See No Fiduciary, Hear No Fiduciary: A Lawyer’s Knowledge Within Aiding and Abetting Fiduciary Breach Claims

Fiduciary liability for attorney conduct generally extends only to direct clients of legal services. Over the last few decades, however, the lawyer’s role has expanded. Following this trend, fiduciary liability also has expanded to allow third-party claims in certain limited circumstances. One example is the attorney aiding and abetting a client’s fiduciary breach claim. One of the key requirements for liability under this claim is the attorney’s knowledge of his client’s fiduciary relationship with the third party alleging the breach. Within those jurisdictions that have accepted the claim, there are two approaches to the knowledge element. The first is the constructive knowledge standard that permits liability if the attorney knew or reasonably should have known of the fiduciary relationship. The second approach is the actual knowledge standard that requires overt and obvious evidence of fiduciary knowledge. In addition to these standards, a third approach ignores the knowledge element entirely: the qualified immunity standard that protects attorneys against third-party liability as long as the conduct falls within an attorney-client relationship. This Note argues for the rejection of constructive knowledge and adoption of either the qualified immunity or actual knowledge standard for numerous doctrinal and policy reasons while maintaining the claim’s original policy goals

Imaging Informatics and the Human Brain Project: the Role of Structure, Review

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A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions

XML-Based Image Annotation: PAIS - a Personal Annotated Image Server

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Slisp: A Flexible Software Toolkit for Hybrid, Embedded and Distributed Applications

We describe Slisp (pronounced ‘Ess-Lisp’), a hybrid Lisp–C programming toolkit for the development of scriptable and distributed applications. Computationally expensive operations implemented as separate C-coded modules are selectively compiled into a small Xlisp interpreter, then called as Lisp functions in a Lisp-coded program. The resulting hybrid program may run in several modes: as a stand-alone executable, embedded in a different C program, as a networked server accessed from another Slisp client, or as a networked server accessed from a C-coded client. Five years of experience with Slisp, as well experience with other scripting languages such as Tcl and Perl, are summarized. These experiences suggest that Slisp will be most useful for mid-sized applications in which the kinds of scripting and embeddability features provided by Tcl and Perl can be extended in an efficient manner to larger applications, while maintaining a well-defined standard (Common Lisp) for these extensions. In addition, the generality of Lisp makes Lisp a good candidate for an application-level communication language in distributed environments

Querying Non-Materialized Ontology Views

One approach to simplifying ontologies, for inclusion in a more tractable semantic web, is through the use of non-materialized view queries. View queries define how a simplified “view” or “application” ontology is derived from larger more complex ontologies. In this work we look at a language for specifying view queries over OWL/RDFS sources, and we illustrate some initial ideas for how to execute user queries over our view ontology, without materializing it first

Lightweight Data Integration Frameworks for Clinical Research

Research data from a single clinical study is often spread across multiple applications and systems. We present a reusable, lightweight, secure framework for automatically integrating and querying study data from heterogeneous sources in order to answer routine, operational questions for researchers

Value Sets via Ontology Views

We present a method for defining value sets as queries over ontologies (ontology views), and a mechanism for evaluating such queries. In particular we demonstrate an approach utilizing reusable template queries and parameterized URLs. We illustrate this method using an example from the Ontology of Clinical Research (OCRe)