Publications

Irini Fundulaki, Evangelia Daskalaki, Melanie Herschel, Janina Saveta:
Instance Matching Benchmarks for Linked Data

The 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2014), Trento, Italy, 2014

Abstract: The widespread adoption of Semantic Web Technologies and the publication of large interrelated RDF datasets and ontologies in the Web has made the integration of data a crucial task. In particular with the increasing number of published datasets in a multitude of domains that form part of the Linked Open Data Cloud, it becomes more and more essential to identify resources that correspond to the same real world object. In this context, instance matching is of crucial importance and successful instance matching techniques will be the cornerstones towards the realization of large scale data integration. It is though essential at this point to develop, along with instance matching systems, benchmarks to determine the weak and strong points of these systems, as well as their overall quality for different use case scenarios. This tutorial aims at presenting existing instance matching benchmarks for Linked Data, in such a way that it will enhance the understanding of the Semantic Web Community on the topic. This understanding is needed in order to consider the advantages, disadvantages and limitations of the existing benchmarks and set the basis for the development of the next generation benchmarks of this kind.

Keywords: Ontology Instance Matching, Benchmarking , Linked Data

Conference Link: http://iswc2014.semanticweb.org/

Publication Link: (To be published)


Haridimos Kondylakis, Lefteris Koumakis, Stefan Rüping, Eleni Kazantzaki, Kostas Marias, Manolis Tsiknakis:
PMIR: A Personal Medical Information Recommender

Medical Informatics Europe (MIE 2014), Instanbul, Turkey, 2014

Abstract: Patients today have ample opportunities to inform themselves in the internet about their disease and possible treatments. While this type of patient empowerment is widely regarded as having a positive influence on the treatment, there exists the problem that the quality of information that can be found on online is very diverse. This paper presents a platform which will empower patient with high quality knowledge about his/her condition, and will provide intelligent and personalized recommendations, according to his/her personalized preferences and medical conditions. We also introduce the EURECA project and its vision in the field of personalized medicine and show project's approach on creating a personal medical information recommender.

Keywords: Medical Information, Recommendations, Data Mining

Conference Link: http://www.mie2014.org/


H. Kondylakis, E. Kazantzaki, L. Koumakis, I. Genitsaridi, K. Marias, A. Gorini, K. Mazzocco, G. Pravettoni, D. Burke, G. McVie and M. Tsiknakis:
Development of Interactive Empowerment services in support of personalized medicine

eCancer Medical Science Journal, 8, 400, 2014 DOI: 10.3332/ecancer.2014.398.

Abstract: In an epoch where shared decision making is gaining importance, a patient's commitment to and knowledge about his/her health condition is becoming more and more relevant. Health literacy is one of the most important factors in enhancing the involvement of patients in their care. Nevertheless, other factors can impair patient processing and understanding of health information: psychological aspects and cognitive style may affect the way patients approach, select, and retain information. This paper describes the development and validation of a short and easy to fill-out questionnaire that measures and collects psycho-cognitive information about patients, named ALGA-C. ALGA-C is a multilingual, multidevice instrument, and its validation was carried out in healthy people and breast cancer patients. In addition to the aforementioned questionnaire, a patient profiling mechanism has also been developed. The ALGA-C Profiler enables physicians to rapidly inspect each patient's individual cognitive profile and see at a glance the areas of concern. With this tool, doctors can modulate the language, vocabulary, and content of subsequent discussions with the patient, thus enabling easier understanding by the patient. This, in turn, helps the patient formulate questions and participate on an equal footing in the decision-making processes. Finally, a preview is given on the techniques under consideration for exploiting the constructed patient profile by a personal health record (PHR). Predefined rules will use a patient's profile to personalise the contents of the information presented and to customise ways in which users complete their tasks in a PHR system. This optimises information delivery to patients and makes it easier for the patient to decide what is of interest to him/her at the moment.

Keywords: Patient Empowerment, Psycho-cognitive models, Personal health record

Publication Link: http://ecancer.org/journal/8/400-development-of-interactive-empowerment-services-in-support-of-personalised-medicine.php


Haridimos Kondylakis, Dimitris Plexousakis:
Exploring RDF/S Evolution using Provenance Queries

Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web (ExploreDB), Co-located with EDBT/ICDT, 2014, Athens, Greece, 2014

Abstract: The evolution of ontologies is an undisputed necessity in current research community. The problem of understanding this evolution is a fundamental problem as, based on this understanding, maintainers of depending artifacts need to take a decision about possible changes. Moreover, as ontologies are often developed by several ontology engineers, it is also important for them to understand what changes have been made by each other. Recent research focuses on just identifying and presenting the changes from one ontology version to another. In this paper, we argue that this is not enough and that we need more fine-grained methods for understanding how the ontology evolved. To this direction, we present a module, named ProvenanceTracker, which gets as input the list of changes between two or more RDF/S ontology versions and can answer fine-grained provenance queries about ontology resources. Our module can identify when a resource was created and how. The sequence of changes that led to the creation of that specific resource can be identified and presented to the user. We evaluate the time complexity of our approach and show that it can possibly reduce the human effort spent on understanding ontology evolution.

Keywords: Ontology Evolution, Provenance

Conference Link: https://sites.google.com/site/exploredb2014/

Publication Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6701560&tag=1


Michael Schuele, Tobias Widmer, Marc Premm, Manfred Criegee-Rieck, Nilmini Wickramasinghe:
Improving Knowledge Provision for Shared Decision Making in Patient-Physician Relationships – A Multiagent Organizational Approach

Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, USA, 2014

Abstract: The paradigm of shared decision making in patientphysician relationships is well documented. Moreover, it is an integral aspect of sound patient centric healthcare delivery. Implementing such an approach within established healthcare processes has yet to be successfully realized. This void is causing problems in healthcare delivery in particular in EU countries such as Germany because knowledge sources are distributed and underlie strict privacy policies; while the lack of adequate shared decision making compromises the quality of healthcare delivery and can lead to errors and inefficient workflow. This paper serves to analyze the provision of personal guidance services for shared decision making in eHealth service networks. By doing so, we address the problem of distributed and privacy-aware knowledge sharing by the formation of agent-based organizations to represent the relationships of patients and physicians and study this problem from the perspective of multiagent systems; i.e. we develop technology enabled collaboration solutions. The efficacy of the proffered decision support system will be demonstrated by a scenario-based evaluation. We contend that such an approach will address the current void.

Link: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_47/apahome47.htm


Sandra Schaller:
Developing an individualized e-health decision support system for dementia treatment and care: The FP7 EU-Project eHealthMonitor (eHM)

ISPOR 16th Annual European Congress, 2013

Proceedings of Value in Health, Volume 16, Issue 7, Pages A551-A552, November 2013.

Keywords: eHealth, decision support, care setting, dementia, caregiver, individual needs, patient outcome, real world data

Link: http://www.valueinhealthjournal.com/article/S1098-3015%2813%2903333-0/fulltext


Vedran Hrgovcic, Robert Woitsch:
Evolution of eHealth Knowledge Spaces: Meta Model Based Approach for Semantic Lifting (Best paper award)

eChallenges 2013, October 2013, Dublin, Ireland

Link: http://www.echallenges.org/e2013/default.asp


Stefan Kirn, Johannes Murray, Marc Premm, Michael Schüle, Tobias Widmer:
Towards a Research Framework for Multiagent Organizations

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Service Science (ISSS), Leipzig, Germany, 2013

Abstract: The increasing number and variety of electronic services offered by heterogene-ous cloud service providers in value chains faces new challenges of transferring the real world business strategies to software. We address the problem of defining a set of specifi-cations for the design of a software system that exhibits the requirements and characteris-tics of the service networks' underlying organizations. This research adopts the theory of multiagent organizations to study and conceptualize a software system that acts on behalf of a cloud service provider to facilitate decision-support for complex organizational tasks. Organizational concepts from social theories of organizations have been applied to multia-gent systems in order to capture the organizational features and components of an enter-prise. The contribution of our research is a set of requirements for software systems that integrates precise mappings of appropriate terminologies and concepts.

Link: http://www.qucosa.de/recherche/frontdoor/?tx_slubopus4frontend[id]=12847


Marc Premm, Tobias Widmer, Paul Karaenke:
Bid-Price Control for the Formation of Multiagent Organisations

Proceedings of the 11th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES), Koblenz, Germany, 2013

Abstract: Agents that participate in a multiagent organisation must receive a reasonable compensation for delivering services to this organisation. Otherwise, the agents would refrain from joining the organisation due to their self-interest. Thus, the formation of multiagent organisations is no mechanical process, but subject to considerations of the involved agents. We approach this decision problem by a bid-price approach from quantity-based Revenue Management to maximise each individual agent's expected revenue. The proposed method is evaluated in a simulation with competing service provider agents. The results suggest that our approach is robust for most cases with low demand and outweighs nondiscriminating formation processes when supply exceeds demand.

Link: http://www.mates2013.de/


Lena Griebel, Brita Sedlmayr, Hans-Ulrich Prokosch, Martin Sedlmayr, Manfred Criegee-Rieck:
Schlüsselfaktoren zur erfolgreichen Einführung personalisierter elektronischer Gesundheitsdienste

58. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V. (GMDS), Lübeck. 01.-05.09.2013

Proceedings GMDS 2013: 150-151.

Link: http://www.egms.de/static/de/meetings/gmds2013/13gmds021.shtml


Lena Griebel, Brita Sedlmayr, Hans-Ulrich Prokosch, Manfred Criegee-Rieck, Martin Sedlmayr:
Key factors for a successful implementation of personalized e-health services

Poster presented at the MedInfo 2013, Copenhagen

Published in Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 2013 (192):965.

Abstract: E-health services hold many promises, e.g. the improvement of health care quality or the reduction of time and costs. However, such services can't tap their full potential if they will not be used. That's why it is essential to understand what brings potential users to accept them. In the literature many acceptance models exist that predict the usage of innovations, but none of them specifically refers to the adoption of e-health services.

Therefore we combined the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and the e-health literacy concept as an essential precondition) and enhanced the resulting model with additional factors. MEDLINE® was searched; 75 studies were included for final analysis. Apart from the UTAUT variables and e-health literacy, 10 additional factors were identified: anxiety, trust, attitude toward using, computer selfefficacy, perceived system quality, search strategy, user's condition, health specific knowledge, Internet dependency and satisfaction with medical care. Future research will include the devolvement of an instrument for assessing these factors and testing the initial research model in an international context.

Keywords: e-Health, Technology Acceptance, e-Health Literacy; Computer Literacy, Health

Document Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23920739

Conference Link: http://www.medinfo2013.dk/


Sandra Schaller:
Addressing individual caregiver needs in dementia care using eHealth: The FP7 EU-Project eHealthMonitor (eHM)

11th International Conference on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases (AD/PD) 2013

Keywords: eHealth, dementia, caregiver, individual needs, patient outcome, real world data

Link: http://adpd.ekonnect.co/ADPD_443/poster_53272/program.aspx


Tobias Widmer, Marc Premm, Paul Karaenke:
Sourcing Strategies for Energy-efficient Virtual Organisations in Cloud Computing (Best paper award)

Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Conference on Business Informatics (CBI), Vienna, Austria, 2013

Abstract: Energy efficiency is an important managerial variable in service business models. Cloud computing advocates the innovation and design of open software services. How the supply of energy-aware software services affects the outsourcing strategies of IT businesses, however, is still not known. This research is concerned with the formation of green virtual organisations (GVOs). Such GVOs foster novel business models to enable the commercialisation of "green" software services. We approach the formation problem from a game-theoretic perspective, which provides well suited models for analysing sourcing strategies of service customers. For analysing the formation, we particularly study the social welfare by examining the economic and ecological efficiency of the GVO as a whole. The contribution of our research is an agent-based GVO formation mechanism that optimises the social welfare of service providers and customers. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed artifact in a set of simulation experiments.

Link: http://cbi2013.isis.tuwien.ac.at/


Haridimos Kondylakis, Lefteris Koumakis, Manolis Tsiknakis, Kostas Marias, Eirini Genitsaridi, Gabriella Pravettoni, Alessandra Gorini, Ketti Mazzocco:
Smart recommendation services in support of patient empowerment and personalized medicine

Multimedia Services in Intelligent Environments – Recommendation Services , 2013, Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-319-00375-7_4

Abstract: Medicine is undergoing a revolution that is transforming the nature of healthcare from reactive to preventive. The changes are catalyzed by a new systems approach to disease which focuses on integrated diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease in individuals. This will replace our current mode of medicine over the coming years with a personalized predictive treatment. While the goal is clear, the path is fraught with challenges. The p-medicine EU project aspires to create an infrastructure that will facilitate this translation from current medical practice to personalized medicine. This Chapter focus on current research activities related to the design and implementation of an intelligent patient empowerment platform and its services. The focus of our work concerns the nature of the interaction between health institutions and individuals, particularly the communicative relation between physicians and patients, the ways of exchanging information, the nature of the information itself and the information assimilation capabilities of the patients. Our practical focus is the domain of cancer patients, whether in normal treatment or participating in clinical trials. The ultimate objective is to implement a smart environment (recommender system) able to act as a decision support infrastructure to support the communication, interaction and information delivery process form the doctor to the patient. A prerequisite of personalized delivery of information and intelligent guidance of the patient into his/her treatment plans is our ability to develop an appropriate and accurate profile of the user. In the p-medicine project we focus on modeling and profiling the psycho-cognitive capabilities of the patient based on questionnaires and other information features and behaviors extracted from a personal health record of the patient. In this chapter we will provide a systematic review of user profiling techniques and approaches and present our results in developing a psycho-cognitive profile of the user/patient. Subsequently we will describe the details and challenges of implementing the recommendation system and services using a combination of methods to counter-balance the intrinsic weaknesses in various algorithmic approaches. We will review solutions that have combined demographic user classes and content-based filters using implicit behavior and explicit preferences, collaborative filtering and demographic or collaborative filtering and knowledge-based filters. Finally, our approach will be fully described, which uses an adaptive user interface for the presentation of the e-consent, an ontology and a semantic web rule language to formally describe patient choices, and a reasoning engine to handle access and personalized delivery of pertinent disease related information.

Keywords: Patient empowerment, recommendation services

Link: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-00375-7_4


Fouad Zablith, Grigoris Antoniou, Mathieu d'Aquin, Giorgos Flouris, Haridimos Kondylakis , Enrico Motta, Dimitris Plexousakis , Marta Sabou:
Ontology Evolution: A Process Centric Survey.

@Knowledge Engineering Review (KER), 2013, Elsevier, pp. 1-31, doi:10.1017/S0269888913000349.

Abstract: Ontology evolution aims at maintaining an ontology up to date with respect to changes in the domain that it models or novel requirements of information systems that it enables. The recent industrial adoption of Semantic Web techniques, which rely on ontologies, has led to the increased importance of the ontology evolution research. Typical approaches to ontology evolution are designed as multiple-stage processes combining techniques from a variety of fields (e.g., natural language processing and reasoning). However, the few existing surveys on this topic lack an in-depth analysis of the various stages of the ontology evolution process. This survey extends the literature by adopting a process-centric view of ontology evolution. Accordingly, we first provide an overall process model synthesized from an overview of the existing models in the literature. Then we survey the major approaches to each of the steps in this process and conclude on future challenges for techniques aiming to solve that particular stage.

Keywords: Ontology Evolution, survey

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0269888913000349


Irini Genitsaridi, Haridimos Kondylakis, Lefteris Koumakis, Kostas Marias, Manolis Tsiknakis:
The Status of Personal Health Record Systems: Requirement Analysis and Evaluation

IEEE International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare (ICTH), 2013.

Abstract: Personal health record (PHR) systems are a constantly evolving area in the field of health information technology which motivates an ongoing research towards their evaluation in several different aspects. In this direction, we present an evaluation study on PHR systems that provides an insight on their current status with regard to functional and technical capabilities and we present our extensions to a specific PHR system. Essentially, we provide a requirement analysis that formulates our composite evaluation model which we use to perform a systems review on numerous available solutions. Then, we present our development efforts towards an intelligent PHR system.

Keywords: Personal health record, requirement analysis, intelligent PHR systems

Link: http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/icth-13/


Evaggelia Maniadi, Haridimos Kondylakis, Emmanouil G. Spanakis, Manolis Tsiknakis, Kostas Marias and Feng Dong:
Designing a digital patient avatar in the context of the MyHealthAvatar project initiative

IEEE 13th International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering (BIBE), 2013

Abstract: The digital avatar is a vision for the digital representation of personal health status in body centric views. It is designed as an integrated facility that allows collection of, access to and sharing to life-long and consistent data. A number of Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) communities have started the movement to this direction by creating a digital patient road-map and by supporting data sharing infrastructures. As an innovative concept, the impact of digital patient and avatar to personalized medicine and treatment is yet to be clear. This requires a focused and concerted effort in addressing various questions regarding user perspective, use cases and scenarios. This paper presents use cases and future scenarios realizing the vision for the digital avatar as well as architectural consideration for the envisaged platform.

Keywords: Avatars, Electronic Health Records

Conference Link: http://medlab.cc.uoi.gr/bibe2013/

Publication Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6701560&tag=1


Haridimos Kondylakis, Dimitris Plexousakis:
Ontology Evolution without Tears.

Journal of Web Semantics (2013), 19, pp. 42-58, Elsevier, DOI.

Abstract: The evolution of ontologies is an undisputed necessity in ontology-based data integration. Yet, few research efforts have focused on addressing the need to reflect the evolution of ontologies used as global schemata onto the underlying data integration systems. In most of these approaches, when ontologies change their relations with the data sources, i.e., the mappings, are recreated manually, a process which is known to be error-prone and time-consuming. In this paper, we provide a solution that allows query answering in data integration systems under evolving ontologies without mapping redefinition. This is achieved by rewriting queries among ontology versions and then forwarding them to the underlying data integration systems to be answered. To this purpose, initially, we automatically detect and describe the changes among ontology versions using a high level language of changes. Those changes are interpreted as sound global-as-view (GAV) mappings, and they are used in order to produce equivalent rewritings among ontology versions. Whenever equivalent rewritings cannot be produced we a) guide query redefinition or b) provide the best "over-approximations", i.e., the minimally-containing and minimally-generalized rewritings. We prove that our approach imposes only a small overhead over traditional query rewriting algorithms and it is modular and scalable. Finally, we show that it can greatly reduce human effort spent since continuous mapping redefinition is no longer necessary.

Keywords: Ontology Evolution, Data Integration, Query Rewriting

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570826813000024/pdfft?md5=ec6ebf7a9c4b2852651f593aec80305d&pid=1-s2.0-S1570826813000024-main.pdf


Tobias Widmer, Marc Premm, Michael Schuele, Johannes Murray and Paul Karaenke:
Distributed knowledge sharing for patient guidance eHealth services

European Conference of Information System (ECIS2013), June 2013, Utrecht, Netherlands

Abstract: The European society is characterised by high costs for its health system and a shrinking work force due to health reasons and an aging population. The acceptance of prevention strategies is disappointingly low, as prevention requires an active and continuous commitment and does not consider individual preferences of potential users. We analyse the provision of personal guidance services in eHealth service networks. The fragmentation of knowledge about personal risk factors hinders the assessment of disease risks. In addition, security and privacy protection requirements may aggravate physicians from accessing all relevant knowledge sources. We address the problem of distributed knowledge sharing by the formation of virtual organisation to represent the relationships of customers and physicians and study this problem from the perspective of multiagent systems; i.e., we represent physicians and patients by software agents. Further, we address the semantic interoperability problem by formal semantics, i.e., semantic web technologies. Therefore, we propose a software architecture that integrates multiagent systems and semantic web technologies. We evaluate the proposed artefact by demonstrating its efficacy via a scenario-based evaluation.

Keywords: knowledge sharing, personal eHealth services, multiagent systems, semantic web

Link: https://sites.google.com/site/ecis2013nl


Tobias Widmer, Marc Premm and Paul Karaenke:
Energy-aware Service Allocation for Cloud Computing

11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013), February 2013, Leipzig, Germany

Abstract: Energy efficiency has become an important managerial variable of IT management. Whereas cloud computing promises significantly higher levels of energy efficiency, it is still not known, if and to what extent outsourcing of software applications to cloud service providers affects the overall energy effi-ciency. This research is concerned with the allocation of cloud services from providers to customers and addresses the problem of energy-aware service allo-cation. The distributed nature of the problem, i.e., the multiple loci of control, entails the failure of centralised solutions. Hence, we approach this problem from a multiagent system perspective, which preserves the distributed setting of multiple service providers and customers. The contribution of our research is a game-theoretic framework for analysing service provider and customer interac-tions and a novel distributed allocation mechanism based on this framework to approximate energy-efficient, optimal allocations. We demonstrate the usefulness and efficacy of the proposed artifact in several simulation experiments.

Keywords: Game Theory, Green IT, Multiagent Systems, Negotiation, Resource Allocation.

Link: http://www.wi2013.de/


Manfred Criegee-Rieck, Hans-Ulrich Prokosch and Martin Sedlmayr:
eHealthMonitor - platform that creates a Personalized eHealth Knowledge Space (PeKS)

GMDS 2012 / INFORMATIK 2012, September 2012, Braunschweig, Germany

Link: http://www.informatik2012.de/


Haridimos Kondylakis, Lefteris Koumakis, Eirini Genitsaridi, Manolis Tsiknakis, Kostas Marias, Gabriella Pravettoni, Alessandra Gorini and Ketti Mazzocco:
IEmS: A collaborative environment for patient empowerment

IEEE 12th International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering (BIBE2012), November 2012, Larnaca, Cyprus

Abstract: Personalized medicine refers to the tailoring of treatment to the individual characteristics of a patient. Part of the personalized medicine is the patient profiling and the communicative relation between physician and patient. The ways of exchanging information, the nature of the information itself and the information assimilation capabilities of the patient can assist the physicians to have a better understanding. Taking advantage of these information sources, a smart environment could be implemented. This environment will be able to act as a decision support infrastructure to support the communication, interaction and information delivery process from the doctor to the patient. A prerequisite of personalized delivery of information and intelligent guidance of the patient into his/her treatment plans is our ability to develop an appropriate and accurate profile of the patient. In this paper we present a collaborative platform which will empower patient with knowledge about his/her health condition and at the same time it will assist the physician to have a better understanding about the patient's unique psychological profile. We also introduce the p-medicine project and its vision in the field of personalized medicine and show project's approach on patient empowerment.

Keywords: Patient Empowerment, Personalized Medicine, Profiling, Clinical trials, Decision making, Medical diagnostic imaging, Portals, Psychology, Servers

Link: http://bibe2012.cs.ucy.ac.cy/


Vedran Hrgovcic, Robert Woitsch and Wilfrid Utz:
Knowledge Based Platform for Personalized eHealth Services

eChallenges 2012, October 2012, Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract: This paper provides an overview on the conceptual work carried out on the design, and development of a personalized knowledge space used for delivery of personalized eHealth services for different groups of stakeholders (e.g. patients, medical professionals, family caregivers, insurance employees, etc) confronted with a problem of accessing required amount information at correct time in a satisfying granularity and content level. Focus of the paper is towards specification of the static personalized knowledge space applying knowledge management using hybrid modelling languages and its extension toward dynamic knowledge spaces.

Keywords: Personal Knowledge Spaces, Hybrid Modelling, eHealth

Link: http://www.echallenges.org/e2012/


Haridimos Kondylakis and Dimitris Plexousakis:
Ontology Evolution: Assisting Query Migration

31st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER2012), October 2012, Florence, Italy

Abstract: Recent research witnesses an increasing need for semantically driven access to data. To that direction, information systems rely more and more on semantic web ontologies to share and interpret data within and across research domains. However, an important problem when dealing with ontologies is the fact that they are living artefacts and subject to change. When ontologies evolve, queries formulated using a past ontology version might become invalid and should be redefined or adapted. In this paper we propose a solution in order to identify the impact of ontology evolution on queries and to ease query migration. We present a module that receives as input the sequence of changes between the two ontology versions along with a set of queries and automatically identifies the specific change operations that affect the input queries. Besides the automatic identification of the affecting change operations, query migration is further aided by providing an explanation for the specific invalidation. This explanation is presented graphically by means of change paths that represent the evolution of the specific parts of the ontology that invalidate the query. We evaluate the time complexity of our approach and show how it can greatly reduce the human effort spent on query redefinition/adaptation.

Keywords: Ontology Evolution, Query Migration

Link: http://islab.dico.unimi.it/er2012/


Haridimos Kondylakis and Manolis Tsiknakis:
Computerized Clinical Guidelines: Current Status & Principles for Future Research

24th Conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (MIE2012), August 2012, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: Although it is widely accepted that the adoption of computerized clinical guidelines would improve the quality of the provided health care, their influence in the daily practice is limited. In this paper we provide insights on the core topics related to computer interpretable clinical guidelines and we present shortly the main approaches in the area. Then we discuss the current limitations, and we present three simple principles that according to our view should be adopted to enhance the penetration of computerized clinical guidelines in the health care organizations. The overall goal of this paper is not only to give readers a quick overview of the works in the area, but also to provide necessary insights for the practical understanding of the issues involved and draw directions for future research and development activities.

Keywords: Clinical Guidelines

Link: http://www.mie2012.it/


E. Daskalaki and D. Plexousakis:
OtO Matching System: A multi-strategy approach to Instance Matching

24th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2012), June 2012, Gdansk, Poland

Abstract: In this paper we describe an ontology to ontology (OtO) matching system which implements a novel instance matching algorithm. The proposed multi-strategy matching system is domain independent and fully customizable at any level. It optimizes the instance matching process by leveraging (a) the rich semantic knowledge from the schema matching results, (b) the implicit knowledge of the domain expert by capturing the identification power of the properties and (c) the probability estimation of the result's validity, in order to accurately detect the ontology instances that represent the same real-world entity. Furthermore we evaluate the system with the ISLab Instance Matching Benchmark in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2009 campaign and report the results.

Keywords: Ontology, instance matching, record linkage, entity resolution

Link: http://www.caise2012.univ.gda.pl/index.php

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