SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users

The purpose of data warehouses is to enable business analysts to make better decisions. Over the years the technology has matured and data warehouses have become extremely successful. As a consequence, more and more data has been added to the data warehouses and their schemas have become increasingly complex. These systems still work great in order to generate pre-canned reports. However, with their current complexity, they tend to be a poor match for non tech-savvy business analysts who need answers to ad-hoc queries that were not anticipated. This paper describes the design, implementation, and experience of the SODA system (Search over DAta Warehouse). SODA bridges the gap between the business needs of analysts and the technical complexity of current data warehouses. SODA enables a Google-like search experience for data warehouses by taking keyword queries of business users and automatically generating executable SQL. The key idea is to use a graph pattern matching algorithm that uses the metadata model of the data warehouse. Our results with real data from a global player in the financial services industry show that SODA produces queries with high precision and recall, and makes it much easier for business users to interactively explore highly-complex data warehouses.Comment: VLDB201

Nursing Advocacy for Optimal Palliative Care of Patients with Advanced Cancer

The purpose of this paper is to review selected research findings about obstacles to palliative care for patients with progressive cancer and discuss the role that oncology and palliative care nurses play in helping to remove these obstacles

Creating Technology-enhanced Practice: A University-Home Care-Corporate Alliance

Insuring full benefit of consumer health informatics innovations requires integrating the technology into nursing practice, yet many valuable innovations are developed in research projects and never reach full integration. To avoid this outcome, a team of researchers partnered with a home care agency’s staff and patients and their corporate parent’s Information Systems and Research group to create a Technology-Enhanced Practice (TEP) designed to enhance care of home bound patients and their family care givers. The technology core of TEP, the HeartCare2 web site, was built in a collaborative process and deployed within the existing patient portal of the clinical partner. This paper describes the innovation and the experience of bringing it into full operation

Caracterisation par indentation multi-echelles de materiaux massifs et de garniture de frein

L’indentation instrumentée est une technique répandue et très puissante utilisée pour l’étude des propriétés mécaniques des matériaux, principalement la dureté et le module d’élasticité. Cependant, l’analyse des résultats est une procédure complexe faisant intervenir le type d’appareil utilisé, les conditions expérimentales et le mode d’interprétation des résultats. Ces paramètres ont un impact important sur la détermination de propriétés mécaniques recherchées et sont plus ou moins influents selon les dispositifs expérimentaux utilisés et les domaines de force et de profondeur de pénétration appliqués [1], [2], [3]. Dans cette étude nous utilisons trois appareils d’indentation instrumentée : le nanoindenteur MTS XP (méthode standard ou Continuous Stiffness Measurement), le microindenteur CSM Instruments (méthode standard ou indentation répétée) et le macroindenteur Zwick ZHU 2.5, avec deux types d’indenteurs pyramidaux, Berkovich et Vickers. La gamme de charge étudiée varie entre 20 mN et 2000 N, et les profondeurs indentées de 0,350 à 280 μm. Le but de cette recherche est d’analyser l’évolution des propriétés mécaniques de matériaux hétérogènes (patin de frein, béton …) en fonction de l’échelle d’observation (force appliquée et volume concerné) ; mais en raison de la complexité des essais d’indentation, et pour établir des relations entre les différents instruments et échelles de mesure, nous avons décidé d’étudier d’abord des matériaux métalliques massifs homogènes