A Case Study of Success Factors for Data Warehouse Implementation and Adoption in Sales Planning

We present the case of the successful implementation of a data warehouse for support of the sales planning process in an Austrian company. We investigate the factors that contributed to the success of the project. The key findings of this case study are as follows. First, highly-qualified external consultants may compensate insufficient qualification of internal staff. Of particular importance in that case is communication between internal staff and external consultants. Second, user training compensates a lack of (perceived) usability of the software. Resistance of initially overwhelmed users may be overcome through training sessions. Finally, rather than acquire functionality that is not required, companies should ensure customizability of the acquired software, which is often more important than a plethora of features

Towards Scalability Guidelines for Semantic Data Container Management

publishedVersio

Providing packages of relevant ATM information: An ontology-based approach

ATM information providers publish reports and notifications of different types using standardized information exchange models. For a typical information user, e.g., an aircraft pilot, only a fraction of the published information is relevant for a particular task. Filtering out irrelevant information from different information sources is in itself a challenging task, yet it is only a first step in providing relevant information, the challenges concerning maintenance, auditability, availability, integration, comprehensibility, and traceability. This paper presents the Semantic Container approach, which employs ontology-based faceted information filtering and allows for the packaging of filtered information and associated metadata in semantic containers, thus facilitating reuse of filtered information at different levels. The paper formally defines an abstract model of ontology-based information filtering and the structure of semantic containers, their composition, versioning, discovery, and replicated physical allocation. The paper further discusses different usage scenarios, the role of semantic containers in SWIM, an architecture for a semantic container management system, as well as a proof-of-concept prototype. Finally the paper discusses a blockchain-based notary service to realize tamper-proof version histories for semantic containers.acceptedVersio

Curation and expansion of Human Phenotype Ontology for defined groups of inborn errors of immunity.

BACKGROUND: Accurate, detailed, and standardized phenotypic descriptions are essential to support diagnostic interpretation of genetic variants and to discover new diseases. The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), extensively used in rare disease research, provides a rich collection of vocabulary with standardized phenotypic descriptions in a hierarchical structure. However, to date, the use of HPO has not yet been widely implemented in the field of inborn errors of immunity (IEIs), mainly due to a lack of comprehensive IEI-related terms. OBJECTIVES: We sought to systematically review available terms in HPO for the depiction of IEIs, to expand HPO, yielding more comprehensive sets of terms, and to reannotate IEIs with HPO terms to provide accurate, standardized phenotypic descriptions. METHODS: We initiated a collaboration involving expert clinicians, geneticists, researchers working on IEIs, and bioinformaticians. Multiple branches of the HPO tree were restructured and extended on the basis of expert review. Our ontology-guided machine learning coupled with a 2-tier expert review was applied to reannotate defined subgroups of IEIs. RESULTS: We revised and expanded 4 main branches of the HPO tree. Here, we reannotated 73 diseases from 4 International Union of Immunological Societies-defined IEI disease subgroups with HPO terms. We achieved a 4.7-fold increase in the number of phenotypic terms per disease. Given the new HPO annotations, we demonstrated improved ability to computationally match selected IEI cases to their known diagnosis, and improved phenotype-driven disease classification. CONCLUSIONS: Our targeted expansion and reannotation presents enhanced precision of disease annotation, will enable superior HPO-based IEI characterization, and hence benefit both IEI diagnostic and research activities

Diagnosis of obstructive coronary artery disease using computed tomography angiography in patients with stable chest pain depending on clinical probability and in clinically important subgroups: Meta-analysis of individual patient data

Objective To determine whether coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) should be performed in patients with any clinical probability of coronary artery disease (CAD), and whether the diagnostic performance differs between subgroups of patients. Design Prospectively designed meta-analysis of individual patient data from prospective diagnostic accuracy studies. Data sources Medline, Embase, and Web of Science for published studies. Unpublished studies were identified via direct contact with participating investigators. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies Prospective diagnostic accuracy studies that compared coronary CTA with coronary angiography as the reference standard, using at least a 50% diameter reduction as a cutoff value for obstructive CAD. All patients needed to have a clinical indication for coronary angiography due to suspected CAD, and both tests had to be performed in all patients. Results had to be provided using 2×2 or 3×2 cross tabulations for the comparison of CTA with coronary angiography. Primary outcomes were the positive and negative predictive values of CTA as a function of clinical pretest probability of obstructive CAD, analysed by a generalised linear mixed model; calculations were performed including and excluding non-diagnostic CTA results. The no-treat/treat threshold model was used to determine the range of appropriate pretest probabilities for CTA. The threshold model was based on obtained post-test probabilities of less than 15% in case of negative CTA and above 50% in case of positive CTA. Sex, angina pectoris type, age, and number of computed tomography detector rows were used as clinical variables to analyse the diagnostic performance in relevant subgroups. Results Individual patient data from 5332 patients from 65 prospective diagnostic accuracy studies were retrieved. For a pretest probability range of 7-67%, the treat threshold of more than 50% and the no-treat threshold of less than 15% post-test probability were obtained using CTA. At a pretest probability of 7%, the positive predictive value of CTA was 50.9% (95% confidence interval 43.3% to 57.7%) and the negative predictive value of CTA was 97.8% (96.4% to 98.7%); corresponding values at a pretest probability of 67% were 82.7% (78.3% to 86.2%) and 85.0% (80.2% to 88.9%), respectively. The overall sensitivity of CTA was 95.2% (92.6% to 96.9%) and the specificity was 79.2% (74.9% to 82.9%). CTA using more than 64 detector rows was associated with a higher empirical sensitivity than CTA using up to 64 rows (93.4% v 86.5%, P=0.002) and specificity (84.4% v 72.6%, P<0.001). The area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve for CTA was 0.897 (0.889 to 0.906), and the diagnostic performance of CTA was slightly lower in women than in with men (area under the curve 0.874 (0.858 to 0.890) v 0.907 (0.897 to 0.916), P<0.001). The diagnostic performance of CTA was slightly lower in patients older than 75 (0.864 (0.834 to 0.894), P=0.018 v all other age groups) and was not significantly influenced by angina pectoris type (typical angina 0.895 (0.873 to 0.917), atypical angina 0.898 (0.884 to 0.913), non-anginal chest pain 0.884 (0.870 to 0.899), other chest discomfort 0.915 (0.897 to 0.934)). Conclusions In a no-treat/treat threshold model, the diagnosis of obstructive CAD using coronary CTA in patients with stable chest pain was most accurate when the clinical pretest probability was between 7% and 67%. Performance of CTA was not influenced by the angina pectoris type and was slightly higher in men and lower in older patients. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42012002780

Towards Distributed Contextualized Knowledge Repositories for Analysis of Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs

A knowledge graph (KG) represents real-world entities as well as their properties and relationships in a structured and often logic-based formalism. Given the large amount of information and the diversity of data stored in KGs, operations for analysis of such data akin to traditional OLAP operations are useful to understand the contents of KGs along different dimensions. In this direction, we recently proposed Knowledge Graph OLAP (KG-OLAP), a framework based on contextualized description logics that allows to organize knowledge graphs in a multi-dimensional structure – a KG-OLAP cube. For KG-OLAP cubes, we defined operations for combination of knowledge from different cells and for abstraction of knowledge within cells. Experiments with a proof-of-concept prototype, however, revealed that the management of a centralized KG-OLAP cube is impractical for large KGs. In this paper, we extend KG-OLAP in order to formalize the case in which knowledge is distributed across different repositories. We hence formalize a distributed version of the multidimensional cube structure, and we show how the operations can be adapted to this scenario

Semantic Web Analysis Graphs: Guided Multidimensional Analysis of Linked Open Data

An increasingly large number of sets of linked open data (LOD), typically in RDF format, are being published on the Semantic Web. Those data represent a potentially valuable resource for data analysis, particularly online analytical processing (OLAP), which often employs multidimensional (MD) models for conducting MD data analysis. Conducting MD analysis over LOD, however, is not a straightforward task. Most analysts will lack the technical skills to query LOD sources using an unfamiliar query language over data in a format not traditionally associated with MD data analysis. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the semantic web analysis graph (SWAG), which allows experts familiar with the LOD source to plot interesting courses of analysis for other users. We present a proof-of-concept prototype. The results of a usability study show that SWAGs may serve to build intuitive user interfaces

A Dynamic Game Model of Crisis Communication on Social Media

When faced with the proliferation of negative information on social media, companies must decide whether to react in a positive way by responding in a timely manner, disclosing the facts, offering apology or compensation, etc., or by reacting negatively with a denial, threat of legal actions, etc. The optimal choice of strategy for the company depends on the costs of the strategy incurred by the company and the propensity of netizens to publicly condemn and shame the company on social media. In this paper, we employ evolutionary game theory in order to propose a model of social media crisis communication. We conduct numeric simulations under different parameters in order to find evolutionary equilibria, which may serve as guidelines for companies deciding on the right social media strategy

Privacy-Preserving Implementation of Local Search Algorithms for Solving Assignment Problems in Time-Critical Real-World Applications

This dataset contains the input files, result files and configurations for the conducted performance experiments.</p