Journal of sol gel science and technology

Early hypertext systems were monolithic and closed, but newer systems tend to be open, distributed, and support collaboration. While this development has resulted in increased openness and flexibility, integrating or adapting various different tools, such as content editors, viewers or even other link servers has remained a tedious task. Many developers were implementing essentially similar components, simply for the benefit of having their own platform on which to experiment with hypertexts. The open hypermedia community is addressing this issue of interoperability between open hypermedia systems. The goal of the community is to provide an open hypermedia framework that can be used by application developers outside the community to construct more powerful hypermedia-aware applications. The design and evolution of this framework is presented along with the requirements that drove its development. The framework has matured to the point where it has supported the creation of a number of research prototypes. These prototypes are described and evaluated with respect to their use of the framework

Query Evaluation in an Object-Oriented Multimedia Mediator

A multimedia mediator aims at providing a well-structured gateway to some application dependent part of a federated multimedia system. Our specific design employs proxy objects for external multimedia items and introduces a new concept of semi-structured and self-describing types for multimedia items. Query evaluation and optimization hide all details of communication with external sources and explore the external parallel computation capacities, the selectivity of local preprocessing, and the impact of materialization

Development and validation of a prognostic score to predict mortality in patients with acute on chronic liver failure.

Background & Aims. Acute-on Chronic Liver Failure (ACLF) is a frequent syndrome (30% prevalence) characterized by acute decompensation of cirrhosis, organ failure(s) and high short-term mortality. This study develops and validates a specific prognostic score for ACLF patients. Methods. Data from 1,349 patients included in the CANONIC study were used. First, a simplified organ function scoring system (CLIF-Consortium Organ Failure score, CLIF-C OFs) to diagnose ACLF was developed using data from all patients. Subsequently, in 275 patients with ACLF, CLIF-C OFs and two other independent predictors of mortality (age and white-cell count) were combined to develop a specific prognostic score for ACLF (CLIF CONSORTIUM score for ACLF, CLIF-C ACLFs). Concordance index (C-index) was used to compare the discrimination abilities of CLIF-C ACLFs, MELD (MELDs), MELD-Sodium (MELD-Nas) and Child-Pugh (CPs) scores. CLIF-C ACLFs was validated in an external cohort and assessed for sequential use. Results. CLIF-C ACLFs showed a significantly higher predictive accuracy than MELDs, MELD-Nas and CPs, reducing (19-28%) the corresponding prediction error rates at all the main time-points after ACLF diagnosis (28, 90, 180 and 365 days) in both the CANONIC and the external validation cohort. CLIF-C ACLFs computed at 48 hours, 3-7 days and 8-15 days after ACLF diagnosis predicted 28-day mortality significantly better than at diagnosis. Conclusions. CLIF-C ACLFs at ACLF diagnosis is superior to MELDs and MELD-Nas in predicting mortality. CLIF-C ACLFs is a clinically relevant, validated scoring system that can be used sequentially to stratify the risk of mortality in ACLF patients