A dynamic query scheduling framework for distributed and evolving information systems

We consider the evolution of information systems towards sophisticated knowledge systems. Investigating the key concepts for information and knowledge systems from a logical point of view, we show that the two most fundamental operations are inference (query answering) and update (‘data manipulation’). They have to be available in every system. Advanced information systems may allow for negative, disjunctive and uncertain information. Even more advanced systems (which might be no longer called information but knowledge systems) will allow for sophisticated reasoning services, such as deductive query answering, active input processing, representing actions, generating explanations, diagnoses and plans.

Evolution is characteristic to every Information System (IS) because of continuing changes in its environment. It is also a necessary condition for guaranteeing IS fitness to the organizational needs and requirements. Nonetheless, each IS evolution presents several risks towards its sustainability and further changes, and steering IS evolution is indispensable for any organization. In this work we propose a framework that aims to guide the actors responsible for IS evolution steering. The framework allows to reduce the uncertainty, which is inherent in the IS evolution, by providing the information necessary to realise IS evolution activities and to simulate their impact. It is composed of several conceptual models representing different IS dimensions (information, activities, regulation). In this paper we detail the IS Steering Metamodel (IS-SM), which is the main element of our framework.

In the future, we are likely to see a tremendous need for context-aware applications which adapt to available context information such as physical surroundings, network, or system conditions. We aim to provide a fundamental support for these applications - a real-time context information collection service. This service delivers the right context information to the right user at the right time. The complexity of providing the real-time context information service arises from 1) the dynamically changing status of information sources, 2) the diverse user requirements in terms of data accuracy and service latency, and 3) constantly changing system conditions. In this paper, we take into consideration these dynamics and focus on addressing the trade-offs between timeliness, accuracy, and cost for information collection in distributed real-time environments. We propose a middleware-based approach to enable a judicious composition of services for accuracy-aware scheduling and cost-aware database maintenance. Specifically, we characterize the problem in terms of quality-of-service satisfaction (QoSSat), quality-of-data satisfaction (QoDSat), and cost. We propose a middleware framework for the real-time information collection process, where the information mediator coordinates and facilitates communication between information sources and consumers. We design a family of algorithms for real-time request scheduling, request servicing, and directory service maintenance to be implemented at the mediator to support QoSSat and QoDSat. Our studies indicate that the composition of our proposed scheduling algorithm and directory service maintenance policy can improve the overall efficiency of the system. We also observe that the proposed policies perform very well as the system scales in the number of information sources and consumer requests

Patients who make high-quality medical decisions are more likely to have better health outcomes. One of the central components to a high-quality decision is the well-informed manner in which it is made. However, there has been little research studying patient behaviors regarding how they seek information about treatments for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We conducted a pilot study surveying beneficiaries of a health plan who had 2 or more visits coded for RA. Of 799 invited subjects, 101 (13%) completed interviews. Participants answered a questionnaire regarding sources of RA treatment information and their usefulness, sociodemographic items, and scales regarding their attitudes toward providers and medicines. Outcomes of interest included the average number of sources described (range, 0-10) and the usefulness for each source (1 "not useful" and 4 "extremely useful"). Methotrexate was the most widely used medication reported. The mean (SD) number of information sources used was 5.0 (2.1). Participants rated the information they used with a mean (SD) score of 2.8 (0.7). We found no strong patient correlates of these outcomes when compared with the aforementioned domains. Of the 98% of the total sample who referred to a rheumatologist for information, 87% rated the source as extremely useful. The Internet was the most frequently used nonprovider source, with 63% of subjects reporting use, and a mean (SD) usefulness rating of 3.0 (1.03). In this pilot study, participants used many sources of information regarding treatment decisions for RA. Ninety-eight percent of the participants used rheumatologists as a source and found them extremely useful. Of the nonprovider sources, the Internet was most common, and 40% found it very useful.

With global megatrends like automation and digitization changing societies, economies, and ultimately businesses, shift is underway, disrupting current business plans and entire industries. Business actors have accordingly developed an instinctive fear of economic decline and realized the necessity of taking adequate measures to keep up with the times. Increasingly, organizations find themselves in an evolve-or-die race with their success depending on their capability of recognizing the requirements for serving a specific market and adopting those requirements accurately into their own structure. In the transportation and logistics sector, emerging technological and information challenges are reflected in fierce competition from within and outside. Especially, processes and supporting information systems are put to the test when technological innovation start to spread among an increasing number of actors and promise higher performance or lower cost. As to warehousing, technological innovation continuously finds its way into the premises of the heterogeneous warehouse operators, leading to modifications and process improvements. Such innovation can be at the side of the hardware equipment or in the form of new software solutions. Particularly, the fourth industrial revolution is globally underway. Same applies to Future Internet technologies, a European term for innovative software technologies and the research upon them. On the one hand, new hardware solutions using robotics, cyber-physical systems and sensors, and advanced materials are constantly put to widespread use. On the other one, software solutions based on intensified digitization including new and more heterogeneous sources of information, higher volumes of data, and increasing processing speed are also becoming an integral part of popular information systems for warehouses, particularly for warehouse management systems. With a rapidly and dynamically changing environment and new legal and business requirements towards processes in the warehouses and supporting information systems, new performance levels in terms of quality and cost of service are to be obtained. For this purpose, new expectations of the functionality of warehouse management systems need to be derived. While introducing wholly new solutions is one option, retrofitting and adapting existing systems to the new requirements is another one. The warehouse management systems will need to deal with more types of data from new and heterogeneous data sources. Also, it will need to connect to innovative machines and represent their respective operating principles. In both scenarios, systems need to satisfy the demand for new features in order to remain capable of processing information and acting and, thereby, to optimize logistics processes in real time. By taking a closer look at an industrial use case of a warehouse management system, opportunities of incorporating such new requirements are presented as the system adapts to new data types, increased processing speed, and new machines and equipment used in the warehouse. Eventually, the present paper proves the adaptability of existing warehouse management systems to the requirements of the new digital world, and viable methods to adopt the necessary renovation processes.

BackgroundFor 7 years, the visceral surgery department (VSD) has benefited from Best Possible Medication Histories (BPMH) at hospital admission. For now BPMH are performed by a pharmacy student, validated by...

Complex artefacts, such as information systems (IS), have multiple aspects and components: business processes, databases, architecture, or software. It is generally agreed that all these should be kept consistent over time. One major issue to preserve consistency is when required evolutions affect multiple aspects or components of the system at the same time. As each evolution requirement can have an impact onto several projects, teams, engineering domains, viewpoints, or system components, the question of "is the consistency link preserved by this requirement?" has to be continuously raised. This paper presents: (i) a framework that defines challenges for RE caused by coevolution; and (ii) an approach to solve some of these RE-related coevolution challenges. The framework was developed based on our experience in three IS evolution projects: ERP installation, baselining of an IS across subsidiaries, and business process improvement driven IS evolution. Each challenge identified in the framework is discussed with respect to our experience with practice and state of the art methods. Our approach was developed for the business process improvement driven IS evolution project, then generalised for the IS baselining project. The approach is presented, and then illustrated with the case of the latter project.

This study uses diffusion theory and opinion leadership to investigate sources of facts and advice used in farmer decision-making concerning soil conservation practices. The importance of interpersonal interactions and the role of new communication technologies, including the Internet, email and the cellular telephone, as well as practical inquiry into which persons, organizations and/or media sources are important opinion leaders in the area of implementation of soil conservation were investigated. Information sources used in actual past behavior changes and information sources likely to be influential in a future hypothetical scenario were assessed. Data for this study were gathered through a random sample mail survey of Grant County, Wisconsin rural landowners. A return rate of 48% yielded 268 usable surveys. Findings reveal that farmers use a number of sources for information concerning the adoption of soil conservation innovations, with ‘neighbors and other farmers,’ ‘government agency staff’ and ‘magazines and other publications’ being the most frequently used and the most important sources throughout the decision process. Perceived trustworthiness of a source was found to be a significant predictor of perceived source influence and although 40% of respondents reported that they are not Internet users, the Internet enjoys a relatively highperceived trustworthiness among all respondents. Among Internet users, the Internet had a very high level of trust—ranking third behind ‘government agency staff’ and ‘neighbors and other farmers.’

It is generally acknowledged that integration of large-scale information systems is a challenging problem. A domain that particularly encounters this problem currently is healthcare, where information systems tend to be heterogeneous and in constant evolution. A particular need for health professionals is the ability to ask medical questions across a heterogeneous information system, then visualise and analyse the results in a synthetic and coherent manner. In this paper, we present a case study of a heterogeneous data source search meta-engine framework, based on category theory. This framework addresses the problem of cross-interrogation of heterogeneous data sources, such as relational database management systems, documentary database systems, or collections of documents. It additionally attempts to address the problem of constant evolution of such information systems. The framework has been successfully applied to the biomedical data of the medical information system at the Institut Curie, a major French cancer care centre. Different aspects of this work are illustrated, such as the mathematical foundations of the Prométhée framework, the methodology used for its implementation, and the impact that Prométhée has encountered since its deployment in a hospital environment.KeywordsCategory TheoryMedical Information SystemConstant EvolutionRelational Database Management SystemHeterogeneous Data SourceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Web has accumulated a rich source of information, such as text, image, rating, etc, which represent different aspects of user preferences. However, the heterogeneous nature of this information makes it difficult for recommender systems to leverage in a unified framework to boost the performance. Recently, the rapid development of representation learning techniques provides an approach to this problem. By translating the various information sources into a unified representation space, it becomes possible to integrate heterogeneous information for informed recommendation.

Information seeking using computer based systems is fundamentally an interactive process. Several factors including user's cognitive capabilities and limitations, work domain and task constraints, and the content and form of the electronic medium influence the information seeking process. Advances in computer based systems development must be integrated with a comprehensive understanding of the information seeking and synthesis behaviour in the context of information use. The article discusses theoretical and practical issues associated with human centered design of effective electronic systems to support search, retrieval, and synthesis of distributed information sources.

There is an explosion in the amount of information that is accessible by the public, especially with the advent of the World Wide Web. With this information only expected to increase as time goes on, there is an obvious need for mechanisms which would allow individuals to access the right information. In the context of the Web, this can be referred to as personalization of the information source(s). The author touches upon various issues and technologies, as well as their interrelationships. These include interaction between agents, cooperation amongst heterogeneous information sources, and coordinating the activities of these agents using workflow.

This study investigated the association of COVID-19 booster vaccine hesitancy with health literacy (HL) and the number of information sources used in Japan. Using data from a longitudinal survey of 6601 vaccinated participants, multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (AORs). Of the participants, 6.6% were hesitant toward the booster. Higher HL was associated with lower odds of hesitancy (AOR = 0.85, 95% CI = 0.77-0.94). Of its subscales, communicative (AOR = 0.86, 95% CI = 0.79-0.95) and critical (AOR = 0.90, 95% CI = 0.83-0.99) literacy were significantly associated with lower hesitancy, but functional literacy was not. Using more diverse information sources (>3 vs. ≤3) was also associated with lower hesitancy (AOR = 0.70, 95% CI = 0.57-0.87). Higher communicative and critical HL and the use of diverse information sources were associated with lower booster hesitancy. Enhancing these capabilities may be a key strategy for increasing vaccination rates.

Network coding has generated much interest in information and coding theory, networking, wireless communications, cryptography, and computer science in the past few years. Consider a point-to-point communication network on which a number of information sources are mulitcast to certain sets of destination nodes. The problem is to characterize the maximum possible thruputs. Contrary to one's intuition, network coding theory reveals that it is in general not optimal to regard the information to be multicast as a fluid which can simply be routed or replicated. Rather, by employing coding at the nodes, bandwidth can in general be saved. Cai and Yeung introduced the model of secure network coding which subsumes both secret sharing and the wiretapped channel II. In this model, an information source is multicast from a source node to a set of destination nodes. A collection of subsets of the channels in the network is given, and a wiretapper is allowed to access any one (but not more than one) of these subsets without being able to obtain any information about the information source. This talk is based on the paper as well as the subsequent papers. In particular, we will discuss a construction of secure network codes which is optimal for the special case that the wiretapper may choose to access any subset of channels of a fixed size.

Disagreement among drug compendia on inclusion and ratings of drug-drug interactions