EasyStrata: evaluation and visualization of stratified genome-wide association meta-analysis data.

The R package EasyStrata facilitates the evaluation and visualization of stratified genome-wide association meta-analyses (GWAMAs) results. It provides (i) statistical methods to test and account for between-strata difference as a means to tackle gene-strata interaction effects and (ii) extended graphical features tailored for stratified GWAMA results. The software provides further features also suitable for general GWAMAs including functions to annotate, exclude or highlight specific loci in plots or to extract independent subsets of loci from genome-wide datasets. It is freely available and includes a user-friendly scripting interface that simplifies data handling and allows for combining statistical and graphical functions in a flexible fashion. AVAILABILITY: EasyStrata is available for free (under the GNU General Public License v3) from our Web site www.genepi-regensburg.de/easystrata and from the CRAN R package repository cran.r-project.org/web/packages/EasyStrata/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Web services to link interlibrary software with OCLC WorldShare

Purpose - This article describes the use of web services to interconnect the GTBib interlibrary loan program with the OCLC WorldShare platform. Design/methodology/approach - We describe the current problem of duplication of procedures in libraries that have added their collections to the OCLC WorldCat catalogue in recent years and are therefore more likely to receive interlibrary loan requests through the WorldShare Platform. Findings - A solution that uses web services to insert and retrieve requests between the two systems is presented. Autonomous agents periodically check the status of the requests and keep them updated and synchronized. These agents also inform the library staff of any variation or inconsistency that is detected. Practical Implications - This technology reduces process management time by making it unnecessary to introduce the request data in both systems. Agents are used to check the consistency of statuses between the two systems, thus avoiding errors and omissions and improving the efficiency of the whole interlibrary loan process. Originality/value - This paper describes in detail the technical aspects of the solution as a reference for the development of future applications.

Analyses of the usefulness of Software Defined Storage Solutions for Web-based Digital Preservation Applications

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Integration av webbaserat analysprogram och kartprogram : Integration of web based analysis-software andmap-software

I takt med att GIS (Grafiska InformationsSystem) blir allt vanligare och mer användarvänligt har WM-data sett att kunder skulle ha intresse i att kunna koppla information från sin verksamhet till en kartbild. Detta för att lättare kunna ta till sig informationen om hur den geografiskt finns utspridd över ett område för att t.ex. ordna effektivare tranporter. WM-data, som det här arbetet är utfört åt, avser att ta fram en prototyp som sedan kan visas upp för att påvisa för kunder och andra intressenter att detta är möjligt att genomföra genom att skapa en integration mellan redan befintliga system. I det här arbetet har prototypen tagits fram med skogsindustrin och dess lager som inriktning. Befintliga program som integrationen ska skapas mellan är båda webbaserade och körs i en webbläsare. Analysprogrammet som ska användas heter Insikt och är utvecklat av företaget Trimma, kartprogrammet heter GIMS som är WM-datas egna program. Det ska vara möjligt att i Insikt analysera data och skapa en rapport. Den ska sedan skickas till GIMS där informationen skrivs ut på kartan på den plats som respektive information hör till. Det ska även gå att välja ut ett eller flera områden i kartan och skicka till Insikt för att analysera information från enbart de utvalda områdena. En prototyp med önskad funktionalitet har under arbetets gång tagits fram, men för att ha en säljbar produkt är en del arbeta kvar. Prototypen har visats för ett antal intresserade som tyckte det var intressant och tror att det är något som skulle kunna användas flitigt inom många områden.

qtl.outbred: Interfacing outbred line cross data with the R/qtl mapping software

Background qtl.outbred is an extendible interface in the statistical environment, R, for combining quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping tools. It is built as an umbrella package that enables outbred genotype probabilities to be calculated and/or imported into the software package R/qtl. Findings Using qtl.outbred, the genotype probabilities from outbred line cross data can be calculated by interfacing with a new and efficient algorithm developed for analyzing arbitrarily large datasets (included in the package) or imported from other sources such as the web-based tool, GridQTL. Conclusion qtl.outbred will improve the speed for calculating probabilities and the ability to analyse large future datasets. This package enables the user to analyse outbred line cross data accurately, but with similar effort than inbred line cross data.

Uma arquitetura de software baseada em componentes visualização de informações industriais

Due to the current need of the industry to integrate data of the beginning of production originating from of several sources and of transforming them in useful information for sockets of decisions, a search exists every time larger for systems of visualization of information that come to collaborate with that functionality. On the other hand, a common practice nowadays, due to the high competitiveness of the market, it is the development of industrial systems that possess characteristics of modularity, distribution, flexibility, scalability, adaptation, interoperability, reusability and access through web. Those characteristics provide an extra agility and a larger easiness in adapting to the frequent changes of demand of the market. Based on the arguments exposed above, this work consists of specifying a component-based architecture, with the respective development of a system based on that architecture, for the visualization of industrial data. The system was conceived to be capable to supply on-line information and, optionally, historical information of variables originating from of the beginning of production. In this work it is shown that the component-based architecture developed possesses the necessary requirements for the obtaining of a system robust, reliable and of easy maintenance, being, like this, in agreement with the industrial needs. The use of that architecture allows although components can be added, removed or updated in time of execution, through a manager of components through web, still activating more the adaptation process and updating of the system

Software tools and efficient algorithms for the feature detection, feature tracking, event localization, and visualization of large sets of atmospheric data

Data sets describing the state of the earth's atmosphere are of great importance in the atmospheric sciences. Over the last decades, the quality and sheer amount of the available data increased significantly, resulting in a rising demand for new tools capable of handling and analysing these large, multidimensional sets of atmospheric data. The interdisciplinary work presented in this thesis covers the development and the application of practical software tools and efficient algorithms from the field of computer science, aiming at the goal of enabling atmospheric scientists to analyse and to gain new insights from these large data sets. For this purpose, our tools combine novel techniques with well-established methods from different areas such as scientific visualization and data segmentation. In this thesis, three practical tools are presented. Two of these tools are software systems (Insight and IWAL) for different types of processing and interactive visualization of data, the third tool is an efficient algorithm for data segmentation implemented as part of Insight.Insight is a toolkit for the interactive, three-dimensional visualization and processing of large sets of atmospheric data, originally developed as a testing environment for the novel segmentation algorithm. It provides a dynamic system for combining at runtime data from different sources, a variety of different data processing algorithms, and several visualization techniques. Its modular architecture and flexible scripting support led to additional applications of the software, from which two examples are presented: the usage of Insight as a WMS (web map service) server, and the automatic production of a sequence of images for the visualization of cyclone simulations. The core application of Insight is the provision of the novel segmentation algorithm for the efficient detection and tracking of 3D features in large sets of atmospheric data, as well as for the precise localization of the occurring genesis, lysis, merging and splitting events. Data segmentation usually leads to a significant reduction of the size of the considered data. This enables a practical visualization of the data, statistical analyses of the features and their events, and the manual or automatic detection of interesting situations for subsequent detailed investigation. The concepts of the novel algorithm, its technical realization, and several extensions for avoiding under- and over-segmentation are discussed. As example applications, this thesis covers the setup and the results of the segmentation of upper-tropospheric jet streams and cyclones as full 3D objects. Finally, IWAL is presented, which is a web application for providing an easy interactive access to meteorological data visualizations, primarily aimed at students. As a web application, the needs to retrieve all input data sets and to install and handle complex visualization tools on a local machine are avoided. The main challenge in the provision of customizable visualizations to large numbers of simultaneous users was to find an acceptable trade-off between the available visualization options and the performance of the application. Besides the implementational details, benchmarks and the results of a user survey are presented.

Knowledge transfer in software-maintenance offshore outsourcing

Software-maintenance offshore outsourcing (SMOO) projects have been plagued by tedious knowledge transfer during the service transition to the vendor. Vendor engineers risk being over-strained by the high amounts of novel information, resulting in extra costs that may erode the business case behind offshoring. Although stakeholders may desire to avoid these extra costs by implementing appropriate knowledge transfer practices, little is known on how effective knowledge transfer can be designed and managed in light of the high cognitive loads in SMOO transitions. The dissertation at hand addresses this research gap by presenting and integrating four studies. The studies draw on cognitive load theory, attributional theory, and control theory and they apply qualitative, quantitative, and simulation methods to qualitative data from eight in-depth longitudinal cases. The results suggest that the choice of appropriate learning tasks may be more central to knowledge transfer than the amount of information shared with vendor engineers. Moreover, because vendor staff may not be able to and not dare to effectively self-manage learn-ing tasks during early transition, client-driven controls may be initially required and subsequently faded out. Collectively, the results call for people-based rather than codification-based knowledge management strategies in at least moderately specific and complex software environments.

Análisis de software de analítica web para medir uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos de bibliotecas universitarias

Las bibliotecas universitarias recopilan, de manera rutinaria estadísticas sobre el uso de sus colecciones impresas y de la actividad in situ. Paralelamente y de manera sostenida, han ido incorporando recursos y servicios electrónicos, lo que ha motivado la elaboración de normas internacionales que definen indicadores que permiten medir su uso, no obstante contar con un software estándar es aún un asunto pendiente. Por otro lado, para medir la actividad de un sitio web existen varios programas gratuitos y de código abierto. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo determinar si los softwares de analítica web gratuitos para sitios web AWStats, Google Analytics y Piwik, pueden utilizarse para evaluar el uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos, conforme a los indicadores propuestos por las normas ANSI/NISO Z39.7-2013, ISO 2789:2003, ISO 20983:2003, BS ISO 11620:2008, EMIS, Counter e ICOLC. Para tales efectos, fueron utilizados para realizar el análisis de esta investigación sitio web y el catálogo en línea de la Biblioteca Florentino Ameghino, Biblioteca Central de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo de la Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina. Los resultados reflejan las características de los indicadores, el software y el caso de estudio. Estas características son abordadas en las conclusiones con el fin de darle contexto y perspectiva a la respuesta de la pregunta de si es viable medir el uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos de una biblioteca universitaria por medio de programas estadísticos para sitios web

Análisis de software de analítica web para medir uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos de bibliotecas universitarias

Las bibliotecas universitarias recopilan, de manera rutinaria estadísticas sobre el uso de sus colecciones impresas y de la actividad in situ. Paralelamente y de manera sostenida, han ido incorporando recursos y servicios electrónicos, lo que ha motivado la elaboración de normas internacionales que definen indicadores que permiten medir su uso, no obstante contar con un software estándar es aún un asunto pendiente. Por otro lado, para medir la actividad de un sitio web existen varios programas gratuitos y de código abierto. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo determinar si los softwares de analítica web gratuitos para sitios web AWStats, Google Analytics y Piwik, pueden utilizarse para evaluar el uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos, conforme a los indicadores propuestos por las normas ANSI/NISO Z39.7-2013, ISO 2789:2003, ISO 20983:2003, BS ISO 11620:2008, EMIS, Counter e ICOLC. Para tales efectos, fueron utilizados para realizar el análisis de esta investigación sitio web y el catálogo en línea de la Biblioteca Florentino Ameghino, Biblioteca Central de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo de la Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina. Los resultados reflejan las características de los indicadores, el software y el caso de estudio. Estas características son abordadas en las conclusiones con el fin de darle contexto y perspectiva a la respuesta de la pregunta de si es viable medir el uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos de una biblioteca universitaria por medio de programas estadísticos para sitios web

A semantic modelling approach to knowledge based statistical software

The topic of this thesis is the development of knowledge based statistical software. The shortcomings of conventional statistical packages are discussed to illustrate the need to develop software which is able to exhibit a greater degree of statistical expertise, thereby reducing the misuse of statistical methods by those not well versed in the art of statistical analysis. Some of the issues involved in the development of knowledge based software are presented and a review is given of some of the systems that have been developed so far. The majority of these have moved away from conventional architectures by adopting what can be termed an expert systems approach. The thesis then proposes an approach which is based upon the concept of semantic modelling. By representing some of the semantic meaning of data, it is conceived that a system could examine a request to apply a statistical technique and check if the use of the chosen technique was semantically sound, i.e. will the results obtained be meaningful. Current systems, in contrast, can only perform what can be considered as syntactic checks. The prototype system that has been implemented to explore the feasibility of such an approach is presented, the system has been designed as an enhanced variant of a conventional style statistical package. This involved developing a semantic data model to represent some of the statistically relevant knowledge about data and identifying sets of requirements that should be met for the application of the statistical techniques to be valid. Those areas of statistics covered in the prototype are measures of association and tests of location.

Análisis de software de analítica web para medir uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos de bibliotecas universitarias

Las bibliotecas universitarias recopilan, de manera rutinaria estadísticas sobre el uso de sus colecciones impresas y de la actividad in situ. Paralelamente y de manera sostenida, han ido incorporando recursos y servicios electrónicos, lo que ha motivado la elaboración de normas internacionales que definen indicadores que permiten medir su uso, no obstante contar con un software estándar es aún un asunto pendiente. Por otro lado, para medir la actividad de un sitio web existen varios programas gratuitos y de código abierto. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo determinar si los softwares de analítica web gratuitos para sitios web AWStats, Google Analytics y Piwik, pueden utilizarse para evaluar el uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos, conforme a los indicadores propuestos por las normas ANSI/NISO Z39.7-2013, ISO 2789:2003, ISO 20983:2003, BS ISO 11620:2008, EMIS, Counter e ICOLC. Para tales efectos, fueron utilizados para realizar el análisis de esta investigación sitio web y el catálogo en línea de la Biblioteca Florentino Ameghino, Biblioteca Central de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo de la Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina. Los resultados reflejan las características de los indicadores, el software y el caso de estudio. Estas características son abordadas en las conclusiones con el fin de darle contexto y perspectiva a la respuesta de la pregunta de si es viable medir el uso de recursos y servicios electrónicos de una biblioteca universitaria por medio de programas estadísticos para sitios web

Un Servizio Web per l'analisi Semantica degli Open Data

Questo lavoro di Tesi ha come obiettivo quello di automatizzare il più possibile la comprensione automatica degli Open Data. Ciò è stato realizzato mediante la progettazione e lo sviluppo del “Semantic Detector”, una soluzione che si interpone tra il dato grezzo, quindi il dataset, e qualsiasi software ad alto livello che sfrutta questi dati per poterli effettivamente riutilizzare o riorganizzare opportunamente in un formato aggregabile.

Smart Alerts: Development of Software to Optimize Data Monitoring

Dherte PM, Negrao MPG, Mori Neto S, Holzhacker R, Shimada V, Taberner P, Carmona MJC - Smart Alerts: Development of a Software to Optimize Data Monitoring. Background and objectives: Monitoring is useful for vital follow-ups and prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of several events in anesthesia. Although alarms can be useful in monitoring they can cause dangerous user`s desensitization. The objective of this study was to describe the development of specific software to integrate intraoperative monitoring parameters generating ""smart alerts"" that can help decision making, besides indicating possible diagnosis and treatment. Methods: A system that allowed flexibility in the definition of alerts, combining individual alarms of the parameters monitored to generate a more elaborated alert system was designed. After investigating a set of smart alerts, considered relevant in the surgical environment, a prototype was designed and evaluated, and additional suggestions were implemented in the final product. To verify the occurrence of smart alerts, the system underwent testing with data previously obtained during intraoperative monitoring of 64 patients. The system allows continuous analysis of monitored parameters, verifying the occurrence of smart alerts defined in the user interface. Results: With this system a potential 92% reduction in alarms was observed. We observed that in most situations that did not generate alerts individual alarms did not represent risk to the patient. Conclusions: Implementation of software can allow integration of the data monitored and generate information, such as possible diagnosis or interventions. An expressive potential reduction in the amount of alarms during surgery was observed. Information displayed by the system can be oftentimes more useful than analysis of isolated parameters.