1,115 research outputs found
Veterinary treatment in organic husbandry
The organic farming regulations put emphasis on the preservation of animal health by prophylaxis in the agriculture. The No 5 of the regulation EC 1804/99 (EC organic regulation) Appendix I B defines the veterinary treatments in organic animal husbandry. The veterinarian can use any medicine, which is effective for the indication and the animal species. If possible, effective homeopathics, phytotherapeutics or the like should have priority.
Problems of implementing the EC organic regulation into the daily farm practice arise mostly from the doubling of the withdrawal period and the restriction of the numbers of treatments. The strict ban on prophylactic treatments is not mentioned any longer in the new regulation 834/2007, which shall apply as from 1st January 2009.
Clarification of the guidelines for animal treatments in organic farming seems to be useful for farmers, veterinarians and boards of control
Towards Collaborative Conceptual Exploration
In domains with high knowledge distribution a natural objective is to create
principle foundations for collaborative interactive learning environments. We
present a first mathematical characterization of a collaborative learning
group, a consortium, based on closure systems of attribute sets and the
well-known attribute exploration algorithm from formal concept analysis. To
this end, we introduce (weak) local experts for subdomains of a given knowledge
domain. These entities are able to refute and potentially accept a given
(implicational) query for some closure system that is a restriction of the
whole domain. On this we build up a consortial expert and show first insights
about the ability of such an expert to answer queries. Furthermore, we depict
techniques on how to cope with falsely accepted implications and on combining
counterexamples. Using notions from combinatorial design theory we further
expand those insights as far as providing first results on the decidability
problem if a given consortium is able to explore some target domain.
Applications in conceptual knowledge acquisition as well as in collaborative
interactive ontology learning are at hand.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
Oral history of human use and experience of crown of thorns starfish on the Great Barrier Reef
[Extract] This oral history study was commissioned by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority "to determine what evidence there is for the occurrence of previous aggregations of crown of thorns starfish". This initiative followed a Crown Of Thorns Starfish Advisory Committee recommendation in January 1985 to conduct "a study of oral history of human use and of experience of the Great Barrier Reef", after a pilot study in oral history was executed at James Cook University of North Queensland for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (Burns, 1982). The Authority recommended to focus this study on extractive industries on the Great Barrier Reef prior to 1960 by recording operators, divers and others involved in these industries (trochus, beche-de-mer, pearling, trawling). The study is seen as a contribution to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority's general interest in the relationship between man and the reef, and is located within the framework of a doctoral dissertation on the development and social relations of the pearl-shell, trochus and beche-de-mer industries on the Great Barrier Reef. These materials represent the fieldwork notes towards a dissertation
Distributed Formal Concept Analysis Algorithms Based on an Iterative MapReduce Framework
While many existing formal concept analysis algorithms are efficient, they
are typically unsuitable for distributed implementation. Taking the MapReduce
(MR) framework as our inspiration we introduce a distributed approach for
performing formal concept mining. Our method has its novelty in that we use a
light-weight MapReduce runtime called Twister which is better suited to
iterative algorithms than recent distributed approaches. First, we describe the
theoretical foundations underpinning our distributed formal concept analysis
approach. Second, we provide a representative exemplar of how a classic
centralized algorithm can be implemented in a distributed fashion using our
methodology: we modify Ganter's classic algorithm by introducing a family of
MR* algorithms, namely MRGanter and MRGanter+ where the prefix denotes the
algorithm's lineage. To evaluate the factors that impact distributed algorithm
performance, we compare our MR* algorithms with the state-of-the-art.
Experiments conducted on real datasets demonstrate that MRGanter+ is efficient,
scalable and an appealing algorithm for distributed problems.Comment: 17 pages, ICFCA 201, Formal Concept Analysis 201
Clones in Graphs
Finding structural similarities in graph data, like social networks, is a
far-ranging task in data mining and knowledge discovery. A (conceptually)
simple reduction would be to compute the automorphism group of a graph.
However, this approach is ineffective in data mining since real world data does
not exhibit enough structural regularity. Here we step in with a novel approach
based on mappings that preserve the maximal cliques. For this we exploit the
well known correspondence between bipartite graphs and the data structure
formal context from Formal Concept Analysis. From there we utilize
the notion of clone items. The investigation of these is still an open problem
to which we add new insights with this work. Furthermore, we produce a
substantial experimental investigation of real world data. We conclude with
demonstrating the generalization of clone items to permutations.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl
Präoperative Nüchternzeiten: Sicht der Patienten
Zusammenfassung: Hintergrund: Mit dem Ziel der subjektiven perioperativen Qualitätsverbesserung scheint es wünschenswert, die präoperativen Nüchternzeiten im Rahmen der als sicher geltenden Grenzen so kurz als möglich zu halten. Diese Maßnahmen sollten mit einer messbaren Verminderung von präoperativem Hunger und Durst einhergehen und v.a. in einer Verbesserung der präoperativen Befindlichkeit resultieren. Welchen Einfluss Durst und Hunger aus Patientensicht auf den präoperativen Komfort haben, ist jedoch weit gehend unbekannt. Ziel dieser Studie war es, das Ausmaß der Beeinträchtigung der Patienten durch eine traditionelle Nüchternheitsregelung abzuschätzen. Patienten und Methoden: Ein Kollektiv von 412Patienten der "American-Society-of-Anesthesiologists"- (ASA-)RisikoklassenI und II, das sich einem kleineren chirurgischen Eingriff unterzog, wurde mithilfe eines Fragebogens zum Ausmaß und Stellenwert von präoperativem Durst und Hunger befragt. Ergebnisse: Es hatten 33% der Patienten mäßigen oder starken Durst, 19% mäßigen bis starken Hunger. Von den Befragten möchten 47% vor der Operation noch trinken, 72% hätten gern noch ein leichtes Frühstück eingenommen. Die mittlere Nüchternzeit war 12,8±3,4h für Flüssigkeiten und 15,5±4,4h für Essen. Durst wurde von 3,3% und Hunger von 0,8% der Patienten als Hauptgrund für die Beeinträchtigung des präoperativen Wohlbefindens genannt. Das lange Warten (8,5%), Nervosität (6,5%) und Angst (4,8%) wurden am häufigsten genannt. Die Antworten waren unabhängig von der Zeitdauer der präoperativen Nüchternheit. Schlussfolgerung: Der Patientenkomfort ist durch eine traditionelle Nüchternheitsregelung beeinträchtigt, und Minimierung der präoperativen Nüchternzeiten wird von den Patienten gewünscht. Anstrengungen mit dem Ziel der Reduktion von präoperativer Angst und Nervosität bergen jedoch zusätzliches großes Potenzial für eine Steigerung der perioperativen Behandlungsqualität aus Sicht der Patiente
Knowledge-Based Assistance System for Part Preparation in Additive Repair by Laser Powder Bed Fusion
For the economic use of repair in the spare parts business, additive repair by Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is a promising technology. As material can only be applied to a flat surface in LPBF, prior machining is required. The selection of the section plane requires expert knowledge, though. To provide that knowledge and recommend a suitable section plane, an expert system can be used. In this paper, a concept for such an expert system is presented and its functionality is evaluated by an example
On the Complexity of Shared Conceptualizations
In the Social Web, folksonomies and other similar knowledge
organization techniques may suffer limitations due to both different
users’ tagging behaviours and semantic heterogeneity. In order to estimate
how a social tagging network organizes its resources, focusing on
sharing (implicit) conceptual schemes, we apply an agent-based reconciliation
knowledge system based on Formal Concept Analysis. This article
describes various experiments that focus on conceptual structures of the
reconciliation process as applied to Delicious bookmarking service. Results
will show the prevalence of sharing tagged resources in order to be
used by other users as recommendations.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009-09492Junta de AndalucÃa TIC-606
A Requirement-centric Approach to Web Service Modeling, Discovery, and Selection
Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has gained considerable popularity for implementing Service-Based Applications (SBAs) in a flexible\ud
and effective manner. The basic idea of SOC is to understand users'\ud
requirements for SBAs first, and then discover and select relevant\ud
services (i.e., that fit closely functional requirements) and offer\ud
a high Quality of Service (QoS). Understanding usersÂ’ requirements\ud
is already achieved by existing requirement engineering approaches\ud
(e.g., TROPOS, KAOS, and MAP) which model SBAs in a requirement-driven\ud
manner. However, discovering and selecting relevant and high QoS\ud
services are still challenging tasks that require time and effort\ud
due to the increasing number of available Web services. In this paper,\ud
we propose a requirement-centric approach which allows: (i) modeling\ud
usersÂ’ requirements for SBAs with the MAP formalism and specifying\ud
required services using an Intentional Service Model (ISM); (ii)\ud
discovering services by querying the Web service search engine Service-Finder\ud
and using keywords extracted from the specifications provided by\ud
the ISM; and(iii) selecting automatically relevant and high QoS services\ud
by applying Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We validate our approach\ud
by performing experiments on an e-books application. The experimental\ud
results show that our approach allows the selection of relevant and\ud
high QoS services with a high accuracy (the average precision is\ud
89.41%) and efficiency (the average recall is 95.43%)
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