OOPS! – OntOlogy Pitfalls Scanner!

The application of methodologies for building ontologies has improved the ontology quality. However, such a quality is not totally guaranteed because of the difficulties involved in ontology modelling. These difficulties are related to the inclusion of anomalies or worst practices in the modelling. Several authors have provided lists of typical anomalies detected in ontologies during the last decade. In this context, our aim in this technical report is to describe OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfalls Scanner!), a tool for pitfalls detection in ontology developments

Outsourcing and acquisition models comparison related to IT supplier selection decision analysis

This paper presents a comparison of acquisition models related to decision analysis of IT supplier selection. The main standards are: Capability Maturity Model Integration for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ), ISO / IEC 12207 Information Technology / Software Life Cycle Processes, IEEE 1062 Recommended Practice for Software Acquisition, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) guide. The objective of this paper is to compare the previous models to find the advantages and disadvantages of them for the future development of a decision model for IT supplier selection

HYDRONEPHROSIS PREDICTS SYMPTOMATIC URETEROLITHIASIS, BUT DOES NOT PREDICT NEED FOR INTERVENTION IN PATIENTS WITH SUSPECTED RENAL COLIC

Computed tomography (CT) is now a first-line test for renal colic, but is costly, potentially harmful, and rarely changes patient care. Hydronephrosis is often present with symptomatic kidney stones, and is reliably determined using point-of-care ultrasound at the bedside, but it is unknown whether the presence of hydronephrosis indicates a large stone that is more likely to require intervention (6mm or greater). We hypothesized that while hydronephrosis would be associated with symptomatic ureterolithiasis, neither the presence nor the degree of hydronephrosis would accurately predict the size of urinary tract stone. This was a two-center retrospective study of randomly selected patients from a 4-year period, abstracted by a single blinded reviewer. We obtained a list of all patients who received a CT scan for suspected renal colic between 04/05 04/09. Hematuria was defined as \u3e5RBCs per HPF. Symptomatic stones were defined as those in the renal pelvis, ureter or bladder. The presence and the degree of hydro were reported as they appeared in the dictated CT result. 630 charts were randomly selected from 2973 records. 53 charts were excluded because they didnt include urinalyses, and 15 were excluded because of age \u3c18 years, leaving 562 chart records for analysis. 48% were male with a mean age of 45 years. 216 (38%) had no stone, 71 (13%) had asymptomatic stones, and 275 (49%) patients had symptomatic stones. Of the patients with symptomatic stones, 29 (11%) had hematuria alone, 82 (30%) had hydro alone, 154 (56%) had both hematuria and hydro, and 10 (4%) had neither. The combination of hydro and hematuria was 56% sensitive and 97% specific for detecting a symptomatic stone with a positive likelihood ratio (LR+) of 20.1 (95% CI 10.1-40.1). Of the patients with symptomatic stones, 229 (83%) were small and 46 (17%) were large. Hydronephrosis alone did not distinguish large stones from small stones (OR 1.7, 95% CI 0.6-4.7), though moderate or severe hydronephrosis was mildly indicative of a larger stone (OR 3.1, 95% CI 1.4-6.9). The combination of hydronephrosis and microscopic hematuria as a predictor of symptomatic urinary tract stone disease has a greater specificity and positive likelihood ratio than either parameter alone. Hydronephrosis of any degree does not distinguish stones likely to require intervention (6mm or greater) from those unlikely to require intervention, though moderate/ severe hydronephrosis is associated with larger stones. The results of this study may be helpful in the creation of a clinical decision rule to limit the use of CT scans for patients with suspected renal colic

Negotiating Democracy in Muslim West Africa: Sahelian Trajectories

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.The media can be accessed here: http://streaming.osu.edu/knowledgebank/mershon09/042809.mp4Leonardo A. Villalón is Director of the Center for African Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. His research specialization is in contemporary African politics, and he has focused in particular on issues of Islam and politics and on democratization in the Sahelian countries of Senegal, Mali, and Niger.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studie

Fault-tolerant wireless sensor networks using evolutionary games

This dissertation proposes an approach to creating robust communication systems in wireless sensor networks, inspired by biological and ecological systems, particularly by evolutionary game theory. In this approach, a virtual community of agents live inside the network nodes and carry out network functions. The agents use different strategies to execute their functions, and these strategies are tested and selected by playing evolutionary games. Over time, agents with the best strategies survive, while others die. The strategies and the game rules provide the network with an adaptive behavior that allows it to react to changes in environmental conditions by adapting and improving network behavior. To evaluate the viability of this approach, this dissertation also describes a micro-component framework for implementing agent-based wireless sensor network services, an evolutionary data collection protocol built using this framework, ECP, and experiments evaluating the performance of this protocol in a faulty environment. The framework addresses many of the programming challenges in writing network software for wireless sensor networks, while the protocol built using the framework provides a means of evaluating the general viability of the agent-based approach. The results of this evaluation show that an evolutionary approach to designing wireless sensor networks can improve the performance of wireless sensor network protocols in the presence of node failures. In particular, we compared the performance of ECP with a non-evolutionary rule-based variant of ECP. While the purely-evolutionary version of ECP has more routing timeouts than the rule-based approach in failure-free networks, it sends significantly fewer beacon packets and incurs statistically fewer routing timeouts in both simple fault and periodic fault scenarios

Quasi-interpolation by means of filter-banks

We consider the problem of approximating a regular function f(t) from its samples, f(nT), taken in a uniform grid. Quasi-interpolation schemes approximate f(t) with a dilated version of a linear combination of shifted versions of a kernel ??(t), specifically fapprox T(t) = ??af[n]??(t/T - n), in a way that the polynomials of degree at most L-1 are recovered exactly. These approximation schemes give order L, i.e., the error is O(TL) where T is the sampling period. Recently, quasi-interpolation schemes using a discrete prefiltering of the samples f(nT) to obtain the coefficients af[n], have been proposed. They provide tight approximation with a low computational cost. In this work, we generalize considering rational filter banks to prefilter the samples, instead of a simple filter. This generalization provides a greater flexibility in the design of the approximation scheme. The upsampling and downsampling ratio r of the rational filter bank plays a significant role. When r = 1, the scheme has similar characteristics to those related to a simple filter. Approximation schemes corresponding to smaller ratios give less approximation quality, but, in return, they have less computational cost and involve less storage load in the syste