Flexible Data Refreshing Architecture for Health Information System Integration

Background: Having a consistent and unified view of heterogeneous distributed medical information sources is an inevitable need of health informatics. Integrating medical information of patients or about a disease, a treatment or side effects of a drug, etc, is very useful to help medical education, to achieve medical research goals and to provide the computer- based decision support systems. Contribution: This article proposes a flexible incremental update method for the materialized part of the integration system. It permits us to manage the integration system according to the characteristics of the data sources which can change. Method: This paper presents a hybrid data integration approach in which the materialized part of the system in mediator is the object indexation structure based on an instance classification of the sources objects which correspond to the global schema. The object identifier of each object in the indexation structure is materialized together with the attributes which are needed for the incremental updating of this indexation (classifying attributes). Results: The main idea of this paper is to develop a hybrid data integration framework, which represents a new aspect of a hybrid method focusing on flexible data refreshing. Conclusion: This hybrid approach implements a vertical hybrid approach. It means that at the mediator level, some data of each object are materialized and others are virtual

Semantic Integration of heterogeneous data sources in the MOMIS Data Transformation System

In the last twenty years, many data integration systems following a classical wrapper/mediator architecture and providing a Global Virtual Schema (a.k.a. Global Virtual View - GVV) have been proposed by the research community. The main issues faced by these approaches range from system-level heterogeneities, to structural syntax level heterogeneities at the semantic level. Despite the research effort, all the approaches proposed require a lot of user intervention for customizing and managing the data integration and reconciliation tasks. In some cases, the effort and the complexity of the task is huge, since it requires the development of specific programming codes. Unfortunately, due to the specificity to be addressed, application codes and solutions are not frequently reusable in other domains. For this reason, the Lowell Report 2005 has provided the guideline for the definition of a public benchmark for information integration problem. The proposal, called THALIA (Test Harness for the Assessment of Legacy information Integration Approaches), focuses on how the data integration systems manage syntactic and semantic heterogeneities, which definitely are the greatest technical challenges in the field. We developed a Data Transformation System (DTS) that supports data transformation functions and produces query translation in order to push down to the sources the execution. Our DTS is based on MOMIS, a mediator-based data integration system that our research group is developing and supporting since 1999. In this paper, we show how the DTS is able to solve all the twelve queries of the THALIA benchmark by using a simple combination of declarative translation functions already available in the standard SQL language. We think that this is a remarkable result, mainly for two reasons: firstly to the best of our knowledge there is no system that has provided a complete answer to the benchmark, secondly, our queries does not require any overhead of new code

Dealing with Inconsistency and Incompleteness in Data Integration

Marco Schaerf, Giuseppe Di Battista, Domenico SaccÃ

Data quality maintenance in Data Integration Systems

A Data Integration System (DIS) is an information system that integrates data from a set of heterogeneous and autonomous information sources and provides it to users. Quality in these systems consists of various factors that are measured in data. Some of the usually considered ones are completeness, accuracy, accessibility, freshness, availability. In a DIS, quality factors are associated to the sources, to the extracted and transformed information, and to the information provided by the DIS to the user. At the same time, the user has the possibility of posing quality requirements associated to his data requirements. DIS Quality is considered as better, the nearer it is to the user quality requirements. DIS quality depends on data sources quality, on data transformations and on quality required by users. Therefore, DIS quality is a property that varies in function of the variations of these three other properties. The general goal of this thesis is to provide mechanisms for maintaining DIS quality at a level that satisfies the user quality requirements, minimizing the modifications to the system that are generated by quality changes. The proposal of this thesis allows constructing and maintaining a DIS that is tolerant to quality changes. This means that the DIS is constructed taking into account previsions of quality behavior, such that if changes occur according to these previsions the system is not affected at all by them. These previsions are provided by models of quality behavior of DIS data, which must be maintained up to date. With this strategy, the DIS is affected only when quality behavior models change, instead of being affected each time there is a quality variation in the system. The thesis has a probabilistic approach, which allows modeling the behavior of the quality factors at the sources and at the DIS, allows the users to state flexible quality requirements (using probabilities), and provides tools, such as certainty, mathematical expectation, etc., that help to decide which quality changes are relevant to the DIS quality. The probabilistic models are monitored in order to detect source quality changes, strategy that allows detecting changes on quality behavior and not only punctual quality changes. We propose to monitor also other DIS properties that affect its quality, and for each of these changes decide if they affect the behavior of DIS quality, taking into account DIS quality models. Finally, the probabilistic approach is also applied at the moment of determining actions to take in order to improve DIS quality. For the interpretation of DIS situation we propose to use statistics, which include, in particular, the history of the quality models

XML-based approaches for the integration of heterogeneous bio-molecular data

Background: The today's public database infrastructure spans a very large collection of heterogeneous biological data, opening new opportunities for molecular biology, bio-medical and bioinformatics research, but raising also new problems for their integration and computational processing. Results: In this paper we survey the most interesting and novel approaches for the representation, integration and management of different kinds of biological data by exploiting XML and the related recommendations and approaches. Moreover, we present new and interesting cutting edge approaches for the appropriate management of heterogeneous biological data represented through XML. Conclusion: XML has succeeded in the integration of heterogeneous biomolecular information, and has established itself as the syntactic glue for biological data sources. Nevertheless, a large variety of XML-based data formats have been proposed, thus resulting in a difficult effective integration of bioinformatics data schemes. The adoption of a few semantic-rich standard formats is urgent to achieve a seamless integration of the current biological resources. </p

Towards Restorative Approach of Justice – A Shift in Paradigm

The involvement of victims of crime and the active participation of victims in the criminal justice process has been an issue of interest among both academicians and professionals globally. The ideological debate whether restorative discipline of practice offers victims a better deal than conventional criminal justice system has gathered a wave among many supporters of the concept. Moreover, restorative justice promoters argue that the status of victims of crime has been given little attention in the criminal justice process from the beginning of the modern criminal justice system to recent years. In view of this, restorative justice (RJ), an alternative to the dominant retributive/ deterrent justice system, has been argued to be more holistic approach that encompasses the victim, offender and the community. In contemporary times, more and more stakeholders of criminal justice system are looking within their existing cultures and finding models and traditions that can be adopted or adapted to suit a culturally sensitive dispute resolution and reconciliation process. However, not very much of this knowledge and practice, or its potential benefits to crime and conflict prevention and social reconciliation, have been researched. So, on the basis of the international recognition attached to the restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution, this paper will enquire into existing legal provisions and rights available for victims of crime, nature of challenges faced by victims while navigating through process of justice, how restorative justice can be an improvement over existing system and role of stakeholders involved. It will also explore, by following examples from several other common law jurisdictions, how India can experiment with more democratic models aimed at reconciliation and restoration of relationships