Abstract:
Information technology plays an important role in medicine because of the advanced decision support systems (DSS) it can provide. We provide an overview of the building blocks necessary for a medical decision support system and introduce seven research articles in this special issue that describe the development and evaluation of individual medical DSS building blocks or complete medical DSS. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Abstract:
The amount of non-English information on the Web has proliferated so rapidly in recent years that it often is difficult for a user to retrieve documents in an unfamiliar language. In this study, we report the design and evaluation of a multilingual Web portal in the business domain in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Web pages relevant to the domain were collected. Search queries were translated using bilingual dictionaries, while phrasal translation and co-occurrence analysis were used for query translation disambiguation. Pivot translations were also used for language-pairs where bilingual dictionaries were not available. A user evaluation study showed that on average, multilingual performance achieved 72.99% of monolingual performance. In evaluating pivot translation, we found that it achieved 40% performance of monolingual retrieval, which was not as good as direct translation. Overall, our results are encouraging and show promise of successful application of MLIR techniques to Web retrieval.
Abstract:
It is important for education in computer science and information systems to keep up to date with the latest development in technology. With the rapid development of the Internet and the Web, many schools have included Internet-related technologies, such as Web search engines and e-commerce, as part of their curricula. Previous research has shown that it is effective to use search engine development tools to facilitate students' learning. However, the effectiveness of these tools in the classroom has not been evaluated. In this article, we review the design of three search engine development tools, SpidersRUs, Greenstone, and Alkaline, followed by an evaluation study that compared the three tools in the classroom. In the study, 33 students were divided into 13 groups and each group used the three tools to develop three independent search engines in a class project. Our evaluation results showed that SpidersRUs performed better than the two other tools in overall satisfaction and the level of knowledge gained in their learning experience when using the tools for a class project on Internet applications development. © 2009 ASIS & T.
Abstract:
Biomedical research used for defense purposes may also be applied to biological weapons development. To mitigate risk, the U.S. Government has attempted to monitor and regulate biomedical research labs, especially those that study bioterrorism agents/diseases. However, monitoring worldwide biomedical researchers and their work is still an issue. In this study, we developed an integrated approach to mapping worldwide bioterrorism research literature. By utilizing knowledge mapping techniques, we analyzed the productivity status, collaboration status, and emerging topics in bioterrorism domain. The analysis results provide insights into the research status of bioterrorism agents/diseases and thus allow a more comprehensive view of bioterrorism researchers and ongoing work. ©2008 IEEE.
