Building sustainable capacity for health research in africa through cloud computing applications

Access to information and continuous education represent critical factors for physicians and researchers over the world. For African professionals, this situation is even more problematic due to the frequently difficult access to technological infrastructures and basic information. Both education and information technologies (e.g., including hardware, software or networking) are expensive and unaffordable for many African professionals. Thus, the use of e-learning and an open approach to information exchange and software use have been already proposed to improve medical informatics issues in Africa. In this context, the AFRICA BUILD project, supported by the European Commission, aims to develop a virtual platform to provide access to a wide range of biomedical informatics and learning resources to professionals and researchers in Africa. A consortium of four African and four European partners work together in this initiative. In this framework, we have developed a prototype of a cloud-computing infrastructure to demonstrate, as a proof of concept, the feasibility of this approach. We have conducted the experiment in two different locations in Africa: Burundi and Egypt. As shown in this paper, technologies such as cloud computing and the use of open source medical software for a large range of case present significant challenges and opportunities for developing countries, such as many in Africa

Online article management system

Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science, Ashesi University College, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, 2010This is an applied group project done by Joshua Tabu Shehe and Ernest Musyoki Museve. This report looks at the processes by which the web-based article management system called WriteWell is developed and implemented for the userside (front-end). This application will allow Eldoret Writers Centre writers to manage their own articles in an efficient way than what they are using currently. This report will look at the background information about Eldoret Writers Centre based in Eldoret which will assist in looking at the methodologies, system design, implementation and testing involved. Lastly, we will look at the experiences gained while working on this project.Ashesi University Colleg

A Semantic Wiki-based Platform for IT Service Management

The book researches the use of a semantic wiki in the area of IT Service Management within the IT department of an SME. An emphasis of the book lies in the design and prototypical implementation of tools for the integration of ITSM-relevant information into the semantic wiki, as well as tools for interactions between the wiki and external programs. The result of the book is a platform for agile, semantic wiki-based ITSM for IT administration teams of SMEs

Technological Impediments to B2C Electronic Commerce: An Update

In 1999, Rose et al. identified six categories of technological impediments inhibiting the growth of electronic commerce: (1) download delays, (2) interface limitations, (3) search problems, (4) inadequate measures of Web application success, (5) security, and (6) a lack of Internet standards. This paper updates findings in the original paper by surveying the practitioner literature for the five-year period from June 1999 to June 2004. We identify how advances in technology both partially resolve concerns with the original technological impediments, and inhibit their full resolution. We find that, despite five years of technological progress, the six categories of technological impediments remain relevant. Furthermore, the maturation of e-Commerce increased the Internet\u27s complexity, making these impediments harder to address. Two kinds of complexity are especially relevant: evolutionary complexity, and skill complexity. Evolutionary complexity refers to the need to preserve the existing Internet and resolve impediments simultaneously. Unfortunately, because the Internet consists of multiple incompatible technologies, philosophies, and attitudes, additions to the Internet infrastructure are difficult to integrate. Skill complexity refers to the skill sets necessary for managing e-Commerce change. As the Internet evolves, more skills become relevant. Unfortunately, individuals, companies and organizations are unable to master and integrate all necessary skills. As a result, new features added to the Internet do not consider all relevant factors, and are thus sub-optimal. NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE IS APPROXIMATELY 600kb. IF YOU USE A SLOW MODEM, IT MAY TAKE A WHILE TO LOA

Requirements Specification for a web application

This research is part of a software development project that aims to improve an existing web-based business application that is used to access engine technical data per different engine types. The need for a completely new application and development project has occurred, because the organization’s business has evolved and emerged new requirements that go beyond the maintenance of the existing system as the currently used technology is outdated and does no longer support the needed changes. The main intention of this research is to provide a requirements specification for the new improved application, including both the functional and non-functional requirements. Other objectives include giving recommendations for the continuation of the project as well as proposing the technologies and tools to be used in the actual implementation. The research was divided into theoretical and empirical research. In the theoretical part the theory behind the web applications and software engineering were explored, concentrating more in detail on the requirements engineering activity. In the empirical part, the existing application was first inspected, and then the detailed research design was made and executed. In practice, the different stakeholders for the application were identified, and requirements were discovered by utilizing conversational interviews in combination with early prototyping. As a result, the requirements in their raw form were discovered, and finally turned in to the final requirements specification through analysis, representation and validation. Last, the recommendations for the project’s continuation were given. As a main result of this research, a requirements specification for the new enhanced web application was established. The produced specification gives both the functional and non-functional requirements in a prioritized and organized natural language form, but also includes the produced user interface mock-up prototype to provide more visual representation to easy the communication between the different stakeholders. In addition, the research gives recommendations for the web technologies and tools to be used in the implementation of the software, and provides suggestions for the continuation of the development project. Overall, the results will work as an input for the following development activities and give a good base for the project to proceed.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Digital Critical Editing, Digital Text Analysis, and Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

This thesis considers why critical editions have not established themselves in the digital medium to the same extent as documentary editions and offers some potential ways to remedy this. The written thesis is accompanied by a digital critical edition of Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, which acts as an example of and case study for the arguments set forth in the written thesis. This edition can be accessed at app.melmoththewanderer.com or at https://pacific-harbor-2932.herokuapp.com/. Documentary editions have found a secure position in the digital medium because they have a solid pre-digital theoretical foundation in the work of Jerome McGann and D.F. McKenzie; digital documentary editions have also become part of the narrative of the rise of the digital humanities. Digital critical editions, however, have neither of these advantages. Editors must instead work to create digital critical editions that can not be easily achieved in the medium of print. This thesis proposes two potential ways that this can be done. Firstly, digital critical editions can benefit by being designed as usable editions that aid users in accessing the different parts of the text. This involves a slight reconception of the critical edition in the digital medium where the job of the editor is not the establishment of a single, stable text but is the establishment of multiple views of the text. Secondly, digital critical editions will also benefit from increased interaction with the field of digital text analysis. This can be achieved in a number of ways: by making the edition’s data available in multiple formats for analysis, by topic modelling a corpus of texts contemporary to the edition’s text and making visualisations of those topic models available to the user in the edition’s paratexts as a novel way of contextualising the edition text, and finally by allowing users to interrogate the results of those topic models while they browse the core text of the edition

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system