Seamless Communication for Crises Management

SECRICOM is proposed as a collaborative research project aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions: (A) Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crisis communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs. (B) Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents’ infrastructure. Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application

Interobserver Variation in Canine Hip Dysplasia Evaluation

Canine hip dysplasia (CHD) is a common disease representing an important problem for many dog breeds worldwide. The screening for CHD and breeding programs have been ongoing for many decades but the incidence of disease have failed to be reduced to the expected level. The early diagnosis of CHD is paramount in order to facilitate the early management strategies and to prevent the breeding of the affected individuals. Generally in this area, the emphasis is placed on the radiographic evaluation process, however this is partly a subjective process suggested to be influenced by the experience of the observers. This study was designed to evaluate the interobserver agreement in CHD evaluation based on the Federation Cynologique International system (FCI system). Ten original radiographs were sent to five different groups of observers, from students to certified veterinarians. They were asked to evaluate the ventro-dorsal radiographs according to the FCI system which is the most common system used in Europe to give the final grades (A, B, C, D, E). The grades were converted to numbers and the data were analysed using a one-way ANOVA test. The results showed that only in 20% of the cases, the interobserver agreement was statistically higher in the group of the most experienced observers when compared to the less experienced group of observers. This means that the level of experience does not always lead to a higher agreement. This could be a problem of widespread objective evaluations of CHD. In addition, there are several different systems of evaluation used in various countries. It is necessary to understand the intention of dog owners, who when buying a dog may be planning its first breeding. Therefore, the “correct” or “incorrect” assessment of the CHD radiographs may not always result in the elimination of affected individuals. We do not know exactly the situation of the development of the hip in some breeds, because scrutineers are receiving only “negative radiographs” for evaluation. Many owners are very educated about hip and elbow dysplasia. It is a time to tell the scientific truth

Distributed web-scale infrastructure for crawling, indexing and search with semantic support

In this paper, we describe our work in progress in the scope of web-scale information extraction and information retrieval utilizing distributed computing. We present a distributed architecture built on top of the MapReduce paradigm for information retrieval, information processing and intelligent search supported by spatial capabilities. Proposed architecture is focused on crawling documents in several different formats, information extraction, lightweight semantic annotation of the extracted information, indexing of extracted information and finally on indexing of documents based on the geo-spatial information found in a document. We demonstrate the architecture on two use cases, where the first is search in job offers retrieved from the LinkedIn portal and the second is search in BBC news feeds and discuss several problems we had to face during the implemen-tation. We also discuss spatial search applications for both cases because both LinkedIn job offer pages and BBC news feeds contain a lot of spatial information to extract and process

Improving inter-enterprise collaboration with recommendation tool based on lightweight semantics in emails

In current time of web and mobile applications, classic email is still one of the most popular means of communication over the Internet. Beset by many problems such as spam or information overload, yet it yields significant benefits especially to enterprise users when communicating, collaborating or solving business tasks. In addition, the current groupware frameworks still does not support well the collaboration between large and small & medium-sized enterprises. In this paper, we present an approach that addresses the challenges of inter-enterprise collaboration, putting together email as a tool for information sharing and lightweight semantics to automate the processing of the knowledge extracted from the emails and their attachments. The building blocks of our approach are: connectors to legacy applications retaining current working styles, use of email for collaboration especially on the SME’s side, information extraction enabling semantic search and recommendation in inter-enterprise collaborations, automatic tagging of documents, and integration of existing business process models. To evaluate our approach we use three different scenarios: new product development, software development supply chain, and supply chain collaboration between SMEs and LEs. Evaluation results suggests that our solution is a benefit for the collaborating enterprises

Information searching for an experience management platform of the EU Pellucid project

The EU Pellucid project is developing an experience management system for public organizations with staff mobility. The paper presents an activity whitin the project focused on searching for information in repositories of documents. The project's background and the process of information searching are described. Ontological methods such as semantic annotation and similarity searching, as well as ontology- and full-text-based searching are presented. Monitoring of organizational repositories is discussed