9,359 research outputs found
Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses
Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces
designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level
of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we
have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects
in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of
the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several
shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the
benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for
discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
BCAS: A Web-enabled and GIS-based Decision Support System for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer
For decades, geographical variations in cancer rates have been observed but the precise determinants of such geographic differences in breast cancer development are unclear. Various statistical models have been proposed. Applications of these models, however, require that the data be assembled from a variety of sources, converted into the statistical models’ parameters and delivered effectively to researchers and policy makers. A web-enabled and GIS-based system can be developed to provide the needed functionality. This article overviews the conceptual web-enabled and GIS-based system (BCAS), illustrates the system’s use in diagnosing and treating breast cancer and examines the potential benefits and implications for breast cancer research and practice
On-line analytical processing
On-line analytical processing (OLAP) describes an approach to decision support, which aims to extract knowledge from a data warehouse, or more specifically, from data marts. Its main idea is providing navigation through data to non-expert users, so that they are able to interactively generate ad hoc queries without the intervention of IT professionals. This name was introduced in contrast to on-line transactional processing (OLTP), so that it reflected the different requirements and characteristics between these classes of uses. The concept falls in the area of business intelligence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Performance assessment of real-time data management on wireless sensor networks
Technological advances in recent years have allowed the maturity of Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSNs), which aim at performing environmental monitoring and data collection. This sort of
network is composed of hundreds, thousands or probably even millions of tiny smart computers
known as wireless sensor nodes, which may be battery powered, equipped with sensors, a radio
transceiver, a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and some memory. However due to the small size and
the requirements of low-cost nodes, these sensor node resources such as processing power, storage
and especially energy are very limited.
Once the sensors perform their measurements from the environment, the problem of data
storing and querying arises. In fact, the sensors have restricted storage capacity and the on-going
interaction between sensors and environment results huge amounts of data. Techniques for data
storage and query in WSN can be based on either external storage or local storage. The external
storage, called warehousing approach, is a centralized system on which the data gathered by the
sensors are periodically sent to a central database server where user queries are processed. The
local storage, in the other hand called distributed approach, exploits the capabilities of sensors
calculation and the sensors act as local databases. The data is stored in a central database server
and in the devices themselves, enabling one to query both.
The WSNs are used in a wide variety of applications, which may perform certain operations on
collected sensor data. However, for certain applications, such as real-time applications, the sensor
data must closely reflect the current state of the targeted environment. However, the environment
changes constantly and the data is collected in discreet moments of time. As such, the collected
data has a temporal validity, and as time advances, it becomes less accurate, until it does not
reflect the state of the environment any longer. Thus, these applications must query and analyze
the data in a bounded time in order to make decisions and to react efficiently, such as industrial
automation, aviation, sensors network, and so on. In this context, the design of efficient real-time
data management solutions is necessary to deal with both time constraints and energy consumption.
This thesis studies the real-time data management techniques for WSNs. It particularly it focuses
on the study of the challenges in handling real-time data storage and query for WSNs and on the
efficient real-time data management solutions for WSNs.
First, the main specifications of real-time data management are identified and the available
real-time data management solutions for WSNs in the literature are presented. Secondly, in order to
provide an energy-efficient real-time data management solution, the techniques used to manage
data and queries in WSNs based on the distributed paradigm are deeply studied. In fact, many
research works argue that the distributed approach is the most energy-efficient way of managing
data and queries in WSNs, instead of performing the warehousing. In addition, this approach can provide quasi real-time query processing because the most current data will be retrieved from the
network.
Thirdly, based on these two studies and considering the complexity of developing, testing, and
debugging this kind of complex system, a model for a simulation framework of the real-time
databases management on WSN that uses a distributed approach and its implementation are
proposed. This will help to explore various solutions of real-time database techniques on WSNs
before deployment for economizing money and time. Moreover, one may improve the proposed
model by adding the simulation of protocols or place part of this simulator on another available
simulator. For validating the model, a case study considering real-time constraints as well as energy
constraints is discussed.
Fourth, a new architecture that combines statistical modeling techniques with the distributed
approach and a query processing algorithm to optimize the real-time user query processing are
proposed. This combination allows performing a query processing algorithm based on admission
control that uses the error tolerance and the probabilistic confidence interval as admission
parameters. The experiments based on real world data sets as well as synthetic data sets
demonstrate that the proposed solution optimizes the real-time query processing to save more
energy while meeting low latency.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi
Perspects in astrophysical databases
Astrophysics has become a domain extremely rich of scientific data. Data
mining tools are needed for information extraction from such large datasets.
This asks for an approach to data management emphasizing the efficiency and
simplicity of data access; efficiency is obtained using multidimensional access
methods and simplicity is achieved by properly handling metadata. Moreover,
clustering and classification techniques on large datasets pose additional
requirements in terms of computation and memory scalability and
interpretability of results. In this study we review some possible solutions
Real estate stock selection and attribute preferences
The majority of studies that explore property portfolio construction and management strategies utilise highly aggregated ex-post data, but stock selection is known to be a significant determinant of portfolio performance. Thus, here we look at stock selection, focusing on the choices faced by investors, necessitating the collection and analysis of primary data, carried out utilising conjoint analysis. This represents a new step in property research, with the data collection undertaken using a simulation exercise. This enables fund managers to make hypothetical purchase decisions, viewing properties comprising a realistic bundle of attributes and making complex contemporaneous trade-offs between attributes, subject to their stated market and economic forecasts and sector specialism. In total 51 fund managers were surveyed, producing 918 purchase decisions for analysis, with additional data collected regarding fund and personal characteristics. The results reveal that ‘fixed’ property characteristics (location and obsolescence) are dominant in the decision-making process, over and above ‘manageable’ tenant and lease characteristics which can be explicitly included within models of probabilities of income variation. This reveals investors are making ex-ante risk judgements and are considering post acquisition risk management strategies. The study also reveals that behavioural factors affect acquisition decisions
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