Pyloric leiomyoma : Behavioural aspects in a shelter dog

The present report describes a case of pyloric wall leiomyoma in a shelter dog with a history of vomiting, pica, licking and chewing the walls of the kennel. The clinical, radiological, ultrasound, hematological and blood chemistry examinations showed no abnormalities. A compulsive oral disorder was diagnosed and treatment with behaviour therapy instigated. The compulsive oral behaviours stopped following behaviour therapy, however, the vomiting persisted, suggesting the need to proceed with further diagnostic exams. The ultrasound examination, repeated after 6 months, had revealed the presence of a hypoechoic mass (3.52 cm) in the pyloric-antrum obstructing the gastric outfl ow. Following gastric dilatation the mass was surgically excised. Histological examination revealed a pyloric leiomyoma. In clinical practice this case highlights the importance of gastrointestinal diseases in the development of behaviour changes related to pica

Versioning Cultural Objects : Digital Approaches

This volume approaches an understanding of the term versioning in the broadest sense, discussing ideas about how versions differ across forms of media, including text, image, and sound. Versions of cultural objects are identified, defined, articulated, and analysed through diverse mechanisms in different fields of research. The study of versions allows for the investigation of the creative processes behind the conception of works, a closer inspection of their socio-political contexts, and promotes investigation of their provenance and circulation. Chapters in this volume include discussion of what a “version” means in different fields, case studies implementing digital versioning techniques, conceptual models for representing versions digitally, and computational and management issues for digital projects

From Words to Images Through Legal Visualization

One of the common characteristics of legal documents is the absolute preponderance of text and their specific domain language, whose complexity can result in impenetrability for those that have no legal expertise. In some experiments, visual communication has been introduced in legal documents to make their meaning clearer and more intelligible, whilst visualizations have also been automatically generated from semantically-enriched legal data. As part of an ongoing research that aims to create user-friendly privacy terms by integrating graphical elements and Semantic Web technologies, the process of creation and interpretation of visual legal concepts will be discussed. The analysis of current approaches to this subject represents the point of departure to propose an empirical methodology that is inspired by interaction and human-centered design practices

The economic impact of moderate stage Alzheimer's disease in Italy: Evidence from the UP-TECH randomized trial

Background: There is consensus that dementia is the most burdensome disease for modern societies. Few cost-of-illness studies examined the complexity of Alzheimer's disease (AD) burden, considering at the same time health and social care, cash allowances, informal care, and out-of-pocket expenditure by families. Methods: This is a comprehensive cost-of-illness study based on the baseline data from a randomized controlled trial (UP-TECH) enrolling 438 patients with moderate AD and their primary caregiver living in the community. Results: The societal burden of AD, composed of public, patient, and informal care costs, was about �20,000/yr. Out of this, the cost borne by the public sector was �4,534/yr. The main driver of public cost was the national cash-for-care allowance (�2,324/yr), followed by drug prescriptions (�1,402/yr). Out-of-pocket expenditure predominantly concerned the cost of private care workers. The value of informal care peaked at �13,590/yr. Socioeconomic factors do not influence AD public cost, but do affect the level of out-of-pocket expenditure. Conclusion: The burden of AD reflects the structure of Italian welfare. The families predominantly manage AD patients. The public expenditure is mostly for drugs and cash-for-care benefits. From a State perspective in the short term, the advantage of these care arrangements is clear, compared to the cost of residential care. However, if caregivers are not adequately supported, savings may be soon offset by higher risk of caregiver morbidity and mortality produced by high burden and stress. The study has been registered on the website www.clinicaltrials.org (Trial Registration number: NCT01700556). Copyright � International Psychogeriatric Association 2015

Socioeconomic Predictors of the Employment of Migrant Care Workers by Italian Families Assisting Older Alzheimer's Disease Patients: Evidence from the Up-Tech Study

Background: The availability of family caregivers of older people is decreasing in Italy as the number of migrant care workers (MCWs) hired by families increases. There is little evidence on the influence of socioeconomic factors in the employment of MCWs. Method: We analyzed baseline data from 438 older people with moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD), and their family caregivers enrolled in the Up-Tech trial. We used bivariate analysis and multilevel regressions to investigate the association between independent variables - education, social class, and the availability of a care allowance - and three outcomes - employment of a MCW, hours of care provided by the primary family caregiver, and by the family network (primary and other family caregivers). Results: The availability of a care allowance and the educational level were independently associated with employing MCWs. A significant interaction between education and care allowance was found, suggesting that more educated families are more likely to spend the care allowance to hire a MCW. Discussion: Socioeconomic inequalities negatively influenced access both to private care and to care allowance, leading disadvantaged families to directly provide more assistance to AD patients. Care allowance entitlement needs to be reformed in Italy and in countries with similar long-term care and migration systems. � 2015 The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved

Multi-layer markup and ontological structures in Akoma Ntoso

The XML documents that represent legal resources contain information and legal knowledge that belong to many distinct conceptual layers. This paper shows how the Akoma Ntoso standard keeps these layers well separated while providing ontological structures on top of them. Additionally, this paper illustrates how Akoma Ntoso allows multiple interpretations, provided by different agents, over the same set of texts and concepts and how current semantic technologies can use these interpretations to reason on the underlying legal texts

Long-term preservation of legal resources

In the last decade, large scale electronic collections of legal documents are increasing their dissemination in the public administrations, especially in those entitled to provide official and legal publication of the legal resources. But if the original purpose of these huge document bases has been, basically, to produce a digital counterpart of their traditional representation on paper, new and challenging requirements are in fact starting to arise: not only support legal drafting, law-making workflow and consolidated versions of the law, which are well managed by Akoma Ntoso, but also long-term preservation, semantic analysis or ontological characterization. In this presentation we will discuss how Akoma Ntoso copes with these new challenges with particular regard to the legal long-term preservation

Managing semantics in XML vocabularies: an experience in the legal and legislative domain

Akoma Ntoso is an XML vocabulary for legal and legislative documents whose primary objective is to provide semantic information on top of a received legal text. There are three key aspects of legal documents on which Akoma Ntoso focuses: identification of structures, references to other legal documents and storage of non-authoritative annotations. Structures are identified and marked up according to an XML vocabulary based on common patterns found in legal documents. References to legal documents across countries are made using a common naming convention based on URIs. Third-party annotations and interpretations (broadly called metadata) are stored using and ontologically sound approach compatible with Topic Maps [15], OWL [19] and GRDDL [4]. The XML documents created according to the Akoma Ntoso specifications use a layered structure where each layer addresses a single problem: the text layer provides a faithful representation of the original content of the legal text, the structure layer provides a hierarchical organization of the parts present in the text layers, the metadata layer associate information from the underlying layers with ontological information. Whenever this semantic information is the result of a subjective interpretation, Akoma Ntoso allows multiple and independent opinions to be stored in a formal way within the document, and used alternatively, cumulatively or compared to each other. The layered structure of Akoma Ntoso is an attempt at balancing extensibility, needed to accommodate the specific needs of individual countries, with clarity and self-explanatoriness, both needed for the preservation of legal digital resources over time (even long spans of time, measured in decades or centuries). Both these aspect have been evaluated taking into account the fact that long preservation of Akoma Ntoso documents must be possible even without access to the extensive original documentation. The same layered structure creates a strict separation between the content that has been approved by the body empowered by law to endorse it (data) and what has been added by other parties (metadata). This separation significantly helps the development of tools able to preserve and guarantee the authenticity of the processed legal document, favouring trust towards e-government initiatives. In fact, Akoma Ntoso XML documents can be managed in any step of the legislative or judiciary life cycle (for instance, in the publishing phase) without any modification to the received text. While Akoma Ntoso imposes an (extensible) XML vocabulary, it does not prescribe the use of a particular ontology. Actually Akoma Ntoso defines a minimal and loose ontology based on few Top Level Classes (TLCs) e.g., Person, Role, Concept, etc. These classes are only generic groupings of instances: no particular property is defined for any of them. Inside an Akoma Ntoso document, a section of the metadata links pieces of text with the appropriate TLC instances, another section of the metadata combines these instances to create complex relations. To perform elaborated computations on a document or on a collection of documents, more precise ontologies have to be used and linked with the provided metadata. For example, we may be interested in using the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) ontology to associate some of the document metadata describing legislative documents to FRBR concepts like Work or Expression of a Work. Another example is the representation of individual persons: instances of the TLC Person class may be associated to instances of the Person class of the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology or to instances of the Creator class of the Dublin Core ontology. Akoma Ntoso allows the use of these and of future ontologies. Even if one relies only on the bare knowledge provided by the Akoma Ntoso minimal ontology and by its document markup, there are many interesting queries that can be carried out using only the origina..

Document changes: Modeling, detection, storage and visualization (DChanges 2016)

The DChanges series of workshops focuses on changes in all their aspects and applications: algorithms to detect changes, models to describe them and techniques to present them to the final users are only some of the topics we investigate. The workshop is open to researchers and practitioners from industry and academia. This year, we would like to focus on the application of change-tracking and diff algorithms to documents that are collaboratively edited via the web. We will also follow up on the discussion of DChanges 2015 about algorithms and interfaces to better understand and exploit detected changes, and about standards for modeling and transmitting changes. Particular attention will also be given to the use of diff, change tracking, and versioning techniques in the field of digital humanities