Access to Health Care and Religion among Young American Men

In order to elucidate cultural correlates of utilization of primary health services by young adult men, we investigated religion in which one was raised and service utilization. Using data from a national survey we tested the hypothesis that religion raised predicts access to and utilization of a regular medical care provider, examinations, HIV and other STD testing and counseling at ages 18–44 years in men born between 1958 and 1984. We also hypothesized that religion raised would be more predictive of utilization for Hispanic Americans and non-Hispanic Black Americans than for non-Hispanic White Americans. The study included a national sample of 4276 men aged 18–44 years. Descriptive and multivariate statistics were used to assess the hypotheses using data on religion raised and responses to 14 items assessing health care access and utilization. Compared to those raised in no religion, those raised mainline Protestant were more likely (p < 0.01) to report a usual source of care (67% vs. 79%), health insurance coverage (66% vs. 80%) and physical examination (43% vs. 48%). Religion raised was not associated with testicular exams, STD counseling or HIV testing. In multivariate analyses controlling for confounders, significant associations of religion raised with insurance coverage, a physician as usual source of care and physical examination remained which varied by race/ethnicity. In conclusion, although religion is a core aspect of culture that deserves further study as a possible determinant of health care utilization, we were not able to document any consistent pattern of significant association even in a population with high rates of religious participation

Overview of Knowledge Sharing and Reuse Components: Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods

Ontologies and problem-solving methods are promising candidates for reuse in Knowledge Engineering. Ontologies define domain knowledge at a generic level, while problem-solving methods specify generic reasoning knowledge. Both type of components can be viewed as complementary entities that can be used to configure new knowledge systems from existing, reusable components. In this paper, we give an overview of approaches for ontologies and problem-solving methods

Applications of Ontologies and Problem Solving Methods

The Workshop on Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods (PSMs), held in conjunction with the Thirteenth Biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI ’98), was held on 24 to 25 August 1998. Twenty-six people participated, and 16 papers were presented. Participants included scientists and practitioners from both the ontology and PSM communities. The first day was devoted to paper presentations and discussions. The second (half) day, a joint session was held with two other workshops: (1) Building, Maintaining, and Using Organizational Memories and (2) Intelligent Information Integration. The reason for the joint session was that in all three workshops, ontologies play a prominent role, and the goal was to bring together researchers working on related issues in different communities. The workshop ended with a discussion about the added value of a combined ontologies-PSM workshop compared to separate workshops

Semantic Content Mediation and Acquisition: The Challenge for Semantic e-Business Solutions

A Top Quadrant report situates the Semantic Web within the current Innovation Wave of “Distributed Intelligence”. This is one of the main innovation waves of the last centuries including textile, railway, auto, computer, distributed intelligence (1997-2061) and nanotechnology (2007-2081). The Distributed Intelligence wave started in the late nineties and is expected to peak between 2010 and 2020. The report estimates first return on investments in 2006-7, growing to a market of $40-60 billion in 2010. Funds are coming primary from governments, venture capitalists and industry commercialization. Over the next few years, this is expected to change in favour of industry commercialization

Semantic Web-enabled Protocol Mediation for the Logistics Domain

Among the problems that arise when trying to make different applications interoperate with each other, protocol mediation is one of the most difficult ones and for which less relevant literature can be found. Protocol mediation is concerned with non-matching message interaction patterns in application interaction. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a protocol mediation component that has been applied in the interoperation between two heterogeneous logistic provider systems (using two different standards: RosettaNet and EDIFACT), for a specific freight forwarding task

Knowledge Management through Ontologies

Most enterprises agree that knowledge is an essential asset for success and survival on a increasingly competitive and global market. This awareness is one of the main reasons for the exponential growth of knowledge management in the past decade. Our approach to knowledge management is based on ontologies, and makes knowledge assets intelligently accessible to people in organizations. Most company-vital knowledge resides in the heads of people, and thus successful knowledge management does not only consider technical aspects but also social ones. In this paper, we describe an approach to intelligent knowledge management that explicitly takes into account the social issues involved. The proof of concept is given by a large-scale initiative involving knowledge management of a virtual organization

The six challenges of the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web has attracted a diverse, but significant, community of researchers, institutes and companies, all sharing the belief that one day the Semantic Web will have as big an impact on life as currently the WWW/Internet has. We share that vision, based on the ever-increasing need to reduce information overload, and to increase task delegation to software agents. However, there is still a long way to go before the Semantic Web dream comes true. In this paper, we identify some of the major challenges the community faces in the coming years, and we outline solution directions. The major challenges concern: (i) the availability of content, (ii) ontology availability, development and evolution, (iii) scalability, (iv) multilinguality, (v) visualization to reduce information overload, and (vi) stability of Semantic Web languages. We will also say some words on the economic impact of the Semantic Web

Combination of DROOL rules and Protégé knowledge bases in the ONTO-H annotation tool

ONTO-H is a semi-automatic collaborative tool for the semantic annotation of documents, built as a Protégé 3.0 tab plug-in. Among its multiple functionalities aimed at easing the document annotation process, ONTO-H uses a rule-based system to create cascading annotations out from a single drag and drop operation from a part of a document into an already existing concept or instance of the domain ontology being used for annotation. It also gives support to the detection of name conflicts and instance duplications in the creation of the annotations. The rule system runs on top of the open source rule engine DROOLS and is connected to the domain ontology used for annotation by means of an ad-hoc programmed Java proxy

Personal eBanking Solutions Based on Semantic Web Services

We describe how Semantic Web Service technology can be used for the provision of personal e-banking online services. We describe two deployed applications: an overdraft notification service and a mortgage comparison service. The former accesses the bank accounts of a user as well as utility goods Web sites where invoicing information is stored and estimates whether the user will be in an overdraft situation in the near future, alerting him/her by e-mail or SMS. The latter accesses the mortgage information provided by the heterogeneous Web sites of different banks and allows users to compare them according to different types of criteria. The chapter not only focuses on the technological decisions followed to implement and deploy these services, but also on the added value of applying Semantic Web Services for them

Iuriservice : un FAQ Inteligente para los jueces en su primer destino

En esta presentación describimos el uso de ontologías legales como base para la mejora del soporte para jueces. El uso de la tecnología de procesamiento de lenguaje natural permite obtener respuestas a los jóvenes jueces en tiempo real y mejorar así su trabajo día a día.We present an intelligent FAQ system for junior judges that intensively uses the ontology and allows a free text input for querying. We describe the use of legal ontologies as a basis to improve IT support for professional judges. As opposed to most legal ontologies designed so far, which are mostly based on dogmatic and normative knowledge, we emphasize the importance of professional knowledge and experience as an important pillar for constructing the ontolog