Computerization of workflows, guidelines and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems

There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation ‘challenge’ themes. One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying ‘challenge’ themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings

A document-like software visualization method for effective cognition of c-based software systems

It is clear that maintenance is a crucial and very costly process in a software life cycle. Nowadays there are a lot of software systems particularly legacy systems that are always maintained from time to time as new requirements arise. One important source to understand a software system before it is being maintained is through the documentation, particularly system documentation. Unfortunately, not all software systems developed or maintained are accompanied with their reliable and updated documents. In this case, source codes will be the only reliable source for programmers. A number of studies have been carried out in order to assist cognition based on source codes. One way is through tool automation via reverse engineering technique in which source codes will be parsed and the information extracted will be visualized using certain visualization methods. Most software visualization methods use graph as the main element to represent extracted software artifacts. Nevertheless, current methods tend to produce more complicated graphs and do not grant an explicit, document-like re-documentation environment. Hence, this thesis proposes a document-like software visualization method called DocLike Modularized Graph (DMG). The method is realized in a prototype tool named DocLike Viewer that targets on C-based software systems. The main contribution of the DMG method is to provide an explicit structural re-document mechanism in the software visualization tool. Besides, the DMG method provides more level of information abstractions via less complex graph that include inter-module dependencies, inter-program dependencies, procedural abstraction and also parameter passing. The DMG method was empirically evaluated based on the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm and the findings depict that the method can improve productivity and quality in the aspect of cognition or program comprehension. A usability study was also conducted and DocLike Viewer had the most positive responses from the software practitioners

Spice-up your coding lessons with the ACME approach

It is nowadays considered a fundamental skill for students and citizens the capacity of undertaking a problem-solving process in various disciplines (including STEM, i.e. science, technology, engineering and mathematics) using distinctive techniques that are typical of computer science. These abilities are usually called Computational Thinking and at the roots of them stands the knowledge of coding. With the goal of encouraging Computational Thinking in young students, we discuss tools and techniques to support the teaching and the learning of coding in school curricula. It is well known that this problem is complex due to the fact that it requires abstraction capabilities and complex cognitive skills such as procedural and conditional reasoning, planning, and analogical reasoning. In this paper, we present ACME (“Code Animation by Evolved Metaphors”) that stands at the foundation of the Diogene-CT code visualization environment and methodology. We discuss visual metaphors for both procedural and object-oriented programming. Based on them, we introduce a playground architecture to support teaching and learning of the principles of coding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scalable code visualization tool using consistent metaphors in the field of Computing Education Research (CER)

Knowledge-based Expressive Technologies within Cloud Computing Environments

Presented paper describes the development of comprehensive approach for knowledge processing within e-Sceince tasks. Considering the task solving within a simulation-driven approach a set of knowledge-based procedures for task definition and composite application processing can be identified. This procedures could be supported by the use of domain-specific knowledge being formalized and used for automation purpose. Within this work the developed conceptual and technological knowledge-based toolbox for complex multidisciplinary task solv-ing support is proposed. Using CLAVIRE cloud computing environment as a core platform a set of interconnected expressive technologies were developed.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (ISKE2013). 201

ISML: an interface specification meta-language

In this paper we present an abstract metaphor model situated within a model-based user interface framework. The inclusion of metaphors in graphical user interfaces is a well established, but mostly craft-based strategy to design. A substantial body of notations and tools can be found within the model-based user interface design literature, however an explicit treatment of metaphor and its mappings to other design views has yet to be addressed. We introduce the Interface Specification Meta-Language (ISML) framework and demonstrate its use in comparing the semantic and syntactic features of an interactive system. Challenges facing this research are outlined and further work proposed

Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation

Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the benefits of programmable systems. In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called Sketch-n-Sketch that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired relationships rested entirely on the user. In this paper, we design and implement new features for Sketch-n-Sketch that assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation systems, our extended Sketch-n-Sketch now provides GUI-based tools for drawing shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create high-level, reusable abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.Comment: In 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2016