Radmila Juric

Implementation of Ontology for Intelligent Hospital Wards

We have developed and implemented an ontology for an intelligent hospital ward. Our aim is to address the pervasiveness of computing applications in healthcare environments, which require: sharing of data across the hospital, including data generated by sensors and embedded in such environments, and dealing with semantic heterogeneity that exists across the hospitals data repositories. Our conceptual ontological model that supports such an environment has been implemented using semantic Web tools and tested through the application developed with the J2EE technology.

Sharing information and data across heterogeneous e-health systems

Information and data sharing across heterogeneous e-health systems, focusing on the management of patient care, have become the backbone of modern delivery of sustainable telemedicine services. Information and data available to healthcare practitioners in such environments range from patients medical records, stored in repositories at places where patients have been treated, to a variety of information related to medical research, pharmaceutical products, or information stored within social networks of healthcare interest groups. This study sought to demonstrate two different approaches enabling the sharing of information/data across heterogeneous e-health systems: (1) Context-Aware Data Retrieval Architecture (CADRA), which secures the extraction and presentation of e-health information to users in requested format, and (2) Generic Ontology for Context Aware, Interoperable, and Data Sharing (Go-CID) software applications, which secure semantic interoperation across heterogeneous e-health data sources. Proof-of-concept was demonstrated in both cases, CADRA and Go-CID, to achieve understanding and building of knowledge about e-health environments. This study invites practical solutions for interoperable e-health systems.

Sharing e-Health Information through Ontological Layering

e-Health information, including patient clinical and demographic data, is very often dispersed across various environments, which either generate them or retrieve them from different sources. Healthcare professionals often need related e-health information in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of a patients health status. There are many obstacles to retrieving information and data from heterogeneous sources. In this paper we show that our ontological layering helps in (a) classifying requests imposed by healthcare professionals when retrieving e-health information from heterogeneous sources and (b) resolving semantic heterogeneities across repositories and composing an adequate answer to issued requests. We use a layered software architectural model based on Generic ontology for Context-aware, Interoperable and Data sharing (Go- CID) software applications, applicable to e-Health environments. Ontological layering and reasoning have been demonstrated with semantic web technologies.

Ontological support for managing non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare

We designed and implemented an ontological solution which makes provisions for choosing adequate devices/sensors for remote monitoring of patients who are suffering from post-stroke health complications. We argue that non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare systems can be elicited and managed through semantics stored in ontological models and reasoning performed on them. Our contribution is twofold: (i) we enrich the elicitation and specification of non-functional requirements within the requirements engineering discipline and (ii) we address the pervasiveness of healthcare software systems through the way of choosing devices embedded in them, and through user expectations in terms of having access to pervasive services personalized to their needs.

Engineering Requirements Through Use Cases in Complex Business Environment

The increasingly global nature of financial markets and institutions means that the collection and management of information on which decisions might be based are increasingly complex. There is a growing requirement for the integration of information flows at individual and departmental levels, and across processes and organisational boundaries. Effective information management is an important contributory factor in the efficiency of such institutions, though there are many associated problems that do not have obvious or simple answers. This paper discusses the problem of information gathering in complex business environments and considers how use cases can help to alleviate the problem using an example of a multinational organisation. Such organisations often require information systems that can support regional differences. However, management requires consistent and uniform representation of information. The example shows that use cases can be a helpful mechanism for capturing user requirements that accommodate both regional properties as well as their organisational commonalties.

Semantic remote patient monitoring system.

We propose an automated and personalized remote patient monitoring (RPM) system, which is applied to care homes and is dependent on the manipulation of semantics describing situations during patient monitoring in ontological models. Decision making in RPM is based on reasoning performed upon ontologies, which secures the delivery of appropriate e-health services in care homes. Our working experiment shows an example of preventive e-healthcare, but it can be extended to any situation that requires either urgent action from healthcare professionals or a simple recommendation during RPM. We use Semantic Web technology and OWL/SWRL-enabled ontologies to illustrate the proposal and feasibility of implementing this RPM system as a software solution in pervasive healthcare. It will be of interest to healthcare professionals, who can directly shape and populate the proposed ontological model, and software engineers, who would consider using OWL/SWRL when creating e-health services in general.

Building an evaluation instrument for OO CASE tool assessment for Unified Modelling Language support

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) as delivered in September 1997 offers the structure and dynamics of its modelling constructs developed in order to standardise different object oriented (OO) development practices. Represented as a language, UML covers some aspects addressed by any methodology and is expected to be accompanied by OO CASE tools through notation and implementation of the UML philosophy. This paper discusses the problem of OO CASE tools as methodology companions that encourage or enforce methodology support. The basis for an evaluation instrument has been developed in order to analyse how commercially available OO CASE tools support the UML. The evaluation instrument is based on extraction of a set of rules that are supposed to be followed in order to claim that the UML itself is being followed. The rules are extracted from the current UML Semantics document and its well-formedness rules. The evaluation instrument is tested against a few OO CASE tools in order to analyse how it can be used on a larger scale for assessing the level of automation and UML support embedded in the tools.

Towards a Software Tool for Raising Awareness of Diabetic Foot in Diabetic Patients

We propose a computational model based on OWL/SWRL enabled ontologies, which can shape the development of an automated software tool for the purpose of providing patient-specific reminders, advice and action-items in preventing the development of diabetic foot in diabetic patients. The tool is aimed at both: (i) patients who would like to manage their illness efficiently by being informed and alerted to the significance of any change(s) they detect in their feet and (ii) healthcare professionals who can disseminate their knowledge to patients more effectively, and thus prevent the development of diabetic foot, which may cause the premature death of diabetic patients. The advantages of using OWL/SWRL enabled ontologies in our computational model are numerous. They range from the power to store, manage and reason effectively upon knowledge and information related to diabetic foot problems and their prevention through OWL/SWRL computations, to the feasibility of including such computations into software applications, which may run as a set of Apps on Android devices or on personalized healthcare iClouds. Consequently in the core of our proposal are (a) the OWL ontological model and its constraints which define and store the semantics of symptoms and observations of the changes in diabetic patients feet and (b) a reasoning process which uses the semantics and the power of ontological matching through SWRL for the purpose of delivering functionalities of the tool.

Computationally Significant Semantics in Pervasive Healthcare

Pervasive computing PerC is leading the way in a fast-growing trend of integrating transparently physical heterogeneous computational devices into our private and professional lives. The ubiquity of these devices and advances in developing software solutions in PerC across domains, have raised hopes for the creation of true wide-spread pervasive computing environments PCE. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying semantics of PCEs in the healthcare domain, and in Self Care Homes SeCH in particular, in order to define and comment on its computationally significant semantics. Our aim is to illustrate that we can manipulate the computationally significant semantics of SeCH through OWL/SWRL enabled ontologies, as candidate technologies for achieving effective and automated decision making in SeCH. The possibility of reasoning upon OWL/SWRL enabled concepts and creating computations from them, and enables the delivery of healthcare services to SeCH residents. They are automatically supported by software applications generated from the Assistive Self Care Systems ASeCS software architecture, which hosts our OWL/SWRL enabled ontology and its reasoning.

An exploratory study for effective COTS and OSS product marketing

Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) and Open Source Software (OSS) products have had significant impact on software development. The phenomenology of COTS-Based systems challenges the software community by emphasising the problems of COTS/OSS products identification, selection and evaluation. In this paper we address these problems by looking how the marketing of such COTS/OSS products can affect their identification and selection. We propose decisive factors that can help COTS/OSS product providers to market their products more effectively and assist users to conduct COTS/OSS product identification and selection more efficiently.