Report on a review of selected general and application controls over the University of Northern Iowa Facility Administration and Maintenance Information System for the period April 29, 2014 through June 5, 2014

Report on a review of selected general and application controls over the University of Northern Iowa Facility Administration and Maintenance Information System for the period April 29, 2014 through June 5, 2014

MODELING OF AN INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR WINE TRACEABILITY BASED ON A SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

The purpose is to present a scientific research that led to the modeling of an information system which aimed at the maintenance of traceability data in the Brazilian wine industry, according to the principles of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Since 2005, traceability data maintenance is an obligation for all producers that intend to export to any European Union country. Also, final customers, including the Brazilian ones, have been asking for information about food products. A solution that collectively contemplated the industry was sought in order to permit that producer consortiums of associations could share the costs and benefits of such a solution. Following an extensive bibliographic review, a series of interviews conducted with Brazilian researchers and wine producers in Bento Goncalves - RS, Brazil, elucidated many aspects associated with the wine production process. Information technology issues related to the theme were also researched. The software was modeled with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and uses web services for data exchange. A model for the wine production process was also proposed. A functional prototype showed that the adopted model is able to fulfill the demands of wine producers. The good results obtained lead us to consider the use of this model in other domains.

A model of factors affecting an information system's change in state

Management are keen to maximize the life span of an information system because of the high cost, organizational disruption, and risk of failure associated with the re-development or replacement of an information system. This research investigates the effects that various factors have on an information system's life span by understanding how the factors affect an information system's stability. The research builds on a previously developed two-stage model of information system change whereby an information system is either in a stable state of evolution in which the information system's functionality is evolving, or in a state of revolution, in which the information system is being replaced because it is not providing the functionality expected by its users. A case study surveyed a number of systems within one organization. The aim was to test whether a relationship existed between the base value of the volatility index (a measure of the stability of an information system) and certain system characteristics. Data relating to some 3000 user change requests covering 40 systems over a 10-year period were obtained. The following factors were hypothesized to have significant associations with the base value of the volatility index: language level (generation of language of construction), system size, system age, and the timing of changes applied to a system. Significant associations were found in the hypothesized directions except that the timing of user changes was not associated with any change in the value of the volatility index. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

The implementation of an Enterprise Geographical Information System to support Cadastre and Expropriation activities.

The processes of mobilization of land for infrastructures of public and private domain are developed according to proper legal frameworks and systematically confronted with the impoverished national situation as regards the cadastral identification and regularization, which leads to big inefficiencies, sometimes with very negative impact to the overall effectiveness. This project report describes Ferbritas Cadastre Information System (FBSIC) project and tools, which in conjunction with other applications, allow managing the entire life-cycle of Land Acquisition and Cadastre, including support to field activities with the integration of information collected in the field, the development of multi-criteria analysis information, monitoring all information in the exploration stage, and the automated generation of outputs. The benefits are evident at the level of operational efficiency, including tools that enable process integration and standardization of procedures, facilitate analysis and quality control and maximize performance in the acquisition, maintenance and management of registration information and expropriation (expropriation projects). Therefore, the implemented system achieves levels of robustness, comprehensiveness, openness, scalability and reliability suitable for a structural platform. The resultant solution, FBSIC, is a fit-for-purpose cadastre information system rooted in the field of railway infrastructures. FBSIC integrating nature of allows: to accomplish present needs and scale to meet future services; to collect, maintain, manage and share all information in one common platform, and transform it into knowledge; to relate with other platforms; to increase accuracy and productivity of business processes related with land property management.

Information system evolvability, feedback and pattern languages

Information systems for business are frequently heavily reliant on software. Two important feedback-related effects of embedding software in a business process are identified. First, the system dynamics of the software maintenance process can become complex, particularly in the number and scope of the feedback loops. Secondly, responsiveness to feedback can have a big effect on the evolvability of the information system. Ways have been explored to provide an effective mechanism for improving the quality of feedback between stakeholders during software maintenance. Understanding can be improved by using representations of information systems that are both service-based and architectural in scope. The conflicting forces that encourage change or stability can be resolved using patterns and pattern languages. A morphology of information systems pattern languages has been described to facilitate the identification and reuse of patterns and pattern languages. The kind of planning process needed to achieve consensus on a system's evolution is also considered.

Estimation of average annual daily traffic (AADT) using geographically weighted regression (GWR) method and geographic information system (GIS)

Annual average daily traffic (AADT) is important information for many transportation planning, design, operation, and maintenance activities, as well as for the allocation of highway funds. Many studies have attempted AADT estimation using factor approach, regression analysis, time series, and artificial neural networks. However, these methods are unable to account for spatially variable influence of independent variables on the dependent variable even though it is well known that to many transportation problems, including AADT estimation, spatial context is important. ^ In this study, applications of geographically weighted regression (GWR) methods to estimating AADT were investigated. The GWR based methods considered the influence of correlations among the variables over space and the spatially non-stationarity of the variables. A GWR model allows different relationships between the dependent and independent variables to exist at different points in space. In other words, model parameters vary from location to location and the locally linear regression parameters at a point are affected more by observations near that point than observations further away. ^ The study area was Broward County, Florida. Broward County lies on the Atlantic coast between Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties. In this study, a total of 67 variables were considered as potential AADT predictors, and six variables (lanes, speed, regional accessibility, direct access, density of roadway length, and density of seasonal household) were selected to develop the models. ^ To investigate the predictive powers of various AADT predictors over the space, the statistics including local r-square, local parameter estimates, and local errors were examined and mapped. The local variations in relationships among parameters were investigated, measured, and mapped to assess the usefulness of GWR methods. ^ The results indicated that the GWR models were able to better explain the variation in the data and to predict AADT with smaller errors than the ordinary linear regression models for the same dataset. Additionally, GWR was able to model the spatial non-stationarity in the data, i.e., the spatially varying relationship between AADT and predictors, which cannot be modeled in ordinary linear regression. ^

Data-stream driven Fuzzy-granular approaches for system maintenance

Intelligent systems are currently inherent to the society, supporting a synergistic human-machine collaboration. Beyond economical and climate factors, energy consumption is strongly affected by the performance of computing systems. The quality of software functioning may invalidate any improvement attempt. In addition, data-driven machine learning algorithms are the basis for human-centered applications, being their interpretability one of the most important features of computational systems. Software maintenance is a critical discipline to support automatic and life-long system operation. As most software registers its inner events by means of logs, log analysis is an approach to keep system operation. Logs are characterized as Big data assembled in large-flow streams, being unstructured, heterogeneous, imprecise, and uncertain. This thesis addresses fuzzy and neuro-granular methods to provide maintenance solutions applied to anomaly detection (AD) and log parsing (LP), dealing with data uncertainty, identifying ideal time periods for detailed software analyses. LP provides deeper semantics interpretation of the anomalous occurrences. The solutions evolve over time and are general-purpose, being highly applicable, scalable, and maintainable. Granular classification models, namely, Fuzzy set-Based evolving Model (FBeM), evolving Granular Neural Network (eGNN), and evolving Gaussian Fuzzy Classifier (eGFC), are compared considering the AD problem. The evolving Log Parsing (eLP) method is proposed to approach the automatic parsing applied to system logs. All the methods perform recursive mechanisms to create, update, merge, and delete information granules according with the data behavior. For the first time in the evolving intelligent systems literature, the proposed method, eLP, is able to process streams of words and sentences. Essentially, regarding to AD accuracy, FBeM achieved (85.64+-3.69)%; eGNN reached (96.17+-0.78)%; eGFC obtained (92.48+-1.21)%; and eLP reached (96.05+-1.04)%. Besides being competitive, eLP particularly generates a log grammar, and presents a higher level of model interpretability.

[evaluation Of Data On Live Birth Certificates From The Information System On Live Births (sinasc) In Campinas, São Paulo, 2009].

To assess the completeness and reliability of the Information System on Live Births (Sinasc) data. A cross-sectional analysis of the reliability and completeness of Sinasc's data was performed using a sample of Live Birth Certificate (LBC) from 2009, related to births from Campinas, Southeast Brazil. For data analysis, hospitals were grouped according to category of service (Unified National Health System, private or both), 600 LBCs were randomly selected and the data were collected in LBC-copies through mothers and newborns' hospital records and by telephone interviews. The completeness of LBCs was evaluated, calculating the percentage of blank fields, and the LBCs agreement comparing the originals with the copies was evaluated by Kappa and intraclass correlation coefficients. The percentage of completeness of LBCs ranged from 99.8%-100%. For the most items, the agreement was excellent. However, the agreement was acceptable for marital status, maternal education and newborn infants' race/color, low for prenatal visits and presence of birth defects, and very low for the number of deceased children. The results showed that the municipality Sinasc is reliable for most of the studied variables. Investments in training of the professionals are suggested in an attempt to improve system capacity to support planning and implementation of health activities for the benefit of maternal and child population.

Geographical Distribution Of The Association Between El Niño South Oscillation And Dengue Fever In The Americas: A Continental Analysis Using Geographical Information System-based Techniques.

El Niño South Oscillation (ENSO) is one climatic phenomenon related to the inter-annual variability of global meteorological patterns influencing sea surface temperature and rainfall variability. It influences human health indirectly through extreme temperature and moisture conditions that may accelerate the spread of some vector-borne viral diseases, like dengue fever (DF). This work examines the spatial distribution of association between ENSO and DF in the countries of the Americas during 1995-2004, which includes the 1997-1998 El Niño, one of the most important climatic events of 20(th) century. Data regarding the South Oscillation index (SOI), indicating El Niño-La Niña activity, were obtained from Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The annual DF incidence (AIy) by country was computed using Pan-American Health Association data. SOI and AIy values were standardised as deviations from the mean and plotted in bars-line graphics. The regression coefficient values between SOI and AIy (rSOI,AI) were calculated and spatially interpolated by an inverse distance weighted algorithm. The results indicate that among the five years registering high number of cases (1998, 2002, 2001, 2003 and 1997), four had El Niño activity. In the southern hemisphere, the annual spatial weighted mean centre of epidemics moved southward, from 6° 31' S in 1995 to 21° 12' S in 1999 and the rSOI,AI values were negative in Cuba, Belize, Guyana and Costa Rica, indicating a synchrony between higher DF incidence rates and a higher El Niño activity. The rSOI,AI map allows visualisation of a graded surface with higher values of ENSO-DF associations for Mexico, Central America, northern Caribbean islands and the extreme north-northwest of South America.

Thermodynamic information system for diagnosis and prognosis of power plant operation condition

A thermodynamic information system for diagnosis and prognosis of an existing power plant was developed. The system is based on an analytic approach that informs the current thermodynamic condition of all cycle components, as well as the improvement that can be obtained in the cycle performance by the elimination of the discovered anomalies. The effects induced by components anomalies and repairs in other components efficiency, which have proven to be one of the main drawbacks in the diagnosis and prognosis analyses, are taken into consideration owing to the use of performance curves and corrected performance curves together with the thermodynamic data collected from the distributed control system. The approach used to develop the system is explained, the system implementation in a real gas turbine cogeneration combined cycle is described and the results are discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Accessibility to general practitioners in rural South Australia - A case study using geographic information system technology

Objective: To demonstrate the potential of GIS (geographic information system) technology and ARIA (Accessibility/Remoteness Index for Australia) as tools for medical workforce and health service planning in Australia. Design: ARIA is an index of remoteness derived by measuring road distance between populated localities and service centres. A continuous variable of remoteness from 0 to 12 is generated for any location in Australia. We created a GIS, with data on location of general practitioner services in non-metropolitan South Australia derived from the database of HUMPS (Rural Undergraduate Medical Placement System), and estimated, for the 1170 populated localities in South Australia, the accessibility/inaccessibility of the 109 identified GP services. Main outcome measures: Distance from populated locality to GP services. Results: Distance from populated locality to GP service ranged from 0 to 677 km (mean, 58 km). In all, 513 localities (43%) had a GP service within 20 km (for the majority this meant located within the town). However, for 173 populated localities (15%), the nearest GP service was more than 80 km away. There was a strong correlation between distance to GP service and ARIA value for each locality (0.69; P<0.05). Conclusions: GP services are relatively inaccessible to many rural South Australian communities. There is potential for GIS and for ARIA to contribute to rational medical workforce and health service planning. Adding measures of health need and more detailed data on types and extent of GP services provided will allow more sophisticated planning.

HIV heterogeneity and proximity of homestead to roads in rural South Africa: an exploration using a geographical information system

OBJECTIVE To describe heterogeneity of HIV prevalence among pregnant women in Hlabisa health district, South Africa and to correlate this with proximity of homestead to roads. METHODS HIV prevalence measured through anonymous surveillance among pregnant women and stratified by local village clinic. Polygons were created around each clinic, assuming women attend the clinic nearest their home. A geographical information system (GIS) calculated the mean distance from homesteads in each clinic catchment to nearest primary (1 degrees) and to nearest primary or secondary (2 degrees) road. RESULTS We found marked HIV heterogeneity by clinic catchment (range 19-31% (P < 0.001). A polygon plot demonstrated lower HIV prevalence in catchments remote from 1 degrees roads. Mean distance from homesteads to nearest 1 degrees or 2 degrees road varied by clinic catchment from 1623 to 7569 m. The mean distance from homesteads to a 1 degrees or 2 degrees road for each clinic catchment was strongly correlated with HIV prevalence (r = 0.66; P = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS The substantial HIV heterogeneity in this district is closely correlated with proximity to a 1 degrees or 2 degrees road. GIS is a powerful tool to demonstrate and to start to analyse this observation. Further research is needed to better understand this relationship both at ecological and individual levels, and to develop interventions to reduce the spread of HIV infection.

A Web-Based geographical information system prototype on Portuguese traditional food products

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Finding a school technological partner: a multicriteria method for school information system producer selection

The choice of an information systems is a critical factor of success in an organization's performance, since, by involving multiple decision-makers, with often conflicting objectives, several alternatives with aggressive marketing, makes it particularly complex by the scope of a consensus. The main objective of this work is to make the analysis and selection of a information system to support the school management, pedagogical and administrative components, using a multicriteria decision aid system – MMASSITI – Multicriteria Method- ology to Support the Selection of Information Systems/Information Technologies – integrates a multicriteria model that seeks to provide a systematic approach in the process of choice of Information Systems, able to produce sustained recommendations concerning the decision scope. Its application to a case study has identi- fied the relevant factors in the selection process of school educational and management information system and get a solution that allows the decision maker’ to compare the quality of the various alternatives.