INFRASTRUCTURE FOR INTEROPERABILITY OF THE E-GOVERNMENT APPLICATIONS BASED ON SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES

The e-Government interoperability is the ability of ICT components/applications to work together, in other words it is the ability of two or more diverse government (ICT) systems or components to sharing and re-use of information-services, inter-linking of administrative tasks, within and between sectors are essential factors for the delivery of high quality, innovative, seamless and customer-centric e-services. The organizational interoperability refers to the cooperation way of the public administrations processes, by defining the communication interfaces between processes. This approach addresses the interoperability of e-government applications at organizational and semantic level, adopting Web services (WS) and Semantic Web Services (SWS) as technological solutions. The e-Government interoperability is becoming an increasingly crucial issue, especially for developing countries that have committed to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 . Enhanced government efficiency and effectiveness coupled with the delivery of basic public services to all citizens are essential components required to achieve such goals. In this context, most governments have finalized the design of national e-government strategies and are busy implementing priority programmes. Today the data needed by policy makers to make better decisions is available but inaccessible. Policy makers are faced not only with overlapping and uncoordinated data sources, but also with the absence of common terms of reference and means of representing these data. This results in the time consuming and complex cost of comparing data that is represented differently. Interoperability will allow data compiled by different agencies to be used together to make faster and better decisions. An important goal of governance is to enable the citizenry to have easier and faster access to government information and services. The seamless flow of data from one government office to another provides the policy maker with the information needed to draft sound policy and deliver better services. In this paper we present an approach, which addresses the interoperability of e-government applications at organizational and semantic level, adopting Web services (WS) and Semantic Web Services (SWS) as technological solutions. The main objective of this work consists in designing and developing a distributed network of semantic registries in order to publish, find and execute the Web services. The publishing in registries of the Web services consists in the execution of syntactic and semantic matching algorithms between the attributes of the registries and the attributes of Web services.e-government application, interoperability, semantic registries, WSDL standard

The effects of celebrity endorsement on the consumers’ perceptions towards global brands

Brands are those lifestyles which consumers chose to buy in order to gain the value offered by the company, in order to be part of the community created through the brand equity elements and validated in the purchase of the products. Companies have understood how important it is to build a strong brand and many of them spend millions on aligning the brand with the design and style of the products, projecting the face and values of the company into the advertising campaigns. One of the most popular methods is through endorsement, placing a renounced celebrity and leveraging on the positive feedback of those customers that also follow the activities of the star whose face is on the cover of the marcom campaign. Celebrities have been used for a very long time to promote brands, sell products and services. Research has shown that those spokesmen of a brand who are more attractive can improve the statistics of recall and appeal more interest to the promotion campaign, as well as influence more on customer’s intention of buying the product (Kahle and Homer, 1985). The main purpose of this research is to investigate how celebrity endorsements influence the brand equity dimensions (brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality and brand associations) as well as stimulate consumers’ word-of-mouth through brand identification, growth in interest and the advertising memorability. The hypotheses were tested with the aid of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) in the PLS (Partial Least Squares) software. The survey is comprised of a target group of 589 respondents, from three countries – Brazil, Moldova and Portugal. Results evidence that the Attitude towards the Celebrity influences different Brand Equity dimensions and affects brand identification, growth in advertisement interest and advertising memorability, generating positive word of mouth (or negative, depending on the type of advertisement and reputation). Based on these findings we suggest further investigation in this area with the possibility to gain more data about the different fields of marcom and the different types of CE which are more appropriate for the given type of business

Analiza agenților patogeni parodontali în microbiomul oral la pacienții cu carcinom cu celule scuamoase cap-gât

Background. Research on the relationship between the human microbiome and malignant tumors has received particular interest in recent years. Regarding the oral microbiota, there are different types of bacteria that are associated with oncogenesis of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Objective of the study. The purpose of our study was to determine the concentration of periodontal pathogens in the oral microbiome in patients with HNSCC. Material and methods. 26 saliva and oral buffer samples were analyzed from patients with HNSCC by quantitative PCR method. A comprehensive quantitative research kit „Dentoscreen” (Litech) was used, which allows the identification of the DNA of 7 periodontal pathogens: Porphyromonas endodontalis, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, Treponema denticola, Fusobacterium nucella. Results. Show that F. nucleatum exceeds the norm in 20 samples and T. forsythia in 18. F. nucleatum is found in high concentrations in most smokers and only in one patient in the “Non-smokers” category. Samples with abnormal concentrations of A. actinomycetemcomitans show high concentrations for most species. In addition, the integration with clinical data indicates the pathological presence of P. endodontalis at all patients with laryngeal carcinoma and approx. in 30% of patients with lip and oropharynx carcinoma. Conclusion. Of all the 7 species studied, F. nucleatum and T. forsythia have pathological concentrations in most samples.Introducere. Cercetările privind relația dintre microbiomul uman și tumorile maligne au înregistrat un interes deosebit în ultimii ani. În ceea ce privește microbiota orală, există diferite tipuri de bacterii care sunt asociate cu oncogeneza carcinomului cu celule scuamoase de cap și gât (HNSCC). Scopul lucrării. Determinarea concentrației agenților patogeni parodontali în microbiomul oral la pacienții cu HNSCC. Material și Metode. Au fost analizate 26 de probe de salivă și tampon bucal de la pacienți cu HCSCC prin metoda PCR cantitativ. S-a utilizat un kit cuprinzător pentru cercetare cantitativă „Dentoscreen” (Litech), care permite identificarea ADN-ului a 7 agenți patogeni parodontali: Porphyromonas endodontalis, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, Treponema denticola, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Prevotella intermedia și Tannerella forsythia. Rezultate. Arată că F. nucleatum depășește norma în 20 de probe și T. forsythia în 18. F. nucleatum se găsește în concentrații mari la majoritatea fumătorilor și doar la un pacient din categoria „Nefumători”. Probele cu concentrații anormale de A. actinomycetemcomitans prezintă concentrații mari pentru majoritatea speciilor. De asemenea, integrarea cu datele clinice indică prezența patologică a P. endodontalis la toți pacienții cu carcinom laringian și cca. la 30% dintre pacienții cu carcinom al buzei și orofaringelui. Concluzii. Din toate cele 7 specii studiate, F. nucleatum și T. forsythia au concentrații patologice în majoritatea probelor

Efficient Gaussian Mixture Model Evaluation in Voice Conversion

Abstract Voice conversion refers to the adaptation of the characteristics of a source speaker's voice to those of a target speaker. Gaussian mixture models (GMM) have been found to be efficient in the voice conversion task. The GMM parameters are estimated from a training set with the goal to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the transformed and target vectors. Obviously, the quality of the GMM model plays an important role in achieving better voice conversion quality. This paper presents a very efficient approach for the evaluation of GMM models directly from the model parameters without using any test data, facilitating the improvement of the transformation performance especially in the case of embedded implementations. Though the proposed approach can be used in any application that utilizes GMM based transformation, we take voice conversion as an example application throughout the paper. The proposed approach is experimented with in this context and evaluated against an MSE based evaluation method. The results show that the proposed method is in line with all subjective observations and MSE results