Combining information seeking services into a meta supply chain of facts

The World Wide Web has become a vital supplier of information that allows organizations to carry on such tasks as business intelligence, security monitoring, and risk assessments. Having a quick and reliable supply of correct facts from perspective is often mission critical. By following design science guidelines, we have explored ways to recombine facts from multiple sources, each with possibly different levels of responsiveness and accuracy, into one robust supply chain. Inspired by prior research on keyword-based meta-search engines (e.g., metacrawler.com), we have adapted the existing question answering algorithms for the task of analysis and triangulation of facts. We present a first prototype for a meta approach to fact seeking. Our meta engine sends a user's question to several fact seeking services that are publicly available on the Web (e.g., ask.com, brainboost.com, answerbus.com, NSIR, etc.) and analyzes the returned results jointly to identify and present to the user those that are most likely to be factually correct. The results of our evaluation on the standard test sets widely used in prior research support the evidence for the following: 1) the value-added of the meta approach: its performance surpasses the performance of each supplier, 2) the importance of using fact seeking services as suppliers to the meta engine rather than keyword driven search portals, and 3) the resilience of the meta approach: eliminating a single service does not noticeably impact the overall performance. We show that these properties make the meta-approach a more reliable supplier of facts than any of the currently available stand-alone services

Comparison of web service architecture based on architecture quality properties

Web service research has been focused on the issues of automatic binding, performance, scalability, and security, however, little research has been done in evaluation of web service architectures, namely Broker based. Examples of these are Matchmaker Broker, Layered Matchmaker, Facilitator, Layered facilitator, and Peer to peer (P2P) based, such as P2P Discovery, Match Maker and P2P, Split Code and P2P execution, Mobile Code with P2P etc. Another consideration is its impact on the adoption in distributed Internet environment. In this paper we introduce a methodology for measuring and evaluating web service architecture style, and we present our development of a set of architectural quality properties, and use these quality properties to carry out comparison and contract of current web services architectures. We provide a detailed analysis and critique of these, and these could be served as a guidelines for the next generation of web services development, which could adopted into the distributed environment

Evaluating E-Government Web Usability : A Case Study of Penang.Net

Electronic Government (E-Government) initiatives have often sounded very promising but been difficult to implement. Therefore, it is important to ensure that people, have opportunities to benefit from the Web by the government, especially from on-line public services or the online information. The study takes into consideration how E-Government should be understood. It presents the review of literature regarding the examination on E-government evaluation methods adopted in leading information technology advanced countries. This study aims to provide usability evaluation of the Penang state E-Government web sites: Penang.Net by using the benchmarking approach by using a form of the benchmark approach to asess the degree to which each of the web site usability and the contents usefulness. By then it contrasts the web page of the three web sites and a discussion of the best practice for various usability criteria. The result of this study can be used to inform the subsequent re-design of the Penang.Net home page. The finding is intended to measure the performance and quality of Penang.Net web against the others state government service website. The suggested guidelines established in this study aimed to provide suggestions to the Penang state government that enables then to produce E-Government web sites that are both usable and benefit to Penang people

Academic and Public Libraries’ Use of Web 2.0 Applications and Services in Mississippi

Libraries have guidelines and standards that hold them accountable to be effective institutions (Husid, 2010). The American Library Association’s (ALA) “Library Bill of Rights” sets six basic standards for all libraries to follow. Among other things, these standards encourage libraries to resist forms of censorship, grant access to all types of materials, and resist biases (ALA, 2007). However, as libraries have evolved, so have many of these guidelines and standards with respect to technology specifically. For example, the American Association of School Libraries (AASL) Standards for the 21st Century Learner requires that the students in today’s classroom strive to master technology skills (ALA, 2007). The Young Adult Library Services Association’s (YALSA) Public Library Evaluation Tool and The Competencies for Librarians Serving Youth: Young Adults Deserve the Best supports the use of social networking and Web 2.0 services like blogs and podcasts in the classroom and library (Husid, 2010). The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Standards for Libraries in Higher Education not only encourages academic libraries to educate students and build a sense of campus community, their principal performance indicator “Discovery” asks libraries to “enable users to discover information in all formats through effective use of technology and organization of knowledge” (ALA, 2011,pg. 9)

Towards computerizing intensive care sedation guidelines: design of a rule-based architecture for automated execution of clinical guidelines

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Computerized ICUs rely on software services to convey the medical condition of their patients as well as assisting the staff in taking treatment decisions. Such services are useful for following clinical guidelines quickly and accurately. However, the development of services is often time-consuming and error-prone. Consequently, many care-related activities are still conducted based on manually constructed guidelines. These are often ambiguous, which leads to unnecessary variations in treatments and costs.</p> <p>The goal of this paper is to present a semi-automatic verification and translation framework capable of turning manually constructed diagrams into ready-to-use programs. This framework combines the strengths of the manual and service-oriented approaches while decreasing their disadvantages. The aim is to close the gap in communication between the IT and the medical domain. This leads to a less time-consuming and error-prone development phase and a shorter clinical evaluation phase.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A framework is proposed that semi-automatically translates a clinical guideline, expressed as an XML-based flow chart, into a Drools Rule Flow by employing semantic technologies such as ontologies and SWRL. An overview of the architecture is given and all the technology choices are thoroughly motivated. Finally, it is shown how this framework can be integrated into a service-oriented architecture (SOA).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The applicability of the Drools Rule language to express clinical guidelines is evaluated by translating an example guideline, namely the sedation protocol used for the anaesthetization of patients, to a Drools Rule Flow and executing and deploying this Rule-based application as a part of a SOA. The results show that the performance of Drools is comparable to other technologies such as Web Services and increases with the number of decision nodes present in the Rule Flow. Most delays are introduced by loading the Rule Flows.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The framework is an effective solution for computerizing clinical guidelines as it allows for quick development, evaluation and human-readable visualization of the Rules and has a good performance. By monitoring the parameters of the patient to automatically detect exceptional situations and problems and by notifying the medical staff of tasks that need to be performed, the computerized sedation guideline improves the execution of the guideline.</p

Do managed clinical networks improve quality of diabetes care? : Evidence from a retrospective mixed methods evaluation

Peer reviewedPostprin

Access and usability issues of scholarly electronic publications

This chapter looks at the various access and usability issues related to scholarly information resources. It first looks at the various channels through which a user can get access to scholarly electronic publications. It then discusses the issues and studies surrounding usability. Some important parameters for measuring the usability of information access systems have been identified. Finally the chapter looks at the major problems facing the users in getting access to scholarly information through today's hybrid libraries, and mentions some possible measures to resolve these problems

Community Development Evaluation Storymap and Legend

Community based organizations, funders, and intermediary organizations working in the community development field have a shared interest in building stronger organizations and stronger communities. Through evaluation these organizations can learn how their programs and activities contribute to the achievement of these goals, and how to improve their effectiveness and the well-being of their communities. Yet, evaluation is rarely seen as part of a non-judgemental organizational learning process. Instead, the term "evaluation" has often generated anxiety and confusion. The Community Development Storymap project is a response to those concerns.Illustrations found in this document were produced by Grove Consultants

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer