Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Information Systems And Health Care Xiii: Examining The Critical Requirements, Design Approaches And Evaluation Methods For A Public Health Emergency Response System, Ann L. Fruhling

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Research pertaining to emergency response systems has accelerated over the past few years, particularly since 9/11 events, and more recently due to Hurricane Katrina and concern over a potential of an avian flu pandemic. This study examines the requirements that are the most demanding with respect to software and hardware, and the associated design strategies for a public health emergency response system (ERS) for electronic laboratory diagnostics consultation. In addition, this study illustrates ways to evaluate the design decisions.

An important goal of a public health ERS is to improve the communication and notification of life-threatening diseases and harmful agents. …

Using The Census Bureau's Public Use Microdata For Migration Analysis, Mark Salling, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

Using the Census Bureau's Public Use Microdata for Migration Analysis, Proceedings of the annual conference of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, Vancouver, BC, Canada, September 2006, pp.336-348.

Testcase Tool, John Louis Van Hemert

Honors Program Theses

The title of my project is "TestCASE Tool." TestCASE Tool is the name, or label, I assigned to the software application that I created for this project. The application is a Tool for storing and reporting data in software testing projects. A Test Case consists of a planned action within a system, the expected result of that action and an assessment of whether the expected result occurred. The acronym, CASE, stands for Computer Aided Software Engineering, which is the software tool genre to which my application belongs.

The Challenges Of Itil Implementations, Jason Gray

Theses : Honours

Originating from the UK, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an IT Service Management framework whose adoption is rapidly spreading throughout Canada, Netherlands, South Africa, India, USA, and Australia. Promoted as a collection of "Best Practices" in IT service management, ITIL is gaining a reputation as a "silver bullet" to IT Service Management woes and is now .gaining popularity amongst IT vendors and leaders of best practices worldwide. Increased IT productivity, IT accountability, increased compliance and reduced IT costs, are just some of the promised list of benefits. More and more organisations are plam1ing to embark on ITIL implementations as …

Grid-Partition Index: A Hybrid Approach To Nearest-Neighbor Queries In Wireless Location-Based Services, Baihua Zheng, Jianliang Xu, Wang-Chien Lee, Dik Lun Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional nearest-neighbor (NN) search is based on two basic indexing approaches: object-based indexing and solution-based indexing. The former is constructed based on the locations of data objects: using some distance heuristics on object locations. The latter is built on a precomputed solution space. Thus, NN queries can be reduced to and processed as simple point queries in this solution space. Both approaches exhibit some disadvantages, especially when employed for wireless data broadcast in mobile computing environments. In this paper, we introduce a new index method, called the grid-partition index, to support NN search in both ondemand access and periodic broadcast …

In-Network Join Processing For Sensor Networks, Hai Yu, Ee Peng Lim, Jun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advances in hardware and wireless technologies have led to sensor networks consisting of large number of sensors capable of gathering and processing data collectively. Query processing on these sensor networks has to consider various inherent constraints. While simple queries such as select and aggregate queries in wireless sensor networks have been addressed in the literature, the processing of join queries in sensor networks remains to be investigated. In this paper, we present a synopsis join strategy for evaluating join queries in sensor networks with communication efficiency. In this strategy, instead of directly joining two relations distributed in a sensor …

Efficient Mining Of Group Patterns From User Movement Data, Yida Wang, Ee Peng Lim, San-Yih Hwang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new approach to derive groupings of mobile users based on their movement data. We assume that the user movement data are collected by logging location data emitted from mobile devices tracking users. We formally define group pattern as a group of users that are within a distance threshold from one another for at least a minimum duration. To mine group patterns, we first propose two algorithms, namely AGP and VG-growth. In our first set of experiments, it is shown when both the number of users and logging duration are large, AGP and VG-growth are …

Systems Analysis & Design: An Essential Part Of Is Education, Albert L. Harris, Michael Lang, Briony J. Oates, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Systems analysis and design has been as critical building block in Information Systems (IS) education since the inception of the IS major. Whether it is taught using the traditional or "structured approach or the object-oriented approach, it exposes students to the different methods, tools, and techniques used in developing new systems, develops students analytical and problem-solving skills, teaches fact-finding and data gathering techniques, and provides teamwork skills. All of these are valuable skills for systems analysts. This paper introduces the reader of this special issue on systems analysis and design education to the issue, discusses the two approaches to teaching …

Using Social Development Lenses To Understand E-Government Development, Keng Siau, Y. Long

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As governments at different levels and all around the world are increasingly using the Web to enhance and improve their services, understanding e-government development and exploring factors that affect e-government development have become important research topics. The purpose of this research is to investigate factors explaining e-government development in terms of social development lenses. Based on growth and regional development theories, the paper hypothesizes that income level, development status, and region are three factors that differentiate e- government development in countries. Group comparison tests are conducted using secondary data from the United Nations and the United Nations Development Programme. The …

Advances In Data Modeling Research, G. Allen, A. Bajaj, V. Khatri, S. Ram, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we summarize the discussions of the panel on "Advances in Data Modeling Research," held at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in 2005. We focus on four primary areas where data modeling research offers rich opportunities: spatio-temporal semantics, genome research, ontological analysis and empirical evaluation of existing models. We highlight past work in each area and also discuss open questions, with a view to promoting future research in the overall data modeling area.

Using Cognitive Mapping Techniques To Supplement Uml And Up In Information Requirements Determination, Keng Siau, Tan Xin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information requirements determination is a critical task in system development projects. Many human issues may hinder the efforts to accurately capture and clearly understand users' information requirements. In this paper, we review the cognitive underpinnings of some human issues, which are discussed in existing literature and relevant to information requirements determination. We then propose the use of cognitive mapping techniques in the process of information requirements determination. Three widely used cognitive mapping techniques - causal mapping, semantic mapping, and concept mapping – are briefly introduced in this article. A case is used to illustrate how to use these cognitive mapping …

E-Healthcare In Abc County Health Department (Abcchd): Trade-Offs Analysis And Evaluation, Keng Siau, Hwee-Joo Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The issue of privacy stirred a tumultuous uproar when the ABC County Health Department (ABCCHD) was planning for an e-Healthcare system that utilized information technology to streamline the administration process of patients. ABCCHD had hired a software vendor, Info-Health, a company that specialized in information system development for the healthcare industry to help in the project. The privacy of patients with Sexually Transmitted Diseases/Human Immunity System was a thorny issue in the implementation of the e-Healthcare system. A trade-off between privacy and cost was discussed and debated. Three alternatives, with varying degrees of privacy and cost, were considered.

The Roles Of Digital Libraries In Teaching And Learning Geography, Chew-Hung Chang, John Hedberg, Tiong-Sa Teh, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adopting a problem-centred approach helps students to learn Geography more effectively as they are able to identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and they learn to associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of learning Geography, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (in Clark’s terminology, 1983) needs to be better understood. An obvious affordance of the digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. This paper describes a developmental project to build …

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines [2006 Edition], Michael O. Leavitt, Ben Shneiderman, Robert W. Bailey, Carol Barnum, John Bosley, Barbara Chaparro, Joseph Dumas, Melody Y. Ivory, Bonnie John, Hal Miller-Jacobs, Sanjay J. Koyani, James R. Lewis, Stanley Page, Judith Ramey, Janice (Ginny) Redish, Jean Scholtz, Steve Wigginton, Cari A. Wolfson, Larry E. Wood, Don Zimmerman

Publications

The new edition of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines. These guidelines reflect HHS’ commitment to identifying innovative, research-based approaches that result in highly responsive and easy-to-use Web sites for the public.

These guidelines help move us in that direction by providing practical, yet authoritative, guidance on a broad range of Web design and communication issues. Having access to the best available research helps to ensure we make the right decisions the first time around and reduces the possibility of errors and costly mistakes.

A Dyadic Composition To Foster Virtual Team Effectiveness: An Experimental Study, Gamze Karayaz

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The importance of effectiveness for virtual teamwork continues to gain momentum as technology and globalization of work accelerate. The implementation of virtual teams provides one approach to enhance competitiveness, overcoming the disadvantages of space and time differences through collaborative technologies. The influence of structure to virtual team performance has not been clearly established in the literature. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the effectiveness of a dyad structured approach for virtual teams using a quasi-experimental research design.

This research investigated four questions related to the influence of structure on virtual team effectiveness related to task performance, communication …

Intelligent Resource Discovery Using Ontology-Based Resource Profiles, J. Steven Hughes, Dan Crichton, Sean Kelly, Chris A. Mattmann, Jerry Crichton, Thuy Tran

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Successful resource discovery across heterogeneous repositories is highly dependent on the semantic and syntactic homogeneity of the associated resource descriptions in each repository. Ideally, consistent resource descriptions are easily extracted from each repository, expressed using standard syntactic and semantic structures, and managed and accessed within a distributed, flexible, and scalable software framework. In practice however, seldom do all three of these elements exist. To help address this situation, the Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed an extensible, standards-based resource description scheme that provides the necessary description and management facilities for the discovery of …

Foreign Migration To The Cleveland-Akron-Lorain Metropolitan Area From 1995 To 2000, Mark Salling, Ellen Cyran

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This report is one of a series on migration to and from the region using the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census of Population and Housing and provides a description of foreign migrants moving to the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain (CAL) Consolidated Metropolitan Area (CMSA) from 1995 to 2000.* The report identifies the countries of origin of migrants and compares the demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics of the foreign migrants to the CAL with other groups, including foreign migrants to Ohio and the nation, and, at times, to domestic migrants to and from the CAL.

Openws-Transaction: Enabling Reliable Web Service Transactions, Ivan Vasquez, John A. Miller, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

OpenWS-Transaction is an open source middleware that enables Web services to participate in a distributed transaction as prescribed by the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction set of specifications. Central to the framework are the Coordinator and Participant entities, which can be integrated into existing services by introducing minimal changes to application code. OpenWS-Transaction allows transaction members to recover their original state in case of operational failure by leveraging techniques in logical logging and recovery at the application level. Depending on transaction style, system recovery may involve restoring key application variables and replaying uncommitted database activity. Transactions are assumed to be defined in …

Demonstrating Dynamic Configuration And Execution Of Web Processes, Karthik Gomadam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web processes are next generation workflows on the web, created using Web services. In this paper we demonstrate the METEOR-S Configuration and Execution Environment (MCEE) system. It will illustrate the capabilities of the system to a) Discover partners b) Optimize partner selection using constraint analysis, c) Perform interaction protocol and data mediation. A graphical execution monitor to monitor the various phases of execution will be used to demonstrate various aspects of the system.

Enterprise Systems Manager, Edward Aractingi

IT Research

Presentation on the need of remote systems administration.

Discovering Informative Connection Subgraphs In Multi-Relational Graphs, Cartic Ramakrishnan, William Milnor, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering patterns in graphs has long been an area of interest. In most approaches to such pattern discovery either quantitative anomalies, frequency of substructure or maximum flow is used to measure the interestingness of a pattern. In this paper we introduce heuristics that guide a subgraph discovery algorithm away from banal paths towards more "informative" ones. Given an RDF graph a user might pose a question of the form: "What are the most relevant ways in which entity X is related to entity Y?" the response to which is a subgraph connecting X to Y. We use our heuristics to …

A Framework To Learn Bayesian Network From Changing, Multiple-Source Biomedical Data, Li G., Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Structure learning in Bayesian network is a big issue. Many efforts have tried to solve this problem and quite a few algorithms have been proposed. However, when we attempt to apply the existing methods to microarray data, there are three main challenges: 1) there are many variables in the data set, 2) the sample size is small, and 3) microarray data are changing from experiment to experiment and new data are available quickly. To address these three problems, we assume that the major functions of a kind of cells do not change too much in different experiments, and propose a …

Improving The Quality Of Conceptual Modeling Using Cognitive Mapping Techniques, Keng Siau, X. Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conceptual modeling involves the understanding and communication between system analysts and end-users. Many factors may affect the quality of conceptual modeling processes as well as the models per se. Human cognition plays a pivotal role in understanding these factors and cognitive mapping techniques are effective tools to elicit and represent human cognition. In this paper, we look at the use of cognitive mapping techniques to improve the quality of conceptual modeling. We review frameworks on quality in conceptual modeling and examine the role of human cognition in conceptual modeling. The paper also discusses how human cognition is related to quality …

Authenticating Query Results In Data Publishing, Di Ma, Robert H. Deng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jianying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a communication-efficient authentication scheme to authenticate query results disseminated by untrusted data publishing servers. In our scheme, signatures of multiple tuples in the result set are aggregated into one and thus the communication overhead incurred by the signature keeps constant. Next attr-MHTs (tuple based Merkle Hash Tree) are built to further reduce the communication overhead incurred by auxiliary authentication information (AAI). Besides the property of communication-efficiency, our scheme also supports dynamic SET operations (UNION, INTERSECTION) and dynamic JOIN with immunity to reordering attack.

Webarc: Website Archival Using A Structured Approach, Ee Peng Lim, Maria Marissa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Website archival refers to the task of monitoring and storing snapshots of website(s) for future retrieval and analysis. This task is particularly important for websites that have content changing over time with older information constantly overwritten by newer one. In this paper, we propose WEBARC as a set of software tools to allow users to construct a logical structure for a website to be archived. Classifiers are trained to. determine relevant web pages and their categories, and subsequently used in website downloading. The archival schedule can be specified and executed by a scheduler. A website viewer is also developed to …

Ontoqa: Metric-Based Ontology Quality Analysis, Samir Tartir, I. Budak Arpinar, Michael Moore, Amit P. Sheth, Boanerges Aleman-Meza

Kno.e.sis Publications

As the Semantic Web gains importance for sharing knowledge on the Internet this has lead to the development and publishing of many ontologies in different domains. When trying to reuse existing ontologies into their applications, users are faced with the problem of determining if an ontology is suitable for their needs. In this paper, we introduce OntoQA, an approach that analyzes ontology schemas and their populations (i.e. knowledgebases) and describes them through a well defined set of metrics. These metrics can highlight key characteristics of an ontology schema as well as its population and enable users to make an informed …

A Software Development Environment For Building Context-Aware Systems For Family Technology, Jeremiah Kenton Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to utilize existing technologies to create a development environment suitable for creating context-aware applications and systems specific to home and family living conditions. After outlining the history of context-aware applications and the challenges that face family-centric systems in this field, a development environment was implemented that solves the unique challenges that face application development for family-centric, context-aware applications. In particular, research cited in this document indicates that a browser-based user interface is the most appropriate interface for a family environment. The flexibility of the interface, as well as the familiarity of the application structure …

Semantics For Scientific Experiments And The Web: The Implicit, The Formal And The Powerful, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Optimal Adaptation In Autonomic Web Processes With Inter-Service Dependencies, Kunal Verma, Prashant Doshi, Karthik Gomadam, John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present methods for optimally adapting Web processes to exogenous events while preserving inter-service dependencies. For example, in a supply chain process, orders placed by the manufacturer may get delayed in arriving. In response to this event, the manufacturer has the choice of either waiting out the delay or changing the supplier.

Dlp Isn't So Bad After All, Peter Haase, Markus Krotzsch, York Sure, Rudi Studer, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We discuss some of the recent controversies concerning the DLP fragment of OWL. We argue that it is a meaningful fragment and can serve as a basic interoperability layer between OWL and logic programming-based ontology languages.