Multidimensional integration of RDF datasets

Data providers have been uploading RDF datasets on the web to aid researchers and analysts in finding insights. These datasets, made available by different data providers, contain common characteristics that enable their integration. However, since each provider has their own data dictionary, identifying common concepts is not trivial and we require costly and complex entity resolution and transformation rules to perform such integration. In this paper, we propose a novel method, that given a set of independent RDF datasets, provides a multidimensional interpretation of these datasets and integrates them based on a common multidimensional space (if any) identified. To do so, our method first identifies potential dimensional and factual data on the input datasets and performs entity resolution to merge common dimensional and factual concepts. As a result, we generate a common multidimensional space and identify each input dataset as a cuboid of the resulting lattice. With such output, we are able to exploit open data with OLAP operators in a richer fashion than dealing with them separately.This research has been funded by the European Commission through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Information Technologies for Business Intelligence-Doctoral College (IT4BI-DC) program.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Dacarbazine (DTIC) versus vaccination with autologous peptide-pulsed dendritic cells (DC) in first-line treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma: a randomized phase III trial of the DC study group of the DeCOG

Background: This randomized phase III trial was designed to demonstrate the superiority of autologous peptide-loaded dendritic cell (DC) vaccination over standard dacarbazine (DTIC) chemotherapy in stage IV melanoma patients. Patients and methods: DTIC 850 mg/m2 intravenously was applied in 4-week intervals. DC vaccines loaded with MHC class I and II-restricted peptides were applied subcutaneously at 2-week intervals for the first five vaccinations and every 4 weeks thereafter. The primary study end point was objective response (OR); secondary end points were toxicity, overall (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS). Results: At the time of the first interim analysis 55 patients had been enrolled into the DTIC and 53 into the DC-arm (ITT). OR was low (DTIC: 5.5%, DC: 3.8%), but not significantly different in the two arms. The Data Safety & Monitoring Board recommended closure of the study. Unscheduled subset analyses revealed that patients with normal serum LDH and/or stage M1a/b survived longer in both arms than those with elevated serum LDH and/or stage M1c. Only in the DC-arm did those patients with (i) an initial unimpaired general health status (Karnofsky = 100) or (ii) an HLA-A2+/HLA-B44− haplotype survive significantly longer than patients with a Karnofsky index <100 (P = 0.007 versus P = 0.057 in the DTIC-arm) or other HLA haplotypes (P = 0.04 versus P = 0.57 in DTIC-treated patients). Conclusions: DC vaccination could not be demonstrated to be more effective than DTIC chemotherapy in stage IV melanoma patients. The observed association of overall performance status and HLA haplotype with overall survival for patients treated by DC vaccination should be tested in future trials employing DC vaccine

Vaccination with Mage-3a1 Peptide–Pulsed Mature, Monocyte-Derived Dendritic Cells Expands Specific Cytotoxic T Cells and Induces Regression of Some Metastases in Advanced Stage IV Melanoma

Dendritic cells (DCs) are considered to be promising adjuvants for inducing immunity to cancer. We used mature, monocyte-derived DCs to elicit resistance to malignant melanoma. The DCs were pulsed with Mage-3A1 tumor peptide and a recall antigen, tetanus toxoid or tuberculin. 11 far advanced stage IV melanoma patients, who were progressive despite standard chemotherapy, received five DC vaccinations at 14-d intervals. The first three vaccinations were administered into the skin, 3 × 106 DCs each subcutaneously and intradermally, followed by two intravenous injections of 6 × 106 and 12 × 106 DCs, respectively. Only minor (less than or equal to grade II) side effects were observed. Immunity to the recall antigen was boosted. Significant expansions of Mage-3A1–specific CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) precursors were induced in 8/11 patients. Curiously, these immune responses often declined after the intravenous vaccinations. Regressions of individual metastases (skin, lymph node, lung, and liver) were evident in 6/11 patients. Resolution of skin metastases in two of the patients was accompanied by erythema and CD8+ T cell infiltration, whereas nonregressing lesions lacked CD8+ T cells as well as Mage-3 mRNA expression. This study proves the principle that DC “vaccines” can frequently expand tumor-specific CTLs and elicit regressions even in advanced cancer and, in addition, provides evidence for an active CD8+ CTL–tumor cell interaction in situ as well as escape by lack of tumor antigen expression

Treatment of disseminated ocular melanoma with sequential fotemustine, interferon α, and interleukin 2

Malignant melanoma of the uvea is remarkable for purely haematogenous dissemination and its tendency to metastasise to the liver. Although the liver is involved in up to 95% of patients, 50% of these also develop extrahepatic metastases, most often in the lungs, bone, skin, and brain. The only effective treatments reported to date relied on hepatic arterial chemoembolisation or -perfusion. The objective of this study was to establish a therapy protocol addressing patients with both sole liver involvement and systemic disease. Forty-eight patients with metastatic ocular melanoma received fotemustine 100 mg m−2 either as 60-min infusion into the hepatic artery or as 15-min infusion via a peripheral vein, depending on the metastatic sites involved, i.e., restriction to the liver or hepatic together with extrahepatic disease. For the first treatment cycle this infusion was repeated after one week. For all cycles, subsequent to a three week resting period, patients received an immunotherapy consisting of subcutaneous interleukin 2 and interferon α2. Although objective responses were more frequent within the cohort receiving intraarterial fotemustine (21.7 vs 8%), this difference did not translate into a significant benefit in overall survival, i.e., 369 and 349 days, respectively. Of note, this overall survival is much longer than that repeatedly reported for stage IV uveal melanoma not treated with fotemustine, suggesting a therapeutic activity of this cytostatic drug even after systemic administration

A Conceptual Modelling Approach to Visualising Linked Data

Increasing numbers of Linked Open Datasets are being published, and many possible data visualisations may be appropriate for a user's given exploration or analysis task over a dataset. Users may therefore find it difficult to identify visualisations that meet their data exploration or analyses needs. We propose an approach that creates conceptual models of groups of commonly used data visualisations, which can be used to analyse the data and users' queries so as to automatically generate recommendations of possible visualisations. To our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a conceptual modelling approach to recommending visualisations for Linked Data

Enabling Spatial OLAP Over Environmental and Farming Data with QB4SOLAP

Governmental organizations and agencies have been making large amounts of spatial data available on the Semantic Web (SW). However, we still lack efficient techniques for analyzing such large amounts of data as we know them from relational database systems, e.g. multidimensional (MD) data warehouses and On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP). A basic prerequisite to enable such advanced analytics is a well-defined schema, which can be defined using the QB4SOLAP vocabulary that provides sufficient context for spatial OLAP (SOLAP). In this paper, we address the challenging problem of MD querying with SOLAP operations on the SW by applying QB4SOLAP to a non-trivial spatial use case based on real-world open governmental data sets across various spatial domains. We describe the process of combining, interpreting, and publishing disparate spatial data sets as a spatial data cube on the SW and show how to query it with SOLAP operators.SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Modeling and querying data warehouses on the semantic web using QB4OLAP

The web is changing the way in which data warehouses are designed and exploited. Nowadays, for many data analysis tasks, data contained in a conventional data warehouse may not suffice, and external data sources, like the web, can provide useful multidimensional information. Also, large repositories of semantically annotated data are becoming available on the web, opening new opportunities for enhancing current decision-support systems. Representation of multidimensional data via semantic web standards is crucial to achieve such goal. In this paper we extend the QB4OLAP RDF vocabulary to represent balanced, recursive, and ragged hierarchies. We also present a set of rules to obtain a QB4OLAP representation of a conceptual multidimensional model, and a procedure to populate the result from a relational implementation of the multidimensional model. We conclude the paper showing how complex real-world OLAP queries expressed in SPARQL can be posed to the resulting QB4OLAP model. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe