development of the department of Geography’s SDI node

Designing an architecture for secure sharing of personal health records : a case of developing countries

Includes bibliographical references.While there has been an increase in the design and development of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems in the developed world, little has been done to explore the utility of these systems in the developing world. Despite the usual problems of poor infrastructure, PHR systems designed for the developing world need to conform to users with different models of security and literacy than those designed for developed world. This study investigated a PHR system distributed across mobile devices with a security model and an interface that supports the usage and concerns of low literacy users in developing countries. The main question addressed in this study is: “Can personal health records be stored securely and usefully on mobile phones?” In this study, mobile phones were integrated into the PHR architecture that we/I designed because the literature reveals that the majority of the population in developing countries possess mobile phones. Additionally, mobile phones are very flexible and cost efficient devices that offer adequate storage and computing capabilities to users for typically communication operations. However, it is also worth noting that, mobile phones generally do not provide sufficient security mechanisms to protect the user data from unauthorized access