An Infrastructure for the Dynamic Distribution of Web Applications and Services

This paper presents the design and implementation of an infrastructure that enables any Web application, regardless of its current state, to be stopped and uninstalled from a particular server, transferred to a new server, then installed, loaded, and resumed, with all these events occurring "on the fly" and totally transparent to clients. Such functionalities allow entire applications to fluidly move from server to server, reducing the overhead required to administer the system, and increasing its performance in a number of ways: (1) Dynamic replication of new instances of applications to several servers to raise throughput for scalability purposes, (2) Moving applications to servers to achieve load balancing or other resource management goals, (3) Caching entire applications on servers located closer to clients.

Self-Organizing Hierarchical Knowledge Discovery by an ARTMAP Image Fusion System

Classifying novel terrain or objects front sparse, complex data may require the resolution of conflicting information from sensors working at different times, locations, and scales, and from sources with different goals and situations. Information fusion methods can help resolve inconsistencies, as when evidence variously suggests that an object's class is car, truck, or airplane. The methods described here consider a complementary problem, supposing that information from sensors and experts is reliable though inconsistent, as when evidence suggests that an object's class is car, vehicle, and man-made. Underlying relationships among objects are assumed to be unknown to the automated system or the human user. The ARTMAP information fusion system used distributed code representations that exploit the neural network's capacity for one-to-many learning in order to produce self-organizing expert systems that discover hierarchical knowledge structures. The system infers multi-level relationships among groups of output classes, without any supervised labeling of these relationships.

Design principles for an enterprise systems chartering method

Our research follows a design science approach to develop a method that supports the initialization of ES implementation projects – the chartering phase. This project phase is highly relevant for implementation success, but is understudied in IS research. In this paper, we derive design principles for a chartering method based on a systematic review of ES implementation literature and semi-structured expert interviews. Our analysis identifies differences in the importance of certain success factors depending on the system type. The proposed design principles are built on these factors and are linked to chartering key activities. We specifically consider system-type-specific chartering aspects for process-centric Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) systems, which are an emerging class of systems at the intersection of BI&A and business process management. In summary, this paper proposes design principles for a chartering method – considering specifics of process-centric BI&A.

Do diabetic veterans use the Internet? Self-reported usage, skills, and interest in using My HealtheVet Web portal.

OBJECTIVE: The Veterans Health Administration has developed My HealtheVet (MHV), a Web-based portal that links veterans to their care in the veteran affairs (VA) system. The objective of this study was to measure diabetic veterans' access to and use of the Internet, and their interest in using MHV to help manage their diabetes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cross-sectional mailed survey of 201 patients with type 2 diabetes and hemoglobin A(1c) > 8.0% receiving primary care at any of five primary care clinic sites affiliated with a VA tertiary care facility. Main measures included Internet usage, access, and attitudes; computer skills; interest in using the Internet; awareness of and attitudes toward MHV; demographics; and socioeconomic status. RESULTS: A majority of respondents reported having access to the Internet at home. Nearly half of all respondents had searched online for information about diabetes, including some who did not have home Internet access. More than a third obtained "some" or "a lot" of their health-related information online. Forty-one percent reported being "very interested" in using MHV to help track their home blood glucose readings, a third of whom did not have home Internet access. Factors associated with being "very interested" were as follows: having access to the Internet at home (p < 0.001), "a lot/some" trust in the Internet as a source of health information (p = 0.002), lower age (p = 0.03), and some college (p = 0.04). Neither race (p = 0.44) nor income (p = 0.25) was significantly associated with interest in MHV. CONCLUSIONS: This study found that a diverse sample of older VA patients with sub-optimally controlled diabetes had a level of familiarity with and access to the Internet comparable to an age-matched national sample. In addition, there was a high degree of interest in using the Internet to help manage their diabetes.

Caring for Alaska Native prostate cancer survivors in primary care: a survey of Alaska Tribal Health System providers.

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the constraints of optimizing health care for prostate cancer survivors in Alaska primary care. OBJECTIVE: To describe the experiences and attitudes of primary care providers within the Alaska Tribal Health System (ATHS) regarding the care of prostate cancer survivors. DESIGN: In late October 2011, we emailed a 22-item electronic survey to 268 ATHS primary care providers regarding the frequency of Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) monitoring for a hypothetical prostate cancer survivor; who should be responsible for the patient's life-long prostate cancer surveillance; who should support the patient's emotional and medical needs as a survivor; and providers' level of comfort addressing recurrence monitoring, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, androgen deprivation therapy, and emotional needs. We used simple logistic regression to examine the association between provider characteristics and their responses to the survivorship survey items. RESULTS: Of 221 individuals who were successfully contacted, a total of 114 responded (52% response rate). Most ATHS providers indicated they would order a PSA test every 12 months (69%) and believed that, ideally, the hypothetical patient's primary care provider should be responsible for his life-long prostate cancer surveillance (60%). Most providers reported feeling either "moderately" or "very" comfortable addressing topics such as prostate cancer recurrence (59%), erectile dysfunction (64%), urinary incontinence (63%), and emotional needs (61%) with prostate cancer survivors. These results varied somewhat by provider characteristics including female sex, years in practice, and the number of prostate cancer survivors seen in their practice. CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest that most primary care providers in Alaska are poised to assume the care of prostate cancer survivors locally. However, we also found that large minorities of providers do not feel confident in their ability to manage common issues in prostate cancer survivorship, implying that continued access to specialists with more expert knowledge would be beneficial.

Phylotastic! Making tree-of-life knowledge accessible, reusable and convenient.

BACKGROUND: Scientists rarely reuse expert knowledge of phylogeny, in spite of years of effort to assemble a great "Tree of Life" (ToL). A notable exception involves the use of Phylomatic, which provides tools to generate custom phylogenies from a large, pre-computed, expert phylogeny of plant taxa. This suggests great potential for a more generalized system that, starting with a query consisting of a list of any known species, would rectify non-standard names, identify expert phylogenies containing the implicated taxa, prune away unneeded parts, and supply branch lengths and annotations, resulting in a custom phylogeny suited to the user's needs. Such a system could become a sustainable community resource if implemented as a distributed system of loosely coupled parts that interact through clearly defined interfaces. RESULTS: With the aim of building such a "phylotastic" system, the NESCent Hackathons, Interoperability, Phylogenies (HIP) working group recruited 2 dozen scientist-programmers to a weeklong programming hackathon in June 2012. During the hackathon (and a three-month follow-up period), 5 teams produced designs, implementations, documentation, presentations, and tests including: (1) a generalized scheme for integrating components; (2) proof-of-concept pruners and controllers; (3) a meta-API for taxonomic name resolution services; (4) a system for storing, finding, and retrieving phylogenies using semantic web technologies for data exchange, storage, and querying; (5) an innovative new service, DateLife.org, which synthesizes pre-computed, time-calibrated phylogenies to assign ages to nodes; and (6) demonstration projects. These outcomes are accessible via a public code repository (GitHub.com), a website (http://www.phylotastic.org), and a server image. CONCLUSIONS: Approximately 9 person-months of effort (centered on a software development hackathon) resulted in the design and implementation of proof-of-concept software for 4 core phylotastic components, 3 controllers, and 3 end-user demonstration tools. While these products have substantial limitations, they suggest considerable potential for a distributed system that makes phylogenetic knowledge readily accessible in computable form. Widespread use of phylotastic systems will create an electronic marketplace for sharing phylogenetic knowledge that will spur innovation in other areas of the ToL enterprise, such as annotation of sources and methods and third-party methods of quality assessment.

A case based reasoning system capturing fire modelling expertise

This paper describes the architecture of the case based reasoning (CBR) component of Smartfire, a fire field modelling tool for use by members of the Fire Safety Engineering community who are not expert in modelling techniques. The CBR system captures the qualitative reasoning of an experienced modeller in the assessment of room geometries so as to set up the important initial parameters of the problem. The system relies on two important reasoning principles obtained from the expert: 1) there is a natural hierarchical retrieval mechanism which may be employed; and 2) much of the reasoning on a qualitative level is linear in nature, although the computational solution of the problem is non-linear. The paper describes the qualitative representation of geometric room information on which the system is based, and the principles on which the CBR system operates.

A knowledge-based system to represent spatial reasoning for fire modelling

This paper describes the architecture of the knowledge based system (KBS) component of Smartfire, a fire field modelling tool for use by members of the fire safety engineering community who are not expert in modelling techniques. The KBS captures the qualitative reasoning of an experienced modeller in the assessment of room geometries, so as to set up the important initial parameters of the problem. Fire modelling expertise is an example of geometric and spatial reasoning, which raises representational problems. The approach taken in this project is a qualitative representation of geometric room information based on Forbus’ concept of a metric diagram. This takes the form of a coarse grid, partitioning the domain in each of the three spatial dimensions. Inference over the representation is performed using a case-based reasoning (CBR) component. The CBR component stores example partitions with key set-up parameters; this paper concentrates on the key parameter of grid cell distribution.

Models and tools for an integrated European environmental management and decision support system, (IEEMDSS)

This work proceeds from the assumption that a European environmental information and communication system (EEICS) is already established. In the context of primary users (land-use planners, conservationists, and environmental researchers) we ask what use may be made of the EEICS for building models and tools which is of use in building decision support systems for the land-use planner. The complex task facing the next generation of environmental and forest modellers is described, and a range of relevant modelling approaches are reviewed. These include visualization and GIS; statistical tabulation and database SQL, MDA and OLAP methods. The major problem of noncomparability of the definitions and measures of forest area and timber volume is introduced and the possibility of a model-based solution is considered. The possibility of using an ambitious and challenging biogeochemical modelling approach to understanding and managing European forests sustainably is discussed. It is emphasised that all modern methodological disciplines must be brought to bear, and a heuristic hybrid modelling approach should be used so as to ensure that the benefits of practical empirical modelling approaches are utilised in addition to the scientifically well-founded and holistic ecosystem and environmental modelling. The data and information system required is likely to end up as a grid-based-framework because of the heavy use of computationally intensive model-based facilities.

Use of Web Logs (Blogs) in Learning Environments: Blogs for Student Support

Innovation in technology and communications and particularly the advent of the Web is changing the structure of teaching and learning today. While there is much debate about the use of technology in learning and how e-learning is creating new approaches to delivery of learning there is been very little if any work on the use of of the emerging technologies in providing student support through their learning process. This paper reports on research and development undertaken by the eCentre based at the University of Greenwich School Of Computing in designing and developing a "Project Blog System" in order to address some long standing issues related to supervision of final year degree student projects. The paper will report on the methodology used to design the system and will discuss some of the results from students and staff evaluation of the system developed.

A blackboard architecture for a hybrid CBR system for scientific software

This paper describes the use of a blackboard architecture for building a hybrid case based reasoning (CBR) system. The Smartfire fire field modelling package has been built using this architecture and includes a CBR component. It allows the integration into the system of qualitative spatial reasoning knowledge from domain experts. The system can be used for the automatic set-up of fire field models. This enables fire safety practitioners who are not expert in modelling techniques to use a fire modelling tool. The paper discusses the integrating powers of the architecture, which is based on a common knowledge representation comprising a metric diagram and place vocabulary and mechanisms for adaptation and conflict resolution built on the Blackboard.

Managing digital libraries using semantic web technologies

The aim of this work is to improve retrieval and navigation services on bibliographic data held in digital libraries. This paper presents the design and implementation of OntoBib¸ an ontology-based bibliographic database system that adopts ontology-driven search in its retrieval. The presented work exemplifies how a digital library of bibliographic data can be managed using Semantic Web technologies and how utilizing the domain specific knowledge improves both search efficiency and navigation of web information and document retrieval.

Personalised e-learning, semantic web and learning ontologies

Kurzel(2004) points out that researchers in e-learning and educational technologists, in a quest to provide improved Learning Environments (LE) for students are focusing on personalising the experience through a Learning Management System (LMS) that attempts to tailor the LE to the individual (see amongst others Eklund & Brusilovsky, 1998; Kurzel, Slay, & Hagenus, 2003; Martinez,2000; Sampson, Karagiannidis, & Kinshuk, 2002; Voigt & Swatman; 2003). According to Kurzel (2004) this tailoring can have an impact on content and how it’s accessed; the media forms used; method of instruction employed and the learning styles supported. This project is aiming to move personalisation forward to the next generation, by tackling the issue of Personalised e-Learning platforms as pre-requisites for building and generating individualised learning solutions. The proposed development is to create an e-learning platform with personalisation built-in. This personalisation is proposed to be set from different levels of within the system starting from being guided by the information that the user inputs into the system down to the lower level of being set using information inferred by the system’s processing engine. This paper will discuss some of our early work and ideas.

Semantic web and e-learning

With emergence of "Semantic Web" there has been much discussion about the impact of technologies such as XML and RDF on the way we use the Web for developing e-learning applications and perhaps more importantly on how we can personalise these applications. Personalisation of e-learning is viewed by many authors (see amongst others Eklund & Brusilovsky, 1998; Kurzel, Slay, & Hagenus, 2003; Martinez, 2000; Sampson, Karagiannidis, & Kinshuk, 2002; Voigt & Swatman, 2003) as the key challenge for the learning technologists. According to Kurzel (2004) the tailoring of e-learning applications can have an impact on content and how it's accesses; the media forms used; method of instruction employed and the learning styles supported. This paper will report on a research project currently underway at the eCentre in University of Greenwich which is exploring different approaches and methodologies to create an e-learning platform with personalisation built-in. This personalisation is proposed to be set from different levels of within the system starting from being guided by the information that the user inputs into the system down to the lower level of being set using information inferred by the system's processing engine.