Jonghoon Chun

MobileMed: A PDA-Based Mobile Clinical Information System

Patient clinical data are distributed and often fragmented in heterogeneous systems, and therefore the need for information integration is a key to reliable patient care. Once the patient data are orderly integrated and readily available, the problems in accessing the distributed patient clinical data, the well-known difficulties of adopting a mobile health information system, are resolved. This paper proposes a mobile clinical information system (MobileMed), which integrates the distributed and fragmented patient data across heterogeneous sources and makes them accessible through mobile devices. The system consists of four main components: a smart interface, an HL7 message server (HMS), a central clinical database (CCDB), and a web server. The smart interface and the HMS work in concert to generate HL7 messages from the existing legacy systems, which essentially send the patient data in HL7 messages to the CCDB to be stored and maintained. The CCDB and the web server enable the physicians to access the integrated up-to-date patient data. By proposing the smart interface approach, we provide a means for effortless implementation and deployment of such systems. Through a performance study, we show that the HMS is reliable yet fast enough to be able to support efficient clinical data communication

Building an operational product ontology system

A base of clearly defined product information is a key foundation for an e-commerce system. The manipulation and exchange of semantically enriched and precise product information can enhance the quality of an e-commerce system and offer a high level of interoperability with other systems. Product information consists of product attributes and the relationships between products. Product categorization (or classification) is one type of such relationships. Ontology can play an important role in the formalization of product information. Although the idea of utilizing ontology for e-Catalogs has been raised before, we are yet to find an operational implementation of applying ontology in the domain. In this paper, we report on our recent effort to build an operational product ontology system for a government procurement service. The system is designed to serve as a product ontology knowledge base; not only for the design and construction of product databases but also for search and discovery of products. Especially, the keyword-based searching over product ontology database demands different techniques from those over conventional document databases or relational databases, and should be designed to reflect particular characteristics of product ontology. We also introduce some other issues that we have experienced in the project, and those issues include product ontology modeling, ontology construction and maintenance, and visualization. Our work presented herein may serve as a reference model for similar projects in the future.

An Ontology-Based Product Recommender System for B2B Marketplaces

An ontology-based product-recommender system can help catalog administrators in B2B marketplaces maintain up-to-date product databases by acquiring mapping information between the new product data and existing data. The proposed approach is keyword-based and independent of the underlying physical structure of product ontology. With a Bayesian belief network as its basis, the ranking algorithm utilizes semantics embedded within relationships defined in ontology to probabilistically determine the ranking scores. The methodology is implemented on a practical ontology system powerful enough to assist users in B2B marketplaces. Its effectiveness is demonstrated in comparison to the conventional search engines.

Mobilenurse: hand-held information system for point of nursing care

Healthcare information travels with patients and clinicians and therefore the need for information to be ubiquitously available is key to reliable patient care and reliable medical systems. We have implemented MobileNurse, a prototype point-of-care system using PDA. MobileNurse has four modules each of which performs: (1) patient information management; (2) medical order check; (3) nursing recording; and (4) nursing care plan. MobileNurse provides easy input interface and various outputs for nursing records. The system consists of PDAs and a mobile support system (MSS) which supports clinical data exchange between PDAs and hospital information system. Two synchronization modules have been developed to keep the patient data consistent between PDAs and MSS. Clinical trials were performed with six volunteered nurses. They tried MobileNurse for 1-day caring-simulated patients. According to the survey after the trials, most of volunteers agreed that MobileNurse is more helpful and convenient than other non-mobile care systems to check medical orders and retrieve the results of recent clinical tests at the bedside. Through the involvement, we found out that ease-to-use interface is the most critical successful factor for mobile patient care systems.

A semantic classification model for e-catalogs

Electronic catalogs (or e-catalogs) hold information about the goods and services offered or requested by the participants, and consequently, form the basis of an e-commerce transaction. Catalog management is complicated by a number of factors and product classification is at the core of these issues. Classification hierarchy is used for spend analysis, customs regulation, and product identification. Classification is the foundation on which product databases are designed, and plays a central role in almost all aspects of management and use of product information. However, product classification has received little formal treatment in terms of underlying model, operations, and semantics. We believe that the lack of a logical model for classification introduces a number of problems not only for the classification itself but also for the product database in general. In this paper, we try to understand what it means to classify products and present how best to represent classification schemes so as to capture the semantics behind the classifications and facilitate mappings between them. We believe the model proposed in this paper satisfies the requirements and challenges that have been raised by previous works.

Practical issues for building a product ontology system

A base of clearly defined product information is a key foundation for an e-commerce system. The manipulation and exchange of semantically enriched and precise product information can enhance the quality of an e-commerce system and offer a high level of interoperability with other systems. Product information consists of product attributes and the relationships between products. Product categorization (or classification) is one type of such relationships. Ontology can play an important role in the formalization of product information. Although the idea of utilizing ontology for e-catalogs has been raised before, we are yet to find an operational implementation of applying ontology in the domain. In this paper, we report on our recent effort to build an operational product ontology system for the government procurement service. The system is designed to serve as a product ontology knowledge base; not only for the design and construction of product databases but also for search and discovery of products. We introduce some of the issues that we have experienced in the project, so that our work may serve as a reference model for similar projects in the future.

CST-trees: cache sensitive t-trees

Researchers have modified existing index structures into ones optimized for CPU cache performance in main memory database environments. A Cache Sensitive B+-Tree is one of them. It is designed to minimize the impact of cache misses for B+-Trees and it has been known to be more effective than other types of main memory index structure including T-Trees. In this paper, we introduce a Cache Sensitive T-Tree (CST-Tree) and show how T-Trees can also be redesigned to be cache sensitive. We present an experimental performance study which shows that our Cache Sensitive T-Trees can outperform the original T-Trees and Cache Sensitive B+-Trees on average 65 percent and 17 percent, respectively.

Practical ontology systems for enterprise application

One of the main challenges in building enterprise applications has been to balance between built-in functionality and domain/scenario-specific customization. The lack of formal ways to extract, distill and standardize the embedded domain knowledge has been a barrier to effective and efficient customization. Ontology may provide, as many would hope, the much needed methodology and standard to achieve the objective of building flexible enterprise solutions. This article examines the uses, issues and challenges of using ontology in enterprise applications. We believe that we are seriously lacking in modeling methodology, domain user tools, and lifecycle management methodology for the creation and maintenance of ontology on a large deployable scale. We present the issues based on an ongoing project to build a product ontology for a public procurement system. Through real life scenarios, we are hoping to convey important research directions to better enable ontology.

Modified naïve bayes classifier for e-catalog classification

As the wide use of online business transactions, the volume of product information that needs to be managed in a system has become drastically large, and the classification task of such data has become highly complex. The heterogeneity among competing standard classification schemes makes the problem only harder. However, the classification task is an indispensable part for successful e-commerce applications. In this paper, we present an automated approach for e-catalog classification. We extend the Naive Bayes Classifier to make use of the structural characteristics of e-catalogs. We show how we can improve the accuracy of classification when appropriate characteristics of e-catalogs are utilized. Effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated through experiments.

A DBMS-based Medical Teleconferencing System

This article presents the design of a medical teleconferencing system that is integrated with a multimedia patient database and incorporates easy-to-use tools and functions to effectively support collaborative work between physicians in remote locations. The design provides a virtual workspace that allows physicians to collectively view various kinds of patient data. By integrating the teleconferencing function into this workspace, physicians are able to conduct conferences using the same interface and have real-time access to the database during conference sessions. The authors have implemented a prototype based on this design. The prototype uses a high-speed network test bed and a manually created substitute for the integrated patient database.