Causes of death and recurrence after surgery for early gastric cancer

The analysis of generalized tonic clonic seizures is usually difficult with scalp EEG due to muscle artifact. We applied Gabor Transform to evaluate 20 seizures from 8 consecutive patients admitted for video-EEG monitoring. We studied the relative intensity ratios of alpha, theta and delta bands over time. In 14/20 events we found a significant decremental activity in the delta band at the onset of the seizure indicating that this is dominated by theta and alpha bands. We conclude that GT is a useful auxiliary tool in the analysis of ictal activity that sheds light on the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms.     

LAURIN: A Distributed Digital Library of Newspaper Clippings

Among the wide range of digital libraries, an interesting, yet quite neglected, subclass is constituted by those exclusively dealing with newspaper clippings. Compared with book–oriented digital libraries, clipping libraries are more difficult to seize, since they are wide and unstructured, and the subjects and content of a clipping are completely heterogeneous. LAURIN is an EU–funded project involving seventeen participants from several countries, including two software companies and a large group of libraries, whose main purpose is to set up a network of digitalized newspaper clipping archives that can be easily accessed through the Internet, for searching and retrieving clippings. The project also provides the libraries with models and methodologies to be used for scanning, digitalizing, storing, indexing, and making accessible newspaper clippings. This paper concentrates on the main architectural features of the LAURIN distributed system, exposing the peculiarities deriving from the diverse users and tasks it supports.     

Lurking: an underestimated human-computer phenomenon

In this article, the authors offer their perspective about online learning. In general, we know that online learning develops through interaction and that it's a collaborative process where students actively engage in writing and reading messages among themselves and with the instructor. However, it's also well known that in any online community, not all users are equally active, and there are indeed people who never take an active part-the so-called lurkers. This article focuses on the lurkers; the authors ran extensive experiments to demonstrate whether there's a relationship between the writing and reading behavior of online students and whether active participation influences learning efficiency. An interesting related result that emerged from the study is that the effort of the instructor in terms of reading and writing posts is higher than that of the learners themselves.     

QBD*: a graphical query language with recursion

A system to query databases using diagrams as a standard user interface is proposed. The system, called Query by Diagram* (QBD*), makes use of a conceptual data model, a query language on this model, and a graphical user interface. The conceptual model is the entity-relationship model. The query language, whose expressive power allows recursive queries, supports visual interaction. The main characteristics of the interface are ease of use and the availability of a rich set of primitives for schema selection and query formulation. The expressive power of QBD* and G⁺, which are the only languages allowing recursive queries to be expressed graphically are compared     

Interacting with databases in the global information infrastructure

The growth of the global Internet is causing a dramatic change in both the kind of people who access information and the types of information itself, ranging from unstructured multimedia data to traditional record-oriented data. To cope with these new needs, the interaction techniques traditionally offered to DBMS users have to evolve and eventually integrate in a powerful interface to the global information infrastructure. In particular, from the user's point of view there is the need for both effective visualization of multimedia information and retrieval tools able to overcome the existing dichotomy between browsing and querying. This article concentrates on the mutual relationship between database querying and Internet navigation by reviewing some important contributions from different areas, such as information retrieval, database research, and visualization techniques     

A flexible video streaming system for urban traffic control

This article discusses an innovative system for traffic management that is presently under installation in the city of Valencia. Key features of the system are to exploit open source software components and use MPEG-4 video streaming over an Internet protocol. The video streaming management is particularly sophisticated, resulting in a flexible, efficient, and reliable service. Another important element is the communication network design. In this case, the main issues to address were flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance. The authors successfully addressed these issues by using a hierarchical network structure, with physical redundancy, based on spanning tree protocols. The overall system is specifically for urban traffic control, but some of its characteristics could make it easily reconfigurable to different contexts and environments.     

Emergent Semantics and Cooperation in Multi-knowledge Communities: the ESTEEM Approach

In the present global society, information has to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting users do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand. This is particularly true in P2P scenarios, where millions of autonomous users (peers) need to cooperate by sharing their resources (such as data and services). We propose the Esteem approach (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), where a comprehensive framework and a platform for data and service discovery in P2P systems are proposed, with advanced solutions for trust and quality-based data management, P2P infrastructure definition, query processing and dynamic service discovery in a context-aware scenario. In Esteem, semantic communities are built around declared interests in the form of manifesto ontologies and their autonomous nature is preserved by allowing a shared semantics to naturally emerge from the peer interactions. Inside the borders of semantic communities data and services are discovered, queried and invoked in a resource sharing scenario, where the context in which users interoperate and the trust of exchanged information are also relevant aspects to take into account.     

Pervasive Software Environments for Supporting Disaster Responses

In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front- and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers.     

From the web of data to a world of action

This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring ‘typing’ of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.