Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

Demonstrating WSMX: Least Cost Supply Management

Current web service technologies lack semantic descriptions of functionality and requirements; semantic markup of web services would allow interoperability and dynamic discovery of services. The Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) provides a framework for semantically describing web services, ontologies, goals and mediators. WSMX is an execution environment for WSMO allowing discovery, mediation and invocation of semantically described services. We give an overview of the current state of WSMX and demonstrate how WSMX can be used in ordering a broadband Internet line. We note two additional requirements for a web service execution environment: that it should be possible to partially defer web service descriptions until runtime and that it should be possible to execute complex goals. We describe how we augmented the software to support these requirements

Influence of patient sex on outcomes after pancreatic surgery: multicentre study

Background Recent findings support the hypothesis of sex-related differences in inflammatory and immunological responses to trauma. The aim of this study was to address sex-specific aspects in patients who underwent pancreatic surgery. Methods This retrospective study used data from the German StuDoQ registry. Patients who underwent pancreatic surgery between 2010 and 2020 were stratified according to procedure (pancreatic head resection, distal pancreatectomy (DP), total pancreatectomy (TP)). Each cohort underwent propensity score matching (PSM) with the co-variables BMI, ASA, age, coronary heart disease (CHD), diabetes, hypertension with medication, and histology to level the distribution of co-morbidities between men and women. The main outcomes were morbidity and mortality. Results The total cohort consisted of 10 224 patients (45.3 per cent women). Men had higher ASA grades, and more often had CHD, diabetes, and hypertension with medication. Women had fewer overall complications (57.3 versus 60.1 per cent; P = 0.005) and a lower mortality rate (3.4 versus 4.9 per cent; P < 0.001). Rates of pancreatic surgery-specific complications, such as clinically relevant postoperative pancreatic fistula (POPF) (grade B/C: 14 versus 17 per cent; P < 0.001), delayed gastric emptying (grade B/C: 7.8 versus 9.2 per cent; P = 0.014), and postpancreatectomy haemorrhage (grade B/C: 7.1 versus 9.0 per cent; P < 0.001), were also lower in women. After PSM, 8358 patients were analysed. In the pancreatic head resection cohort (5318 patients), women had fewer complications (58.6 versus 61.4 per cent; P = 0.044), a lower in-hospital mortality rate (3.6 versus 6.1 per cent; P < 0.001), and less often had clinically relevant POPF (11.6 versus 16.2 per cent; P < 0.001). After DP, the clinically relevant POPF rate was lower in women (22.5 versus 27.3 per cent; P = 0.012). In the TP cohort, men more often developed intra-abdominal abscess requiring drainage (5.0 versus 2.3 per cent; P = 0.050). Conclusion Women had favourable outcomes after pancreatic surgery. Sex-related differences are emerging in medicine. Data are rare in pancreatic surgery, which is still associated with considerable morbidity and mortality. This study showed, in a large patient cohort, that women have significantly fewer complications after surgery, even after propensity score matching for co-morbidities

Tissue conditioning - strategies to improve perfusion and reduce ischemia - reperfusion injury

Ischemia as well as ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) can cause serious tissue damage and therefore is a feared complication in reconstructive surgery. This is the reason why researchers around the world invest their efforts to improve tissue viability after ischemic events. Tissue conditioning offers a broad scope of different techniques which can be applied pre-, peri- or postoperatively to adapt the affected tissue to the subsequent stress during and after ischemia to prevent or minimize IRI. The different ways of tissue conditioning in flap surgery include surgical delay, ischemic conditioning, remote ischemic conditioning as well as thermic preconditioning and other techniques, using growth factors, pharmaceutical agents, extracorporeal shock waves as well as stemm cells. Therefore, we want to shed some light on the effects of ischemia and ischemia-reperfusion injury and further illustrate the different strategies of tissue conditioning with special concern to flap surgery but also regarding wound healing in general

Si–H Bond Activation at the Boron Center of Pentaphenylborole

Si–H bond activation is usually considered a domain of transition-metal complexes, and only few metal-free systems have proven suitable for this task. We have now found that Et₃SiH readily reacts with pentaphenylborole to afford 1-bora-3-cyclopentenes as the <i>syn</i> and <i>anti</i> addition products. Here, Si–H bond cleavage is accomplished at a single boron center, a reactivity that is facilitated by a combination of high electrophilicity and loss of antiaromaticity. The mechanism of this transformation most likely involves a sequence of adduct formation, σ-bond metathesis, and conrotatory ring closure, similar to that observed for H/D exchange between H₂ and silanes mediated by HB­(C₆F₅)₂ and heterolytic H₂ splitting by boroles, respectively

Si–H Bond Activation at the Boron Center of Pentaphenylborole

Si–H bond activation is usually considered a domain of transition-metal complexes, and only few metal-free systems have proven suitable for this task. We have now found that Et₃SiH readily reacts with pentaphenylborole to afford 1-bora-3-cyclopentenes as the <i>syn</i> and <i>anti</i> addition products. Here, Si–H bond cleavage is accomplished at a single boron center, a reactivity that is facilitated by a combination of high electrophilicity and loss of antiaromaticity. The mechanism of this transformation most likely involves a sequence of adduct formation, σ-bond metathesis, and conrotatory ring closure, similar to that observed for H/D exchange between H₂ and silanes mediated by HB­(C₆F₅)₂ and heterolytic H₂ splitting by boroles, respectively

Integrin beta1 (ITGB1) as a prognostic marker in esophageal adenocarcinoma

Abstract Today, individual prognosis in patients with adenocarcinoma of the esophagus (EAC) is based on post-surgical TNM staging and valid biomarkers are still not implemented. Integrin beta1 (ITGB1) is widely expressed in epithelial cells and promotes cell adhesion and growth. Its impact on tumor progression was described for different tumor entities before, data on its function as a potential biomarker in EAC is not available. Aim of the study is to evaluate the expression level of ITGB1 in a large collective of EAC and its impact on patients´ prognosis. 640 patients with esophageal adenocarcinoma were analyzed immunohistochemically for ITGB1. The data was correlated with long term outcome, clinical, pathological and molecular data (TP53, HER2/neu, c-myc, GATA6, PIK3CA and KRAS). Of 640 patients to be analyzed, 127 (19.8%) showed expression of ITGB1. ITGB1 expression was associated with lymph node metastasis, expression of integrin alphaV and KRAS mutation status. Patients with high ITGB1 expression showed impaired overall survival (22.5 months (95% CI 15.3–29.7 months), vs. 34.1 months (95% CI 25.3–42.4 months), P = 0.024). This effect was particularly evident in the group of patients undergoing primary surgery without prior neoadjuvant therapy (10.2 months (95% CI 1.9–41.7 months) vs. 31.4 months (95% CI 21.1–144.2 months, P = 0.008). ITGB1 was also an independent prognostic marker in multivariable analysis (HR 1.696 (95% CI 1.084–2.653, P = 0.021) in patients that underwent primary surgery. We demonstrate for the first time the prognostic significance of ITGB1 expression in a large EAC patient population