The portal as information broker

The term information broker is widely used in the area of library and information science to describe a middle agent who deals in information as a commodity, enabling customers to gain more efficient access to quality data. The role of this middle agent is described as “information retrieval and information organisation” (Rugge & Glossbrenner, 1995). The role of the broker is to bring additional organisation to the market by lowering search costs (Palmer & Lindemann, 2003).

Web health portal to enhance patient safety in Australian healthcare systems

The use of a web Health Portal can be employed not only for reducing health costs but also to view patient's latest medical information (e.g. clinical tests, pathology and radiology results, discharge summaries, prescription renewals, referrals, appointments) in real-time and carry out physician messaging to enhance the information exchanged, managed and shared in the Australian healthcare sector. The Health Portal connects all stakeholders (such as patients and their families, health professionals, care providers, and health regulators) to establish coordination, collaboration and a shared care approach between them to improve overall patient care safety. The paper outlines a Health Portal model for designing a real-time health prevention system. An application of the architecture is described in the area of web Health Portal.

Hydrogen sulfide attenuates carbon tetrachloride-induced hepatotoxicity, liver cirrhosis and portal hypertension in rats

BACKGROUND : Hydrogen sulfide (H(2)S) displays vasodilative, anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory and cytoprotective activities. Impaired production of H(2)S contributes to the increased intrahepatic resistance in cirrhotic livers. The study aimed to investigate the roles of H(2)S in carbon tetrachloride (CCl(4))-induced hepatotoxicity, cirrhosis and portal hypertension.

METHODS AND FINDINGS : Sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS), a donor of H(2)S, and DL-propargylglycine (PAG), an irreversible inhibitor of cystathionine γ-lyase (CSE), were applied to the rats to investigate the effects of H(2)S on CCl(4)-induced acute hepatotoxicity, cirrhosis and portal hypertension by measuring serum levels of H(2)S, hepatic H(2)S producing activity and CSE expression, liver function, activity of cytochrome P450 (CYP) 2E1, oxidative and inflammatory parameters, liver fibrosis and portal pressure. CCl(4) significantly reduced serum levels of H(2)S, hepatic H(2)S production and CSE expression. NaHS attenuated CCl(4)-induced acute hepatotoxicity by supplementing exogenous H(2)S, which displayed anti-oxidative activities and inhibited the CYP2E1 activity. NaHS protected liver function, attenuated liver fibrosis, inhibited inflammation, and reduced the portal pressure, evidenced by the alterations of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), hyaluronic acid (HA), albumin, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6 and soluble intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1, liver histology, hepatic hydroxyproline content and α-smooth muscle actin (SMA) expression. PAG showed opposing effects to NaHS on most of the above parameters.

CONCLUSIONS :  Exogenous H2S attenuates CCl4-induced hepatotoxicity, liver cirrhosis and portal hypertension by its multiple functions including anti-oxidation, anti-inflammation, cytoprotection and anti-fibrosis, indicating that targeting H2S may present a promising approach, particularly for its prophylactic effects, against liver cirrhosis and portal hypertension.

EST-PAC HPC - a web portal for high-throughput EST annotation and protein sequence prediction

Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) are short DNA sequences generated by sequencing the transcribed cDNAs coming from a gene expression. They can provide significant functional, structural and evolutionary information and thus are a primary resource for gene discovery. EST annotation basically refers to the analysis of unknown ESTs that can be performed by database similarity search for possible identities and database search for functional prediction of translation products. Such kind of annotation typically consists of a series of repetitive tasks which should be automated, and be customizable and amenable to using distributed computing resources. Furthermore, processing of EST data should be done efficiently using a high performance computing platform. In this paper, we describe an EST annotator, EST-PACHPC, which has been developed for harnessing HPC resources potentially from Grid and Cloud systems for high throughput EST annotations. The performance analysis of EST-PACHPC has shown that it provides substantial performance gain in EST annotation.

An intelligent content discovery technique for health portal content management

Background: Continuous content management of health information portals is a feature vital for its sustainability and widespread acceptance. Knowledge and experience of a domain expert is essential for content management in the health domain. The rate of generation of online health resources is exponential and thereby manual examination for relevance to a specific topic and audience is a formidable challenge for domain experts. Intelligent content discovery for effective content management is a less researched topic. An existing expert-endorsed content repository can provide the necessary leverage to automatically identify relevant resources and evaluate qualitative metrics.Objective: This paper reports on the design research towards an intelligent technique for automated content discovery and ranking for health information portals. The proposed technique aims to improve efficiency of the current mostly manual process of portal content management by utilising an existing expert-endorsed content repository as a supporting base and a benchmark to evaluate the suitability of new contentMethods: A model for content management was established based on a field study of potential users. The proposed technique is integral to this content management model and executes in several phases (ie, query construction, content search, text analytics and fuzzy multi-criteria ranking). The construction of multi-dimensional search queries with input from Wordnet, the use of multi-word and single-word terms as representative semantics for text analytics and the use of fuzzy multi-criteria ranking for subjective evaluation of quality metrics are original contributions reported in this paper.Results: The feasibility of the proposed technique was examined with experiments conducted on an actual health information portal, the BCKOnline portal. Both intermediary and final results generated by the technique are presented in the paper and these help to establish benefits of the technique and its contribution towards effective content management.Conclusions: The prevalence of large numbers of online health resources is a key obstacle for domain experts involved in content management of health information portals and websites. The proposed technique has proven successful at search and identification of resources and the measurement of their relevance. It can be used to support the domain expert in content management and thereby ensure the health portal is up-to-date and current.

High rates of alcohol consumption and related harm at schoolies week : a portal study

To investigate alcohol consumption, substance use and risky and harmful behaviour among young people attending 'schoolies' week in Victoria.

Words Between Worlds: Portal Fantasy as Dialogic in Gaiman and Miéville

Step through the looking-glass and where do you go? Inherently, every text exposes the reader to other worlds. However, the fantastic, like no other mode, not only exposes, but explores, explains, and employs other worlds (and how we enter them) to question what is real and unreal, possible and impossible.Using Farah Mendelsohn’s (2008) examination of portal fantasy, this paper argues that when you step into another world you leave something behind and bring something back. This Bakhtinian dialogic will then frame an analysis of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) which explore notions of organic subjectivity, reader expectations, and if gaps actually exist between textual and extra-textual, real and unreal.These atypical, self- reflexive, satirical portal fantasies express how writers position readers (not unlike their protagonists) in alternative conceptual realms, disturbing the everyday, the commonplace realities we often take for granted. As such, both texts and the discursive strategies they use ask: what do we see, or, as may be the case, un-see? Significantly, this paper suggests that, via self-conscious world-building, portal fantasies allow reader and writer the opportunity to inhabit those spaces between textual, ideological, generic, metaphorical, irrational, fantastic worlds.