Scalability of encryption techniques for electronic health record (EHR) retrieval

Electronic Health Record (EHR) retrieval processes are complex demanding Information Technology (IT) resources exponentially in particular memory usage. Database-as-a-service (DAS) model approach is proposed to meet the scalability factor of EHR retrieval processes. A simulation study using ranged of EHR records with DAS model was presented. The bucket-indexing model incorporated partitioning fields and bloom filters in a Singleton design pattern were used to implement custom database encryption system. It effectively provided faster responses in the range query compared to different types of queries used such as aggregation queries among the DAS, built-in encryption and the plain-text DBMS. The study also presented with constraints around the approach should consider for other practical applications.

Semantic service discovery in the service ecosystem

Electronic services are a leitmotif in ‘hot’ topics like Software as a Service, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Service oriented Computing, Cloud Computing, application markets and smart devices. We propose to consider these in what has been termed the Service Ecosystem (SES). The SES encompasses all levels of electronic services and their interaction, with human consumption and initiation on its periphery in much the same way the ‘Web’ describes a plethora of technologies that eventuate to connect information and expose it to humans. Presently, the SES is heterogeneous, fragmented and confined to semi-closed systems. A key issue hampering the emergence of an integrated SES is Service Discovery (SD). A SES will be dynamic with areas of structured and unstructured information within which service providers and ‘lay’ human consumers interact; until now the two are disjointed, e.g., SOA-enabled organisations, industries and domains are choreographed by domain experts or ‘hard-wired’ to smart device application markets and web applications. In a SES, services are accessible, comparable and exchangeable to human consumers closing the gap to the providers. This requires a new SD with which humans can discover services transparently and effectively without special knowledge or training. We propose two modes of discovery, directed search following an agenda and explorative search, which speculatively expands knowledge of an area of interest by means of categories. Inspired by conceptual space theory from cognitive science, we propose to implement the modes of discovery using concepts to map a lay consumer’s service need to terminologically sophisticated descriptions of services. To this end, we reframe SD as an information retrieval task on the information attached to services, such as, descriptions, reviews, documentation and web sites - the Service Information Shadow. The Semantic Space model transforms the shadow's unstructured semantic information into a geometric, concept-like representation. We introduce an improved and extended Semantic Space including categorization calling it the Semantic Service Discovery model. We evaluate our model with a highly relevant, service related corpus simulating a Service Information Shadow including manually constructed complex service agendas, as well as manual groupings of services. We compare our model against state-of-the-art information retrieval systems and clustering algorithms. By means of an extensive series of empirical evaluations, we establish optimal parameter settings for the semantic space model. The evaluations demonstrate the model’s effectiveness for SD in terms of retrieval precision over state-of-the-art information retrieval models (directed search) and the meaningful, automatic categorization of service related information, which shows potential to form the basis of a useful, cognitively motivated map of the SES for exploratory search.

Competing through service innovation : the role of bricolage and entrepreneurship in project-oriented firms

The criticality of service innovation in building and sustaining competitive advantage is gaining increasing recognition in the marketplace. Using empirical data from US and Australian project-oriented firms, the study uses a multi-staged multi-method research program to demonstrate how entrepreneurial service firms strategically combine resources at hand (bricolage) to innovate and stay ahead of rivals. The research shows that service entrepreneurship (SE) and bricolage influence two forms of service innovation (interactive and supportive), which in turn is associated with sustained competitive advantage (SCA). The results suggest that SE and bricolage indirectly relate to SCA through service innovation. The findings offer novel insights into how project-oriented service firms engage in innovation. In short, the findings encourage the “making do by combining resources at hand” as higher levels of entrepreneurial bricolage are associated with higher levels of interactive and supportive innovation enabling SCA, suggesting a new model.

Mining work, family and community : a spatially-oriented approach to the impact of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine closure in remote Australia

While changes in work and employment practices in the mining sector have been profound, the literature addressing mining work is somewhat partial as it focuses primarily on the workplace as the key (or only) site of analysis, leaving the relationship between mining work and families and communities under-theorized. This article adopts a spatially oriented, case-study approach to the sudden closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in the south-west of Western Australia to explore the interplay between the new scales and mobilities of labour and capital and work–family–community connections in mining. In the context of the dramatically reconfigured industrial arena of mining work, the study contributes to a theoretical engagement between employment relations and the spatial dimensions of family and community in resource-affected communities.

Towards semantic search and inference in electronic medical records : an approach using concept-based information retrieval

Background This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching. Aim The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records. Method Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology. Results Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision. Conclusion The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.

Aspect oriented business process modeling with precedence

Complexity is a major concern which is aimed to be overcome by people through modeling. One way of reducing complexity is separation of concerns, e.g. separation of business process from applications. One sort of concerns are cross-cutting concerns i.e. concerns which are scattered and tangled through one of several models. In business process management, examples of such concerns are security and privacy policies. To deal with these cross-cutting concerns, the aspect orientated approach was introduced in the software development area and recently also in the business process management area. The work presented in this paper elaborates on aspect oriented process modelling. It extends earlier work by defining a mechanism for capturing multiple concerns and specifying a precedence order according to which they should be handled in a process. A formal syntax of the notation is presented precisely capturing the extended concepts and mechanisms. Finally, the relevant of the approach is demonstrated through a case study.

Efficient safety information retrieval on construction sites: a preliminary methodology

IT-supported field data management benefits on-site construction management by improving accessibility to the information and promoting efficient communication between project team members. However, most of on-site safety inspections still heavily rely on subjective judgment and manual reporting processes and thus observers’ experiences often determine the quality of risk identification and control. This study aims to develop a methodology to efficiently retrieve safety-related information so that the safety inspectors can easily access to the relevant site safety information for safer decision making. The proposed methodology consists of three stages: (1) development of a comprehensive safety database which contains information of risk factors, accident types, impact of accidents and safety regulations; (2) identification of relationships among different risk factors based on statistical analysis methods; and (3) user-specified information retrieval using data mining techniques for safety management. This paper presents an overall methodology and preliminary results of the first stage research conducted with 101 accident investigation reports.

SOA approaches

As the service-oriented architecture paradigm has become ever more popular, different standardization efforts have been proposed by various consortia to enable interaction among heterongeneous environments through this paradigm. This chapter will overview the most prevalent of these SOA approaches. It will first show how technical services can be described, how they can interact with each other and be discovered by users. Next, the chapter will present different standards to facilitate service composition and to design service-oriented environments in light of a universal understanding of service orientation. The chapter will conclude with a summary and a discussion on the limitations of the reviewed standards along their ability to describe service properties. This paves the way to the next chapters where the USDL standard will be presented, which aims to lift such limitations.

Small business entity tax concessions : through the eyes of the practitioner

The often competing imperatives of equity, simplicity and efficiency in the income tax regime, particularly the notion of simplicity, has been most evident within Australia’s small business sector over the last decade. In an attempt to provide tax simplification and reduce the tax compliance burden faced by Australian small businesses, provisions collectively referred to as the ‘simplified tax system’ or STS were introduced. The STS was designed to provide eligible small businesses with the option of adopting a range of ‘simplified’ tax measures designed to simplify their tax affairs whilst at the same time, reducing their tax compliance costs. Ultimately, a low take-up rate and accompanying criticisms led to a remodelled and rebadged concessionary regime known as the ‘Small Business Entity’ (SBE) regime which came into effect from 1 July 2007. This paper, through a pilot study, investigates the SBE regime though the eyes of the practitioner. In line the Australian Federal Government’s objective of simplification and reduced compliance costs, the purpose of the study was to (1) determine the extent to which the SBE concessions are being adopted by tax practitioners on behalf of their clients, (2) gain an understanding as to which individual SBE tax concessions are most favoured by practitioners, (3) determine the primary motivation as to why tax practitioners recommend particular SBE concessions to their clients, and (4) canvass the opinions of practitioners as to whether they believed that the introduction of the SBE concessions had met their stated objective of reducing tax compliance costs for small businesses. The findings of this research indicate that, while there is a perception that the SBE concessions are worth embracing, contrary to the policy intent, the reasons behind adopting the concessions was the opportunity to minimise a clients’ tax liability. It was revealed that adopting particular concessions had nothing to do with compliance costs savings and, in fact, the SBE concessions merely added another layer of complexity to an already cumbersome and complex tax code, which resulted in increased compliance costs for their small businesses clients. Further, the SBE concessions allowed tax practitioners the opportunity to engage in effective tax minimisation, thereby fulfilling the client advocacy role of the tax practitioner in maximising their clients’ tax preferences.

AEHRC & QUT at TREC 2011 Medical Track : a concept-based information retrieval approach

The Australian e-Health Research Centre and Queensland University of Technology recently participated in the TREC 2011 Medical Records Track. This paper reports on our methods, results and experience using a concept-based information retrieval approach. Our concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identify in searching medical records. Queries and documents are transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as de ned by the SNOMED-CT ontology. Results show our concept-based approach performed above the median in all three performance metrics: bref (+12%), R-prec (+18%) and Prec@10 (+6%).

Integrated health prediction of bridge systems using dynamic object oriented Bayesian networks (DOOBNS)

The serviceability and safety of bridges are crucial to people’s daily lives and to the national economy. Every effort should be taken to make sure that bridges function safely and properly as any damage or fault during the service life can lead to transport paralysis, catastrophic loss of property or even casualties. Nonetheless, aggressive environmental conditions, ever-increasing and changing traffic loads and aging can all contribute to bridge deterioration. With often constrained budget, it is of significance to identify bridges and bridge elements that should be given higher priority for maintenance, rehabilitation or replacement, and to select optimal strategy. Bridge health prediction is an essential underpinning science to bridge maintenance optimization, since the effectiveness of optimal maintenance decision is largely dependent on the forecasting accuracy of bridge health performance. The current approaches for bridge health prediction can be categorised into two groups: condition ratings based and structural reliability based. A comprehensive literature review has revealed the following limitations of the current modelling approaches: (1) it is not evident in literature to date that any integrated approaches exist for modelling both serviceability and safety aspects so that both performance criteria can be evaluated coherently; (2) complex system modelling approaches have not been successfully applied to bridge deterioration modelling though a bridge is a complex system composed of many inter-related bridge elements; (3) multiple bridge deterioration factors, such as deterioration dependencies among different bridge elements, observed information, maintenance actions and environmental effects have not been considered jointly; (4) the existing approaches are lacking in Bayesian updating ability to incorporate a variety of event information; (5) the assumption of series and/or parallel relationship for bridge level reliability is always held in all structural reliability estimation of bridge systems. To address the deficiencies listed above, this research proposes three novel models based on the Dynamic Object Oriented Bayesian Networks (DOOBNs) approach. Model I aims to address bridge deterioration in serviceability using condition ratings as the health index. The bridge deterioration is represented in a hierarchical relationship, in accordance with the physical structure, so that the contribution of each bridge element to bridge deterioration can be tracked. A discrete-time Markov process is employed to model deterioration of bridge elements over time. In Model II, bridge deterioration in terms of safety is addressed. The structural reliability of bridge systems is estimated from bridge elements to the entire bridge. By means of conditional probability tables (CPTs), not only series-parallel relationship but also complex probabilistic relationship in bridge systems can be effectively modelled. The structural reliability of each bridge element is evaluated from its limit state functions, considering the probability distributions of resistance and applied load. Both Models I and II are designed in three steps: modelling consideration, DOOBN development and parameters estimation. Model III integrates Models I and II to address bridge health performance in both serviceability and safety aspects jointly. The modelling of bridge ratings is modified so that every basic modelling unit denotes one physical bridge element. According to the specific materials used, the integration of condition ratings and structural reliability is implemented through critical failure modes. Three case studies have been conducted to validate the proposed models, respectively. Carefully selected data and knowledge from bridge experts, the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) and existing literature were utilised for model validation. In addition, event information was generated using simulation to demonstrate the Bayesian updating ability of the proposed models. The prediction results of condition ratings and structural reliability were presented and interpreted for basic bridge elements and the whole bridge system. The results obtained from Model II were compared with the ones obtained from traditional structural reliability methods. Overall, the prediction results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed modelling approach for bridge health prediction and underpin the assertion that the three models can be used separately or integrated and are more effective than the current bridge deterioration modelling approaches. The primary contribution of this work is to enhance the knowledge in the field of bridge health prediction, where more comprehensive health performance in both serviceability and safety aspects are addressed jointly. The proposed models, characterised by probabilistic representation of bridge deterioration in hierarchical ways, demonstrated the effectiveness and pledge of DOOBNs approach to bridge health management. Additionally, the proposed models have significant potential for bridge maintenance optimization. Working together with advanced monitoring and inspection techniques, and a comprehensive bridge inventory, the proposed models can be used by bridge practitioners to achieve increased serviceability and safety as well as maintenance cost effectiveness.

Modelling the flow of cane constituents in the milling process

A model has been developed to track the flow of cane constituents through the milling process. While previous models have tracked the flow of fibre, brix and water through the process, this model tracks the soluble and insoluble solid cane components using modelling theory and experiment data, assisting in further understanding the flow of constituents into mixed juice and final bagasse. The work provided an opportunity to understand the factors which affect the distribution of the cane constituents in juice and bagasse. Application of the model should lead to improvements in the overall performance of the milling train.

Investigating Customer-Oriented Deviance (COD) from a frontline employee's perspective

While frontline employees (FLEs) are known to bend the rules or act in non-conforming ways for customers, the phenomenon of FLEs over-servicing customers is not well understood. This paper proposes a behavioural concept termed customer-oriented deviance (COD) and a conceptual model of its key drivers. Using a qualitative study involving 22 in-depth interviews with FLEs, the analysis reveals three categories of COD behaviours: deviant service adaptation (DSA), deviant service communication (DSC), and deviant use of resources (DUR). The drivers of COD are categorised as individual (risk-taking, service aptitude, and pro-social moral values), situational (resource availability, social capita with customers, legitimacy of customer problems, and avoidance of hassles), and organisational (unconducive service climate and anticipated rewards). This paper contributes to understanding how and why FLEs over-service customers and extends current research by exploring multiple categories of behaviours within a services marketing context.

Assessing efficiency of a transit oriented development (TOD) by comparative analysis

Transit oriented developments (TODs) are master planned communities constructed to reduce the dependence on the private car and promote the modes of transport such as public transport, walking and cycling, which are presumed by many transport professionals to be more sustainable. This paper tests this assumption that TOD is a more sustainable form of development than traditional development, with respect to travel demand, by conducting travel surveys for a case study TOD and comparing the travel characteristics of TOD residents with the travel characteristics of residents of Brisbane, Australia who live in non TOD suburbs. The results of a household comparison showed that the Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) households had slightly smaller household size, lower vehicle and bicycle ownership compared to Brisbane Statistical Division (BSD), Brisbane’s inner north and inner south suburbs. The comparison of average trip characteristics showed that on an average KGUV residents undertook fewer trips on the given travel day (2.6 trips/person) compared to BSD (3.1 trips/person), Brisbane Inner North Suburbs (BINS) (3.6 trips/person) and Brisbane Inner South Suburbs (BISS) (3.5 trips/person) residents. The mode share comparison indicated that KGUV residents used more public transport and made more walk-only trips in comparison to BSD, BINS and BISS residents. Overall, 72.4 percent of KGUV residents used a sustainable mode of transport for their travel on a typical weekday. On the other hand, only 17.4 percent, 22.2 percent and 24.4 percent residents of BSD, BINS and BISS used sustainable modes of transport for this travel. The results of trip length comparison showed that overall KGUV residents have smaller average trip lengths as compared to its counterparts. KGUV & BINS residents used car for travelling farther and used public transport for accessing destinations located closer to their homes. On the contrary, BSD and BISS residents exhibited an opposite trend. These results support the transportation claims of many transport professionals that TODs are more transport efficient and therefore more sustainable in this respect.