Level Of Interoperability Research Articles

European Air C2 System National Requirements: Case Study of the Slovak Republic

The end of the world bipolar division has reduced the likelihood of a threat of an atomic conflict, but at the same time it has released dormant conflicts. From that time, the phenomena that are not new, but their frequency, intensity, impact on human society have caused a change in the way they are perceived. In this context it is clear, that to ensure the sovereignty of the European airspace and specifically the one of the Slovak Republic, as a member of NATO, is the first priority task of the Air Force missions. To accomplish this, there will be significantly increased the requirements for processes automatization within Air C2 systems, in order to keep the necessary level of interoperability and to utilize and exploit both combat and reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles.

Role of the Multimodal Centre in Shaping Sustainable Mobility and Quality of Life in a Medium-sized City – Nysa Case Study

The article presents the results of the evaluation of the relationship between the way of shaping public space related to ensuring sustainable mobility in the city and the experiences of users influencing the perceptible quality of life. The assessment was carried out for one of the medium-sized cities, which was included in the list of cities threatened with exclusion. The subject of the evaluation was the city multimodal centreorganised around the railway station in Nysa. The aim of the research was to identify a selected, small group of key challenges and recommendations aimed at improving user experience in using a multimodal centre in the city. The article highlights the role of service infrastructure (stops, stations, transfer centres) in the ecosystem of sustainable urban mobility. Each element of this ecosystem (designed in accordance with the idea of universal design) can have a significant impact on the improvement of the perceptible (declared) quality of life in the city, if the applied solutions positively influence the user’s experience (including the sense of comfort and care). The authors focused on the current state of play in order to identify the key areas of intervention needed to improve the user experience in using the multimodal centre in a small and medium sized city. Attention was paid not only to the aspect of infrastructure accessibility, but also to the relations between urban, architectural and engineering solutions in the context of their impact on the assessment of the multimodal centre in terms of its usefulness in three dimensions: functional, rational and perceptible. The summary outlines the process of achieving from the basic solution standard to interoperability. This knowledge will allow better decision making in the planning of user-oriented projects in the city. This may be of particular importance when the conscious objective of the action is to achieve the level of interoperability expected by users of facilities such as, inter alia, a multimodal centre, which is one element of an urban public space with a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizen. Keywords: user experience, quality of life, universal design, interoperability, sustainable mobility

Semantic Interoperability in the IoT

The adoption of the Internet of Things is gradually increasing. However, there remains a significant obstacle that hinders its adoption as a truly ubiquitous technology: the ability of constrained devices to unambiguously exchange data with shared meaning. In this respect, the World Wide Web Consortium has developed the Web of Things architecture to provide semantic data exchange. However, such an architecture does not cover all possible use cases and still has important limitations. This article specifically addresses these issues. In particular, it discusses the design and implementation of a solution that extends the Web of Things architecture to achieve a higher level of semantic interoperability for the Internet of Things. The proposed solution relies on a human-assisted translation process and defines an architecture that enhances the semantic compatibility between components in the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated through both a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, in terms of performance and key properties in comparison with the state of the art.

Automatic Data Standardization for the Global Cryosphere Watch Data Portal

The Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) was initiated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as a mechanism to support the delivery of Earth System monitoring, modelling and prediction services focused on the cryosphere. GCW fosters international coordination and partnerships with the goal of providing authoritative, clear and usable data, information and analyses on the past, current and future state of the cryosphere. It fosters sustained and mutually beneficial partnerships between research and operational institutions, by linking research and operations as well as scientists and practitioners. This is important as most available cryospheric data come from the scientific community. It is generally managed by research institutes which often do not have the infrastructure, the resources, nor the mandate to enable FAIR data management, which is necessary for interoperability and discovery at data level. This implies that data do not fit into standardized systems or dataflows for broader data access and exchange (as exists at the WMO) and thus have been unavailable for operational meteorological and climate applications. This lack of standardization also impairs the reuse of data within the scientific community. GCW is bridging this gap through a data portal and software stack enabling the transformation of sparsely documented and highly variable data into standardized and well documented data suitable for downstream applications with data level interoperability. A processing engine converts raw data provided by the data producers into NetCDF-CF standard files with NetCDF Attribute Convention for Dataset Discovery (ACDD) metadata. The data portal web front end harvests the metadata necessary for its search engine through an OPeNDAP server so no manual editing of the medatadata is necessary. When a user downloads some data from the web portal, it gets the requested data through the OPeNDAP server.

Organizational Characteristics and the Adoption of Electronic Health Records Among Nursing Homes in One Southern State.

Electronic health records (EHRs) can improve quality of care and patient safety, as demonstrated in a variety of health care settings. However, greater use of EHRs in nursing homes (NHs) is needed. To understand which NHs have and have not adopted EHR systems, all federally certified NHs in Arkansas (n = 223) were surveyed, with 27.9% responding. Non-responders were similar to responders on all characteristics except for staffing skill mix, with responders having a higher skill mix than non-responders. Two thirds of responding Arkansas NHs reported having an EHR system in use (69.8%), while only a few reported no plans for an EHR system (4.8%). NHs with greater resources and in competitive markets were more likely to implement EHR systems. Full implementation across all NHs may require intervention, which should be explored in future research. In addition, future investigation should consider the level of interoperability of EHR systems that are in place among NHs.

HBIM-GIS Integration: From IFC to CityGML Standard for Damaged Cultural Heritage in a Multiscale 3D GIS

This study describes the technical-systemic and conceptual-informative interoperability tests for the integration of a Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) model in a 3D Geographic Information System (GIS) environment aimed to provide complete and useful documentation for multiscale analyses on cultural heritage particularly exposed to risks. The case study of the San Lorenzo Church in Norcia (Italy) has been chosen given the urgent need to update the existing documentation for its protection and conservation issues, due to the extensive damage suffered after the series of earthquakes that occurred in central Italy starting from summer 2016. Different tests to evaluate two levels of conceptual interoperability (technical and semantic) when importing the HBIM model into a GIS environment were performed, whether with commercial software or with open source ones (ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, respectively). A data integration platform (Feature Manipulation Engine, FME) has been used for converting the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) data format into the GML (Geography Markup Language) format, in order to obtain a unique and unified model and vocabulary for the 3D GIS project, structured with different levels of detail, according to CityGML standard. Finally, as HBIM-GIS integration is considered, the loss of geometric and informative data has been taken into account and evaluated.

Heterogeneous Sensing Data Analysis for Commercial Waste Collection.

Waste collection has become a major issue all over the world, especially when it is offered as a service for businesses; unlike public waste collection where the parameters are relatively homogeneous. This industry can greatly benefit from new sensing technologies and advances in artificial intelligence that have been achieved over the last few years. However, in most situations waste management systems are based on obsolete technologies, with a low level of interoperability and thus offering static processes. The most advanced solutions are generally limited to statistical, non-predictive approaches and have a limited view of reality, making them weakly effective in dealing with day-to-day business issues (overflowing containers, poor quality of service, etc.). This paper presents a case study currently being developed in Luxembourg with a company offering a business waste collection service, which has a significant amount of constraints to consider. Our main objective is to investigate the use of multiple waste data sources to derive useful indicators for improving collection processes. We start with company-owned historical data and then investigate GPS information from tracking devices positioned on collection trucks. Furthermore, we analyze data collected from ultrasonic sensors deployed on almost 50 different containers to measure fill levels. We describe the deployment steps and show that this approach, combined with anomaly detection and prediction techniques, has the potential to change the way this business operates. We also discuss the interest of the different datasets presented and multi-objective optimization issues. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first major work dedicated to the world of professional waste collection.

NG-Tax 2.0: A Semantic Framework for High-Throughput Amplicon Analysis.

NG-Tax 2.0 is a semantic framework for FAIR high-throughput analysis and classification of marker gene amplicon sequences including bacterial and archaeal 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA), eukaryotic 18S rRNA and ribosomal intergenic transcribed spacer sequences. It can directly use single or merged reads, paired-end reads and unmerged paired-end reads from long range fragments as input to generate de novo amplicon sequence variants (ASV). Using the RDF data model, ASV’s can be automatically stored in a graph database as objects that link ASV sequences with the full data-wise and element-wise provenance, thereby achieving the level of interoperability required to utilize such data to its full potential. The graph database can be directly queried, allowing for comparative analyses of over thousands of samples and is connected with an interactive Rshiny toolbox for analysis and visualization of (meta) data. Additionally, NG-Tax 2.0 exports an extended BIOM 1.0 (JSON) file as starting point for further analyses by other means. The extended BIOM file contains new attribute types to include information about the command arguments used, the sequences of the ASVs formed, classification confidence scores and is backwards compatible. The performance of NG-Tax 2.0 was compared with DADA2, using the plugin in the QIIME 2 analysis pipeline. Fourteen 16S rRNA gene amplicon mock community samples were obtained from the literature and evaluated. Precision of NG-Tax 2.0 was significantly higher with an average of 0.95 vs 0.58 for QIIME2-DADA2 while recall was comparable with an average of 0.85 and 0.77, respectively. NG-Tax 2.0 is written in Java. The code, the ontology, a Galaxy platform implementation, the analysis toolbox, tutorials and example SPARQL queries are freely available at http://wurssb.gitlab.io/ngtax under the MIT License.

The Cost- Saving Role of Blockchain Technology As a Data Integrity Tool: E-health Scenario

The digital economy of health and its global proliferation have led to the use of health information systems in the daily health services delivery to patients. Consequently, there is a development of web-based electronic healthcare aimed at providing electronic health services in real-time. In this way, through the implementation of the concept of electronic health, there is an exchange of health information among all stakeholders of the health organization, all with the aim of monitoring the health status of patients, timely intervention and adequate allocation of medical resources. Processing and sharing a large amount of health data in real time, with the constant need to maintain a high level of interoperability and scalability of network infrastructure, requires the highest possible level of security in accessing data, in order to reduce the misuse of health data. By using blockchain technology, the risk of misusing health information, asymmetry of information and the risk of increasing transaction costs are reduced in a very short time. Blockchain is a robust mathematical algorithm that can provide maximum security of the transaction using cryptographic methods. This type of technology is based on a distributed database that contains encrypted data that can not be changed or disturbed. For this reason, the application of this technology as a data integration tool is increasingly reflected in the electronic business of health organizations - electronic healthcare. Blockchain technology is especially used in information-intensive electronic healthcare records and medical applications, which ultimately results in reduced costs of providing health services, especially when it comes to system maintenance and security costs, interoperability and data redundancy. According to above-mentioned cost-saving role of blockchain technology in processing, sharing and analyzing healthcare data, in this paper, there will be more to say about the positive economic impact of blockchain technology on electronic healthcare, especially in the case of Estonia. This European country is a pioneer in creating, implementing and using the e-Health concept as an integral part of health information system through its healthcare system, in order to increase efficiency of healthcare services.
 Keywords: Blockchain technology, data integrity, e-Health, health economics

Digital health Systems in Kenyan Public Hospitals: a mixed-methods survey

BackgroundAs healthcare facilities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries adopt digital health systems to improve hospital administration and patient care, it is important to understand the adoption process and assess the systems’ capabilities. This survey aimed to provide decision-makers with information on the digital health systems landscape and to support the rapidly developing digital health community in Kenya and the region by sharing knowledge.MethodsWe conducted a survey of County Health Records Information Officers (CHRIOs) to determine the extent to which digital health systems in public hospitals that serve as internship training centres in Kenya are adopted. We conducted site visits and interviewed hospital administrators and end users who were at the facility on the day of the visit. We also interviewed digital health system vendors to understand the adoption process from their perspective. Semi-structured interview guides adapted from the literature were used. We identified emergent themes using a thematic analysis from the data.ResultsWe obtained information from 39 CHRIOs, 58 hospital managers and system users, and 9 digital health system vendors through semi-structured interviews and completed questionnaires.From the survey, all facilities mentioned purchased a digital health system primarily for administrative purposes. Radiology and laboratory management systems were commonly standalone systems and there were varying levels of interoperability within facilities that had multiple systems. We only saw one in-patient clinical module in use. Users reported on issues such as system usability, inadequate training, infrastructure and system support. Vendors reported the availability of a wide range of modules, but implementation was constrained by funding, prioritisation of services, users’ lack of confidence in new technologies and lack of appropriate data sharing policies.ConclusionPublic hospitals in Kenya are increasingly purchasing systems to support administrative functions and this study highlights challenges faced by hospital users and vendors. Significant work is required to ensure interoperability of systems within hospitals and with other government services. Additional studies on clinical usability and the workflow fit of digital health systems are required to ensure efficient system implementation. However, this requires support from key stakeholders including the government, international donors and regional health informatics organisations.

Mind over matter? Multinational naval interoperability during Operation Iraqi Freedom

ABSTRACTThe increasing frequency of multinational operations has heightened the importance of interoperability. While human and cultural factors are only two pieces of the interoperability jigsaw they are of enduring significance. The cohesiveness of the relationship amongst the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Navy and the United States Navy during the 2003 Iraq War was underpinned by high levels of perceptive interoperability, which manifested itself in effective working relationships. That conflict demonstrated that while historical ties provided a foundation for cooperation, a number of multinational initiatives were undertaken to further enhance interoperability. This article addresses how such a high level of perceptive interoperability was achieved by examining the conduct of multinational exercises, the importance of personnel exchanges and the role of liaison officers, before considering the effect it had on the conduct of operations. The Iraq War demonstrated that cultural factors are at least as important as other facets of interoperability.

A framework for disease diagnosis based on fuzzy semantic ontology approach

In this paper, we propose an OWL2 ontology based on SNOMED CT standard medical terminology. It can provide significant help to support physicians in diabetes risk level diagnosis problem. It explicitly defines the semantics of diabetes knowledge by using ontology and deal with the imprecise and vague nature of its data by using fuzzy set theory. It involves building a complete linguistic fuzzy rule-base that can integrate knowledge from expert and CPG with knowledge extracted from training data and knowledge extracted from the semantic model. This step enhances the level of automation and interoperability of CDSS. The importance of our work comes from the current lack of studies related to the integration of the formal integration between the ontology semantics and FES reasoning, especially in the medical domain. The ontology acts as an integral and complementary component of the FES.

Advanced Distribution Management Systems: Connectivity Through Standardized Interoperability Protocols

The electric power system is evolving from a centralized generation model toward a complex distributed infrastructure with potentially millions of controllable generators and load prosumers. Transformative changes are especially pronounced at the distribution system level, with applications of new technologies influencing policies, planning, and utility operations. Consumers of electric power are also evolving, as they now generate electricity locally and utilize the Internet of Things for managing their home electric use and interfacing with grid applications. Evidence of this abounds, from the high penetration of rooftop solar installations and other distributed energy resources (DERs) that are transforming electricity consumers into prosumers (who consume and produce electricity) to the proliferation of controllable smart appliances reacting to signals and changing the pattern of power consumption. Key attributes common to the evolution of the distribution system and consumers include the significantly increasing level of data connectivity, interoperability, and systems integration required for realizing the benefits of adopting new technologies at scale.

From the web of bibliographic data to the web of bibliographic meaning: structuring, interlinking and validating ontologies on the semantic web

Bibliographic data sets have revealed good levels of technical interoperability observing the principles and good practices of linked data. However, they have a low level of quality from the semantic point of view, due to many factors: lack of a common conceptual framework for a diversity of standards often used together, reduced number of links between the ontologies underlying data sets, proliferation of heterogeneous vocabularies, underuse of semantic mechanisms in data structures, ontology hijacking (Feeney et al., 2018), point-to-point mappings, as well as limitations of semantic web languages for the requirements of bibliographic data interoperability. After reviewing such issues, a research direction is proposed to overcome the misalignments found by means of a reference model and a superontology, using Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) to solve current limitations of RDF languages.

Analysis of the integration of management system based on the business arquitecture approach in Habana Libre Hotel

The problem of research lies in: How to help improve the strategic technological capability - based approach to Enterprise Architecture for system Integration Company? To solve the problem posed above is defined as General Objective: To apply the methodology of Strategic Management based approach to enterprise architecture for system integration business management (DEAE-ISDE) in the Habana Libre Hotel to contribute to integration of the steering system. For the development of the research tools such as: Checklist, Kendall's Concordance Coefficient, Diagram of Relations, Level of Integration of the Management System, among others. The main deficiencies were: the lack of an ICT that integrates the management of all indicators of efficiency and effectiveness, the lack of participation of the workers in the processes of changes, the lack of Integration of the activities of the strategic team because they do not have well defined the functions of each member, the low level of interoperability to automatically generate information from one application to another, deficiencies in strategic planning and the non-existence of a process for the management of technology surveillance. Eight improvement actions are proposed to eradicate the deficiencies found.

Review of Interoperability Practices for Enterprise Information System (EIS) in Public Sector

Interoperable information system is crucial to enable an organization to provide good services to users. It can give a high impact and good return to government agencies, particularly in terms of efficiency in managing information system as well as making it time and cost effective. However, the implementation and work processes involving the interoperability of the public sector information system are still under focused. The major issues identified are concerning on difficulties in the implementation of integration between legacy systems or new systems; Recurring transactions or transactions in various systems, especially those involving legacy systems or new systems; Differences in database platforms; Difficulty in implementing the system redesign process; and no standard use of meta data, data model and complete database schema that can be used as reference. They hinder the implementation of good governance and contribute to ineffective decision-making process in the public sector. Hence, a more detailed and comprehensive study should be carried out to identify the critical success factors that contribute to the interoperability of the enterprise information system in the public sector. The method of the study is qualitative. The instruments for data collection include document analysis. The finding reveals that interoperability factors and elements can be classified according to the levels of interoperability i.e. (i) Organization; (ii) Technical; and (iii) Semantics. They can then be used as the basis for the development of reference for developing comprehensive guidelines based on the success factors and elements outlined. It is hoped that these factors could contribute to the development of enterprise information systems in the public sector which emphasizes the concept of interoperability.

Evaluation of electronic health information systems in the Sri Lankan state health sector: a cross sectional study

Introduction: Over the past years, the state health sector witnessed the development and deployment of many intuitional based, electronic Health Information Systems (eHIS) in Sri Lanka. These eHIS have been implemented with varying degree of maturity and some show the potential to be scaled-up. However, some initiatives had been limited to pilot implementations and failed to scale up for sub-national to national level. The objectives of the evaluation were to assess the scaling up potential of the eHIS, provide recommendations to the national digital health strategy and enlist the systems in a global digital health marketplace i.e. Digital Health Atlas, for higher visibility and review. Methods: The MAPS toolkit was used as the primary evaluation tool, owing to its strong focus on digital health interventions scale-up. It was mapped with the eleven guiding principles of the National Health Information Policy strategic action plan which was assumed to be the closest available digital health strategy at the time of this evaluation, as there was no explicit digital health strategy for the country. Furthermore, the MAPS toolkit was logically mapped to the Principles for Digital Development for interpretation. The questionnaire was adopted with minor changes to suit local settings and validated by a panel of experts. The tool was administered to the managers of the currently implemented eHIS by three trained Interviewers. Data were randomly verified for quality assurance. Evaluated systems were enlisted in Digital Health Atlas, Sri Lanka country page. Results: 22 data points of 18 exclusive systems participated in the evaluation. Majority of the systems evaluated had a national scope (75%), and a very few projects had a subnational (12.5%) and institutional level scope (12.5%) but implemented at the institutional level. Nearly 60% of them had a financial contribution from the Ministry of Health while 25% had both financial as well as human resources. Nearly 91% of the systems have tested their products for usability with anticipated user groups. Further 86% of the systems had a demonstrated efficacy with 96% stating that the system has demonstrated effectiveness. Therefore, it was assumed that the slow scale-up progress was due to implementation issues rather than usability issues. Majority of the systems had a formal partnership with the Ministry of Health/Government entities. However, the formal partnerships with implementing partners, technology partners and service providers were not up to the standards. The formal partnership with marketing (communications) partner and evaluation (or research) partner was not identified by many systems. Majority of the systems have considered potential economic costs for scaling up the eHealth project. Nearly 46% (22.7% documented) have identified the total cost of ownership over the next five years, to reach their projected scale. Another 46% (18.2% documented) have identified key elements of the cost associated with scaling up the project. With regards to strategic choices regarding partners who offer sustainable funding for scaling up, 41% (9.1% documented) have explored diverse funding streams. However, nearly 59% have not identified and mitigated risks for a transition plan which may have affected the scaling-up. Conclusion: The enterprise-level digital health strategy and blueprint with action plan needs to be finalized to be able to address critical issues related to governance and monitoring of these systems. National level digital health governance mechanism needs to be resumed and re-established. Areas such as mechanisms for expanding human resource capacity and strategies for project team member retention should be strengthened further. A national enterprise level interoperability layer is a grave necessity. The enlisted systems in Digital Health Atlas can be case studies for the global community on Sri Lankan experience.

Patterns of digitalisation in machinery-building industries: evidence from Russia

Abstract Digitalisation in machinery-building is expected to enhance productivity and drive the digital transformation of other industries. The extant literature sparsely describes pathways of different sectors in digitalisation, considering the heterogeneous characteristics of firms and sectors. Emerging economies with important state participation represent a particular interest in this area of research. To this end, a multiple case study method was used to describe a set of determinants revealed from the literature on Russian technological development and innovation in manufacturing. Two different patterns were identified. The first one was typical for large leading firms with state participation, which have a global market presence and a substantial level of interoperability, currently turning into a service business model. Private firms that follow the second pattern focus on physical and digital infrastructure upgrading targeted at particular issues to secure connectivity across departments. The state participation does not have a decisive role in digitalisation decisions; however, it affects the participation of companies in national digital initiatives. This study is a preliminary analysis of the determinants associated with corporate digitalisation from the sectoral perspective. Since both national and corporate strategies are ongoing, it seems premature to make generalised conclusions. Instead, the paper provides useful insights for management and policy that refer to digital technology uptake by machinery-building industries.

Internet of things (IoT) platform competition: Consumer switching versus provider multihoming

Internet of things (IoT) brings new opportunities and represents a new source of welfare and efficiency. However, the emerging consumer IoT platform competition creates the risk of monopoly power due to network effects. Overall, it is likely that both competition (incentivized through lowering consumer switching costs) and cooperation (achieved through interoperability, which enables data portability and service provider multihoming) are needed to maximize social welfare. This article aims to address how consumer switching costs and provider multihoming affect competition of emerging consumer IoT data platforms under different market conditions and regulatory schemes. It utilizes agent-based modelling that is especially suitable when decision making is distributed at a micro level while some rules are applied in a centralized fashion. The obtained findings emphasize the role of the regulator in guiding the market. It seems that when switching costs diminish at all sides of the platforms, consumers and service providers will favour the platform with a higher number of users. Further, service provider multihoming mitigates market concentration on both sides of a platform when switching costs are low. Thus, there seems to be a minimum level of interoperability needed to promote market competition. Further, although data portability gives more freedom to consumers in choosing a platform provider, it may result in a winner-takes-all situation due to strong indirect network effects.

Potential of Virtual Earth Observation Constellations in Archaeological Research.

Earth observation sensors continually provide datasets with different spectral and spatial characteristics, while a series of pre- and postprocessing techniques are needed for calibration purposes. Nowadays, a variety of satellite images have become accessible to researchers, while big data cloud platforms allow them to deal with an extensive number of datasets. However, there is still difficulty related to these sensors meeting specific needs and challenges such as those of cultural heritage and supporting archaeological research world-wide. The harmonization and synergistic use of different sensors can be used in order to maximize the impact of earth observation sensors and enhance their benefit to the scientific community. In this direction, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) has proposed the concept of virtual constellations, which is defined as “a coordinated set of space and/or ground segment capabilities from different partners that focuses on observing a particular parameter or set of parameters of the Earth system”. This paper provides an overview of existing and future earth observation sensors, the various levels of interoperability as proposed by Wulder et al., and presents some preliminary results from the Thessalian plain in Greece using integrated optical and radar Sentinel images. The potential for archaeolandscape studies using virtual constellations is discussed here.