Web services based state of the environment reporting

The Environmental Sciences Division within Queensland Environmental Protection Agency works to monitor, assess and model the condition of the environment. The Division has as a legislative responsibility to produce a whole-of-government report every four years dealing environmental conditions and trends in a ”State of the Environment report” (SoE)[1][2][3]. State of Environment Web Service Reporting System is a supplementary web service based SoE reporting tool, which aims to deliver accurate, timely and accessible information on the condition of the environment through web services via Internet [4][5]. This prototype provides a scientific assessment of environmental conditions for a set of environmental indicators. It contains text descriptions and tables, charts and maps with spatiotemporal dimensions to show the impact of certain environmental indicators on our environment. This prototype is a template based indicator system, to which the administrator may add new sql queries for new indicator services without changing the architecture and codes of this template. The benefits are brought through a service-oriented architecture which provides an online query service with seamless integration. In addition, since it uses web service architecture, each individual component within the application can be implemented by using different programming languages and in different operating systems. Although the services showed in this demo are built upon two datasets of regional ecosystem and protection area of Queensland, it will be possible to report on the condition of water, air, land, coastal zones, energy resources, biodiversity, human settlements and natural culture heritage on the fly as well. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the prototype. In the next section, I will discuss the research tasks in the prototype.

Development of a web-service-agents-based family wealth management system

The roiling financial markets, constantly changing tax law and increasing complexity of planning transaction increase the demand of aggregated family wealth management (FWM) services. However, current trend of developing such advisory systems is mainly focusing on financial or investment side. In addition, these existing systems lack of flexibility and are hard to be integrated with other organizational information systems, such as CRM systems. In this paper, a novel architecture of Web-service-agents-based FWM systems has been proposed. Multiple intelligent agents are wrapped as Web services and can communicate with each other via Web service protocols. On the one hand, these agents can collaborate with each other and provide comprehensive FWM advices. On the other hand, each service can work independently to achieve its own tasks. A prototype system for supporting financial advice is also presented to demonstrate the advances of the proposed Webservice- agents-based FWM system architecture.

Providing evidence-based answers to clinical questions - A pilot information service for general practitioners

Objective: To pilot a clinical information service for general practitioners. Methods: A representative sample of 31 GPs was invited to submit clinical questions to a local academic department of general practice. Their views on the service and the usefulness of the information were obtained by telephone interview. Results: Over one month, nine GPs (29% of the sample, 45% of those stating an interest), submitted 20 enquiries comprising 45 discrete clinical questions. The median time to search for evidence, appraise it and write answers to each enquiry was 2.5 hours (range, 1.0-7.4 hours). The median interval between receipt of questions and dispatch of answers was 3 clays (range, 1-12 days). Conclusions: The GPs found the answers useful in clinical decision making; in four out of 20 cases patient management was altered.

Feasibility of an evidence-based literature search service for general practitioners

Objective: To test the feasibility of an evidence-based clinical literature search service to help answer general practitioners' (GPs') clinical questions. Design: Two search services supplied GPs who submitted questions with the best available empirical evidence to answer these questions. The GPs provided feedback on the value of the service, and concordance of answers from the two search services was assessed. Setting: Two literature search services (Queensland and Victoria), operating for nine months from February 1999. Main outcome measures: Use of the service; time taken to locate answers; availability of evidence; value of the service to GPs; and consistency of answers from the two services. Results: 58 GPs asked 160 questions (29 asked one, 11 asked five or more). The questions concerned treatment (65%), aetiology (17%), prognosis (13%), and diagnosis (5%). Answering a question took a mean of 3 hours 32 minutes of personnel time (95% Cl, 2.67-3.97); nine questions took longer than 10 hours each to answer, the longest taking 23 hours 30 minutes. Evidence of suitable quality to provide a sound answer was available for 126 (79%) questions. Feedback data for 84 (53%) questions, provided by 42 GPs, showed that they appreciated the service, and asking the questions changed clinical care. There were many minor differences between the answers from the two centres, and substantial differences in the evidence found for 4/14 questions. However, conclusions reached were largely similar, with no or only minor differences for all questions. Conclusions: It is feasible to provide a literature search service, but further assessment is needed to establish its cost effectiveness.

Ubiquitous travel service delivery

Free independent travelers require flexible, reactive service delivery due to their regularly changing location and activities and the lack of a wired Internet connection. A ubiquitous travel service delivery system that is able to dynamically deliver services in response to relevant events, such as changing location, availability of new last-minute specials, work opportunities, and safety issues can provide added value while retaining the flexibility that is so important to independent travelers. This article describes such a system. An engineering design research approach has been adopted to design the system. Issues addressed include traveler and service states and events, contexts, situations, and situation-action rules. An architecture is proposed that is based on distributed, cooperating software agents and mobile data technologies. The role of these agents is to continuously monitor situations that are occurring in the physical and virtual service spaces and to take the required action for any situations that are relevant to the traveler.

Functionally partitioned module-based programmable architecture for wireless base-band processing

A specialised reconfigurable architecture is targeted at wireless base-band processing. It is built to cater for multiple wireless standards. It has lower power consumption than the processor-based solution. It can be scaled to run in parallel for processing multiple channels. Test resources are embedded on the architecture and testing strategies are included. This architecture is functionally partitioned according to the common operations found in wireless standards, such as CRC error correction, convolution and interleaving. These modules are linked via Virtual Wire Hardware modules and route-through switch matrices. Data can be processed in any order through this interconnect structure. Virtual Wire ensures the same flexibility as normal interconnects, but the area occupied and the number of switches needed is reduced. The testing algorithm scans all possible paths within the interconnection network exhaustively and searches for faults in the processing modules. The testing algorithm starts by scanning the externally addressable memory space and testing the master controller. The controller then tests every switch in the route-through switch matrix by making loops from the shared memory to each of the switches. The local switch matrix is also tested in the same way. Next the local memory is scanned. Finally, pre-defined test vectors are loaded into local memory to check the processing modules. This paper compares various base-band processing solutions. It describes the proposed platform and its implementation. It outlines the test resources and algorithm. It concludes with the mapping of Bluetooth and GSM base-band onto the platform.

Classifying client goals in community-based ABI rehabilitation: a taxonomy for profiling service delivery and conceptualizing outcomes

Purpose: To develop, confirm and trial a framework for analysing the content of goals set within community-based rehabilitation. This framework (taxonomy) is proposed as a tool to assist in service evaluation and outcome exploration. Method: Qualitative thematic analysis and categorization of 1765 rehabilitation goal statements in a four phase process of synthesis, refinement, verification and application. Results: A taxonomy of goal content was developed comprising 21 categories within five domains, utilizing 125 descriptors. The taxonomy demonstrated good inter-rater consistency and was able to discriminate between similar but related data sets comprising goal statements. Conclusion: Structured analysis of the content of goal setting (particularly in community rehabilitation) utilizing a framework such as the proposed taxonomy has considerable potential as a 'window' into service delivery to broaden the parameters of existing service evaluation and to more clearly link outcome exploration to intervention.

A knowledge-based system for liquid retaining structure design with blackboard architecture

Owing to the high degree of vulnerability of liquid retaining structures to corrosion problems, there are stringent requirements in its design against cracking. In this paper, a prototype knowledge-based system is developed and implemented for the design of liquid retaining structures based on the blackboard architecture. A commercially available expert system shell VISUAL RULE STUDIO working as an ActiveX Designer under the VISUAL BASIC programming environment is employed. Hybrid knowledge representation approach with production rules and procedural methods under object-oriented programming are used to represent the engineering heuristics and design knowledge of this domain. It is demonstrated that the blackboard architecture is capable of integrating different knowledge together in an effective manner. The system is tailored to give advice to users regarding preliminary design, loading specification and optimized configuration selection of this type of structure. An example of application is given to illustrate the capabilities of the prototype system in transferring knowledge on liquid retaining structure to novice engineers. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.