Self-organized Data Ecologies for Pervasive Situation-Aware Services: the Knowledge Networks Approach

Pervasive computing services exploit information about the physical world both to adapt their own behavior in a context-aware way and to deliver to users enhanced means of interaction with their surrounding environment. The technology to acquire digital information about the physical world is increasingly available, making services at risk of being overwhelmed by such growing amounts of data. This calls for novel approaches to represent and automatically organize, aggregate, and prune such growing amounts of data before delivering it to services. In particular, individual data items should form a sort of self-organized ecology in which, by linking and combining with each other into sorts of “knowledge networks”, they can be able to provide to services compact and easy to be managed higher-level knowledge about situations occurring in the environment. In this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, with the help of a simple case study, we motivate the need to evolve from models of “context-awareness” towards models of “situation-awareness” via proper self-organized “knowledge networks” tools, and introduce a general reference architecture for knowledge networks. Second, we describe the design and implementation of a knowledge network toolkit we have developed, and exemplify algorithms for knowledge self-organization integrated within it. Open issues and future research directions are also discussed

Semantic-enhanced hybrid recommender systems for personalised e-Government services

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.E-Government is becoming ever more active in terms of improving the provision of services to citizens from a citizen-centred perspective, in which online services and information are delivered to citizens on a personalised basis. Some developed governments have started to offer personalised services through their official portals. However, the personalised services that are offered are mostly limited to static customisation and are therefore far from achieving effective citizen-centred e-Government services. Furthermore, delivering personalised online services that match the different needs and interests of government users is a challenge for e-Government, specifically in connection with the increasing information and services that are offered through the medium of government portals. Therefore, more advanced and intelligent e-Government systems are desirable. Personalisation techniques, particularly in the form of recommender systems, are promising to provide better solutions to support the development of personalisation in e-Government services. Furthermore, semantic enhanced recommender systems can better support citizen-centred e-Government services and enhance recommendation accuracy. The success of semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and the citizen-centric initiative of e-Government have fostered the idea of developing personalised e-Government recommendation service systems using semantic enhanced hybrid recommender systems. Accordingly, the effectiveness of utilising the semantic knowledge of e-Government services to enhance the recommendation quality of offered services is addressed in this thesis. This thesis makes five significant contributions to the area of e-Government personalised recommendation services. These contributions are summarised as follows: (i) the thesis first proposes a general framework for offering personalised e-Government services from a citizen-centred perspective based on the available user profiles information and semantic knowledge of a specific e-Government domain of interest; (ii) based on this general framework, a personalised e-Government tourism service recommendation framework is also proposed and considered as a target domain in this research study; (iii) new semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches are developed to support the implementation of the recommendation generator engines of the proposed e-Government frameworks. The recommendation generator engines represent the core components of the proposed frameworks; (iv) new semantic similarity measures based on semantic knowledge of a target domain ontology are proposed to effectively evaluate the similarity between e-Government service items. The new semantic similarity measures are incorporated within the proposed hybrid approaches to improve the quality and accuracy of recommendations and to overcome the limitations of existing hybrid recommendation approaches; and (v) a switching semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation system is further proposed to enhance the overall quality of recommendation, address the sparsity, the cold-start user and item problems. Experimental evaluations of the proposed semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and switching system, on a real world tourism dataset, show promising results against state-of-the-art recommendation approaches in terms of the quality of recommendations, capacity to alleviate the sparsity, cold-start item and user problems

IMPLEMENTASI PROGRAM KESEHATAN IBU DAN ANAK BIDANG PELAYANAN ANTENATAL CARE DAN NIFAS DI PUSKESMAS BANDARHARJO KOTA SEMARANG

One indicator of the success of development in the health sector is the maternal mortality rate, this illustrates how the quality of maternal health. Maternal health quality issues are enhanced through maternal and child health programs. Puskesmas as primary health care unit must apply mother and child health program both promotive and preventive treatment based on Ministry of Health Regulation. 75/2014 on Puskesmas and supported by Central Java Governor Regulation No. 17 of 2016 on the implementation of Maternal and Child Health Services in Central Java Province. This study aims to obtain information about the implementation of the rogram as well as factors inhibiting and driving the implementation of Maternal and Child Health Programs in the Field of Antenatal Care Services and Childbed in the Public Health Center Bandarharjo City of Semarang. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method. The results of the study on program implementation indicate that antenatal care and postpartum services are good but there are some indicators of antenatal care services that are not optimal such as laboratory test services, pregnancy classes implementation, and counseling. The authors use the six obstacles and drivers of program implementation from Van Metter and Van Horn, which are the size and objectives of the policies, resources, the character of the implementing agency, the attitudes/trends of the implementers, inter- organizational communication and implementation activities, and the economic, social and political environment. Based on the result of the research, the inhibiting factors are the limited number of human resources and the social environment that are less supportive. Based on the results of this research, some efforts are needed to improve the antenatal care and postpartum services, among others, equalization of laboratory tests and pregnant women's classes for all pregnant women, Human resources, and commitment from the government to cooperate in conducting guidance to the community with certain social conditions through socialization and mentoring that can increase knowledge and awareness of the community

Application of Library Service Charter in Quality Service Delivery in University Libraries

Purpose was to assess the application of library service charter in quality service delivery in university libraries with reference to the University of Nairobi Library in Kenya, and propose measures to ensure successful implementation and management of the practice. Objectives of the study were to: examine the extent of the library service charter in quality service delivery in the library, establish levels of library staff awareness, perception and responsiveness to information service delivery, assess the actualization of the matrices of the library service charter for quality improvements, establish the challenges experienced by the library in realising the commitments of the service delivery charter, and propose measures to be undertaken to ensure successful actualization of the library service charter. Mixed research methods of qualitative and quantitative design were applied in the research. The library service charter played critical role in delivery of services to the information customers, significantly enhanced information management through professionalism, staff performance, teamwork and timely feedback. The challenges experienced in implementing the service charter included low work motivation, increased workload, complexity in understanding the provisions of the charter, bureaucracy, institutional weakness, targets set inhibits performance and inadequate facilitation. There is need for elaborated information fluency programme to equip the library staff with adequate knowledge and skills on all matrices of the practice. In addition, the library should plan for capacity building, provide enough copies of the service charter to patrons, and monitor and evaluate the service charter for continuous improvement of service delivery

Experience of nurses with using eHealth in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan: a qualitative study in primary and secondary healthcare

Background: To improve the quality of health care in remote parts of Pakistan, a research project was initiated in the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan using information and communication technology to improve patient care and support continuing education of health providers (eHealth). This paper describes the experience of nurses in using eHealth in their routine practices. Methods: All health centres of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan using eHealth as part of this study, were taken as a single case. These include four primary healthcare centres, three secondary care centres and one medical centre. In-depth interviews were conducted using semi-structured interview guide to study nurses’ perspective about using eHealth, and its perceived impact on their professional lives. Results: According to the respondents, eHealth enhanced access to care for remote communities, and improved quality of health services by providing opportunities for continuing learning. Nurses also appreciated eHealth for reducing their professional isolation, and providing exposure to new knowledge through teleconsultations and eLearning. The responses categorized under six major headings include: gaps in health services prior to eHealth; role of eHealth in addressing these gaps; benefits of eHealth; challenges in eHealth implementation; community’s perception about eHealth; and future recommendations. Conclusions: Low-cost and simple eHealth solutions have shown to benefit nurses, and the communities in the remote mountainous regions of Pakistan

The cybrary and the consortium: mutual benefits. The University of Queensland Cybrary and the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation

This paper looks at the procedures and processes involved at the University of Queensland Library in its transition to a digital library, now known as the Cybrary, and describes the resultant information services available to students, scholars, and practitioners. As Australia’s first virtual library, the University of Queensland Library has been recognised by the Australian Award for University Teaching in 1998 and again in 2000. (http://www.cybrary.uq.edu.au ) The UQ Library is also a member of QULOC, the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation, a consortium which initiates and supports cooperative world class solutions to information resource needs of university libraries in its member institutions. The traditional paradigm of the library was a physical place where scholars and students went to gain access to recorded knowledge using bibliographic records to guide them to rows of shelves of printed materials. Librarians guarded collections and assisted users. Much has changed in recent times. With the availability of electronic forms of information, stored locally, and accessed remotely, the new paradigm is the Cybrary – a gateway for clients located anywhere to access electronic resources everywhere and at any time. The Cybrarian is a navigator and guide. The Cybrary is the window on the world of knowledge. The effectiveness of the Cybrary in service delivery is dependent upon the effective implementation of information technology, combined with appropriate training for both cybrary staff and end users. The Cybrary uses a single interface to provide integrated access to its printed and electronic resources and services - the Library’s website. From the website, the information searcher has access to electronic databases, electronic journals, and Internet resources all of which can be searched/browsed by subject. Help tools are also available online to guide the searcher through the range of resources. The availability of remote access to information greatly facilitates the delivery of education to distant students, and enables the access to information by remote workers in the field. It revolutionises opportunity for students, scholars and practitioners alike. Many of the functions of the Cybrary are enhanced and supported through its membership of the Consortium, which is used as a vehicle for such activities as information sharing, continuing education, staff development, and cooperative research and development projects

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes