Selection and verification of workflows in multimedia service compositions

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Personalization for the Semantic Web III

This report provides an overview of the achievements of working group A3 for bringing personalization functionality to the Semantic Web. It continues the work started in the deliverable A3-D1 and A3-D4. In the deliverable at hand, we report on a successfully held workshop on Semantic Web Personalization at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference, and the research results on techniques and algorithms for enabling personalization in the Semantic Web, and achievements on developing suitable architectures for the personalized information systems in the Semantic Web.peer-reviewe

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Interoperability for Peer-to-Peer Networks: Opening P2P to the rest of the World

Abstract. Due to the information growth, distributed environments are offered as a feasible and scalable solution. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have become one of the most important and used distributed environments inside (and outside) the e-learning community. They bring many advantages such as high flexibility for peers to dynamically join or leave the network, scalability, autonomy and high resilience against peer failures. However, every single one of them typically uses an interface specifically developed for that network, and it requires every peer to implement it in order to join. This is leading to increased development costs for potentially new participants of the network, and usually makes different P2P networks unable to interact with other systems and environments, isolating the network as a whole. In this paper, we report on a solution based on a proxy-based architecture and semantic mappings in order to allow the sharing of content between the set of peers inside a P2P network and other systems outside the network. Furthermore, we present an open-source implementation of the modules described in the paper.

Semantic Caching in Schema-Based P2P-Networks

Abstract. In this paper, we present the use of semantic caching in the environment of schema-based super-peer networks. Different from traditional caching, semantic caching allows the answering of queries that are not in the cache directly. The challenge of answering the queries using the cache is reduced to the problem of answering queries using materialized views. For this purpose, we implemented the MiniCon-algorithm, which delivers the maximally-contained-rewritings of a posed query based on the stored views. Using simulation and experimental results, we will show the benefit of semantic caching

Ranking categories for web search

In the context of Web Search, clustering based engines are emerging as an alternative for the classical ones. In this paper we analyse different possible ranking algorithms for ordering clusters of documents within a search result. More specifically, we investigate approaches based on document rankings, on the similarities between the user query and the search results, on the quality of the produced clusters, as well as some document independent approaches. Even though we use a topic based hierarchy for categorizing the URLs, our metrics can be applied to other clusters as well. An empirical analysis with a group of 20 subjects showed that the average similarity between the user query and the documents within each category yields the best cluster ranking

Distributed Queries and Query Optimization in Schema-Based P2P-Systems

Databases have employed a schema-based approach to store and retrieve structured data for decades. For peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, similar approaches are just beginning to emerge, also motivated by the fact, that sending (atomic) queries to the appropriate peers clearly fails for queries which need data from more than one peer to be executed. While quite a few database techniques can be re-used in this new context, a P2P data management infrastructure poses additional challenges which have to be solved before schema-based P2P networks become as common as schema-based databases. Because of the dynamic nature of P2P networks, we can neither assume global knowledge about data distribution, nor are static topologies and static query plans suitable for these networks. Unlike in traditional distributed database systems, we cannot assume a complete schema instance but rather work with a distributed schema which directs query processing tasks from one node to one or more neighboring nodes

A Service Oriented Architecture for Personalized Universal Media Access

Multimedia streaming means delivering continuous data to a plethora of client devices. Besides the actual data transport, this also needs a high degree of content adaptation respecting the end users’ needs given by content preferences, transcoding constraints, and device capabilities. Such adaptations can be performed in many ways, usually on the media server. However, when it comes to content editing, like mixing in subtitles or picture-in-picture composition, relying on third party service providers may be necessary. For economic reasons this should be done in a service-oriented way, because a lot of adaptation modules can be reused within different adaptation workflows. Although service-oriented architectures have become widely accepted in the Web community, the multimedia environment is still dominated by monolithic systems. The main reason is the insufficient support for working with continuous data: generally the suitability of Web services for handling complex data types and state-full applications is still limited. In this paper we discuss extensions of Web service frameworks, and present a first implementation of a service-oriented framework for media streaming and digital item adaptation. The focus lies on the technical realization of the services. Our experimental results show the practicality of the actual deployment of service-oriented multimedia frameworks