A Semantic Web Services Architecture

The semantic Web services initiative architecture (SWSA) committee has created a set of architectural and protocol abstractions that serve as a foundation for semantic Web service technologies. This article summarizes the committee\u27s findings, emphasizing its review of requirements gathered from several different environments. We also identify the scope and potential requirements for a semantic Web services architecture

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Internet-based e-learning workflow process

[Abstract]: More and more people are interested in Internet-based e-learning. Internet-based e-learning has become one very important arena of modern education system. This paper is based our Internet-based e-learning teaching experience which comes from one of the leading e-learning university, the University of Southern Queensland. The Internet-based e-learning system can effectively reach the expected achievement through a well-designed workflow mechanism. The whole e-learning environment is made of four sub-workflow systems, teaching, learning, administration and technology support. Through well-designed four sub-workflow systems, all key activities are identified from these sub-workflow systems. Through improving these key activities, the whole Internet-based e-learning process has got a significant improvement. The performance of learning and teaching through this new-designed e-learning workflow system has better satisfied all aspects of learning, teaching, administration and technology support

Work distribution and resource management in BPEL4People : capabilities and opportunities

The BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask extensions to the BPEL proposal define the state of the art in resource management and work distribution in business process execution languages. In this paper, we use the workflow resource patterns as an evaluation framework to assess the capabilities of BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask and identify several areas where there is opportunity for further improvement

Amoeba: a methodology for modeling and evolution of cross-organizational business processes

Business service engagements involve processes that extend across two or more autonomous organizations. Because of regulatory and competitive reasons, requirements for cross-organizational business processes often evolve in subtle ways. The changes may concern the business transactions supported by a process, the organizational structure of the parties participating in the process, or the contextual policies that apply to the process. Current business process modeling approaches handle such changes in an ad hoc manner, and lack a principled means for determining what needs to be changed and where. Cross-organizational settings exacerbate the shortcomings of traditional approaches because changes in one organization can potentially affect the workings of another. This article describes Amoeba, a methodology for business processes that is based on business protocols. Protocols capture the business meaning of interactions among autonomous parties via commitments. Amoeba includes guidelines for (1) specifying cross-organizational processes using business protocols, and (2) handling the evolution of requirements via a novel application of protocol composition. This article evaluates Amoeba using enhancements of a real-life business scenario of auto-insurance claim processing, and an aerospace case study