Gabriele Pozzani

Representing Fuzzy Information by Using XML Schema

Issues related to fuzzy data have been investigated in the classical database research field, and in the last years are becoming interesting topics also in the XML data context. In this work we propose a general XML schema definition for representing fuzzy information.

An XML Schema for Managing Fuzzy Documents

Topics related to fuzzy data have been investigated in the classical database research field, and in the last years they are becoming interesting also in the XML data context. In this work, we consider issues related to the representation and management of fuzzy data by using XML documents. We propose to represent different aspects of fuzzy information by starting from proposals coming from the classical database context. We extend and integrate their datatype classifications in order to propose a complete and general approach for representing fuzzy information in XML documents by using XML Schema. In particular, we describe a fuzzy XML Schema Definition taking into account fuzzy datatypes and elements needed to fully represent fuzzy information.

Defining spatio-temporal granularities for raster data

The notion of granularity is used in several areas of computing. In temporal databases, granularity relates to the fact that the time frame associated to an event of interest (e.g., an accident) can be envisaged at several levels of detail (e.g., hour, day, month, etc.). Similarly, granularity in data warehousing is the level of detail at which facts (e.g., sales) are captured in dimensions (e.g., product, store, and day). However, there is no commonly-agreed definition of spatial or spatio-temporal granularities. Sometimes, the term spatial granularity is confounded with multiple resolutions. Further, the few proposals about them are mainly focused on the vector data model. In this paper, we define spatial and spatio-temporal granularities for raster data models. In our framework, relations and operations between spatial and spatio-temporal granularities are also defined.

A Co-occurrence Based MedDRA Terminology Generation: Some Preliminary Results

The generation of medical terminologies is an important activity. A flexible and structured terminology both helps professionals in everyday manual classification of clinical texts and is crucial to build knowledge bases for encoding tools implementing software to support medical tasks. For these reasons, it would be nice to “enforce” medical dictionaries such as MedDRA with sets of locutions semantically related to official terms. Unfortunately, the manual generation of medical terminologies is time consuming. Even if the human validation is an irreplaceable step, a significative set of “high-quality” candidate terminologies can be automatically generated from clinical documents by statistical methods for linguistic. In this paper we adapt and use a co-occurrence based technique to generate new MedDRA locutions, starting from some large sets of narrative documents about adverse drug reactions. We describe here the methodology we designed and results of some first experiments.

Telemedicine for Developing Countries. A Survey and Some Design Issues.

BACKGROUND Developing countries need telemedicine applications that help in many situations, when physicians are a small number with respect to the population, when specialized physicians are not available, when patients and physicians in rural villages need assistance in the delivery of health care. Moreover, the requirements of telemedicine applications for developing countries are somewhat more demanding than for developed countries. Indeed, further social, organizational, and technical aspects need to be considered for successful telemedicine applications in developing countries. OBJECTIVE We consider all the major projects in telemedicine, devoted to developing countries, as described by the proper scientific literature. On the basis of such literature, we want to define a specific taxonomy that allows a proper classification and a fast overview of telemedicine projects in developing countries. Moreover, by considering both the literature and some recent direct experiences, we want to complete such overview by discussing some design issues to be taken into consideration when developing telemedicine software systems. METHODS We considered and reviewed the major conferences and journals in depth, and looked for reports on the telemedicine projects. RESULTS We provide the reader with a survey of the main projects and systems, from which we derived a taxonomy of features of telemedicine systems for developing countries. We also propose and discuss some classification criteria for design issues, based on the lessons learned in this research area. CONCLUSIONS We highlight some challenges and recommendations to be considered when designing a telemedicine system for developing countries.

ST4SQL: a spatio-temporal query language dealing with granularities

In many different application fields the amount and importance of spatio-temporal data (i.e., temporally and/or spatially qualified data) is increasing in last years and users need new solutions for their management. In this paper we propose a spatio-temporal query language, called ST4SQL. The proposed language extends the well-known SQL syntax and the T4SQL temporal query language [4]. The proposed query language deals with different temporal and spatial semantics. These semantics allow one to specify how the system must manage temporal and spatial dimensions for evaluating the queries. Moreover, the query language introduces new constructs for grouping data with respect to temporal and spatial dimensions. Both semantics and grouping constructs take into account and exploit data qualified with granularities.

An inference system for relationships between spatial granularities

Spatial granularities allow one to qualify classical data adding them space locations. In order to compare data qualified with different granularities and to associate data to different granularities (e.g., in analysis similar to drill-down and roll-up operations), it is necessary to know how the involved granularities are related. However, the explicit evaluation of these relationships may be heavy from a computational point of view. Moreover, the explicit evaluation of these relationships could not be requested, as relationships can be derived from already established ones. Thus, in this paper, we propose an inference system for deriving spatial relationships that definitely hold, starting from a given set of relationships between spatial granularities, without evaluating them explicitly.

Design, Development, Deployment of a Telemedicine System in a Developing Country: Dealing with Organizational and Social Issues

Telemedicine means delivering health care services to remote locations by ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Several types of telemedicine systems exist: by this paper, we focus on teleconsulting systems. We report here about a telemedicine project in one of the poorest country worldwide, Burundi. After gathering the requirements, which strongly differ from the requirements of a telemedicine project in a developed country, we designed, implemented, and deployed a prototype aimed at providing local physicians of the Hospital of Ngozi, Burundi, with expert second opinions from their colleagues in the University of Verona, Italy, on interpreting ECG signals, ultrasound and X-ray images. We considered in a seamless way both process- and data-related requirements. Besides the more technical aspects, we also report on some organizational and social issues we faced during the project.

Dealing with multigranular spatio-temporal databases to manage psychiatric epidemiology data

In epidemiology spatio-temporal data may represent surveillance data and origins of diseases. In order to better exploit these data, temporal and spatial dimensions could be managed considering them as meta-data useful to retrieve classical data. In this paper, we propose to use a framework for spatio-temporal granularities with the aim to improve the querying of clinical spatio-temporal data. We show how granularities can be used to enrich a psychiatric case register. We exemplify our approach reporting spatio-temporal queries, based on granularities, useful for epidemiological studies.

Mapping Free Text into MedDRA by Natural Language Processing: A Modular Approach in Designing and Evaluating Software Extensions

MagiCoder is a Natural Language Processing application designed to extract MedDRA terms from narrative clinical text. MagiCoder has been developed to support the work of people responsible for pharmacovigilance. Given a narrative description, MagiCoder proposes an automatic encoding; the pharmacologist reviews, (possibly) corrects, and then validates the solution. This drastically reduces the time needed for the validation of reports with respect to a completely manual encoding. In this paper we extend in a modular way and analyse MagiCoder, comparing its different new extensions. We designed a benchmark consisting of a representative set of adverse drug reaction reports that also includes long and badly written descriptions. We measured an average precision and recall of 68.74% and 70.19%, respectively. On descriptions up to 100 characters, both precision and recall exceeded 75%, i.e., 77.97% and 75.78%, respectively.