The Requirements for Ontologies in Medical Data Integration: A Case Study

Evidence-based medicine is critically dependent on three sources of information: a medical knowledge base, the patients medical record and knowledge of available resources, including where appropriate, clinical protocols. Patient data is often scattered in a variety of databases and may, in a distributed model, be held across several disparate repositories. Consequently addressing the needs of an evidence-based medicine community presents issues of biomedical data integration, clinical interpretation and knowledge management. This paper outlines how the Health-e-Child project has approached the challenge of requirements specification for (bio-) medical data integration, from the level of cellular data, through disease to that of patient and population. The approach is illuminated through the requirements elicitation and analysis of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), one of three diseases being studied in the EC-funded Health-e-Child project.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Presented at the 11th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (Ideas2007). Banff, Canada September 200

Development of a platform recommending 3D and spectral digitisation strategies

[EN] Spatial and spectral recording of cultural heritage objects is a complex task including data acquisition, processing and analysis involving different technical disciplines. Additionally, the development of a suitable digitisation strategy satisfying the expectations of the humanities experts needs an interdisciplinary dialogue often suffering from misunderstanding and knowledge gaps on both the technical and humanities sides.Through a concerted discussion experts from the cultural heritage and technical domains currently develop a so-called COSCHKR platform (Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage Knowledge Representation) which will give recommendations for spatial and spectral recording strategies adapted to the needs of the cultural heritage application. The platform will make use of an ontology through which the relevant parameters of the different domains involved in the recording, processing, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage objects are hierarchically structured and are related through rule-based dependencies. Background and basis for this ontology is the fact that a deterministic relation exists between (1) the requirements of a cultural heritage application on spatial, spectral, as well as visual digital information of a cultural heritage object which itself has concrete physical characteristics and (2) the technical possibilities of the spectral and spatial recording devices. Through a case study which deals with the deformation analysis of wooden samples of cultural heritage artefacts this deterministic relationship is illustrated explaining the overall structure and development of the ontology.The aim of the COSCHKR platform is to support cultural heritage experts finding the best suitable recording strategy for their often unique physical cultural heritage object and research question. The platform will support them and will make them aware of the relevant parameters and limitations of the recording strategy with respect to the characteristics of the cultural heritage object, external influences, application, recording devices, and data.This work was partly supported by COST under Action TD1201: Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage (COSCH).Wefers, S.; Karmacharya, A.; Boochs, F. (2016). Development of a platform recommending 3D and spectral digitisation strategies. Virtual Archaeology Review. 7(15):18-27. doi:10.4995/var.2016.5861.SWORD182771

Discrete-Event Simulation Data Transformation: A Model-Driven Data Integration Approach

Achieving a smooth production system is a complex process that requires the use of commercial discrete event simulation (DES) tools to provide a high flexibility production process, for instance the use of simulation modelling to model a production system. These tools require high levels of cooperation to work together because they are not designed to be integrated and hardly share their data. This research aims to integrate DES tools applied by different manufacturing systems in order to enable them to share their data. This thesis presents data integration from a simulation model point of view because it views data integration between different DES tools models as key steps towards system integration. A new approach has been developed which is called a Model-Driven Data Integration Approach (MDDI), so named because the integration involves the combination of data from different DES tools model sources. The effectiveness of this data integration approach has been demonstrated in a case study undertaken for DES design of a phone production line in the manufacturing industry. However, the application of the MDDI is not limited to this case study: it can also be used for other system and applications. The MDDI approach was tested and evaluated on the basis of this case study. These test cases simulated how the data integration based on different DES tools’ models react to the process of data sharing as they occur in the manufacturing production line. The result is that the MDDI approach best maintains data consistency and integrity and can be adopted by different industries

Using a Layered Approach for Interoperability on the Semantic Web

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Using a Layered Approach for Interoperability on the Semantic Web

In this paper, we further develop a proposed layered approach for the Semantic Web. Our objective is to build a specific solution to the problem of providing data interoperability among different databases, so as to allow for schematic data integration. In particular, we solve the problem of translating queries on a database schema into queries on another database schema, using their relationship with an ontology. We use RDF Schema to model the databases and the ontology. A common vocabulary expresses the mappings between each database schema and the ontology