Clinical and biomedical research production is rapidly growing, but delivery to practitioners remains unacceptably slow. To improve health care quality and to make the best scientific achievements part of usual practices, clinicians need better information systems and services. The international, multi-disciplinary author team presents analyses and recommendations that will lead to competitive advantages by increasing quality and effectiveness of health care delivery. The book includes the latest findings on: advanced information technologies in disseminating research results; information...

This guide covers main issues in transforming the vast majority of models to be used in the context of the semantic web: XML schemas, relational models, UML diagrams, RDF schemas and ontologies. Different practical approaches are presented as well as discussions on some theoretical issues.

The Semantic Web aims at machine agents that thrive on explicitly specified semantics of content in order to search, filter, condense, or negotiate knowledge for their human users. A core technology for making the Semantic Web happen, but also to leverage application areas like Knowledge Management and E-Business, is the field of Semantic Annotation, which turns human-understandable content into a machine understandable form. This book reports on the broad range of technologies that are used to achieve this translation and nourish 3rd millennium applications. The book starts with a survey of...

Development of models with explicit mechanisms for data generation from cluster structures is of major interest in order to provide a theoretical framework for cluster structures found in data. Especially appealing in this regard are the so-called typological structures in which observed entities relate in various degrees to one or several prototypes. Such structures are relevant in many areas such as medicine or marketing, where any entity (patient/consumer) may adhere, with different degrees, to one or several prototypes (clinical scenario/consumer behavior), modeling a typological...

Ever since the early days of machine learning and data mining, it has been realized that the traditional attribute-value and item-set representations are too limited for many practical applications. This book collects studies on mining and learning within graphs, trees and sequences in studies worldwide.

Specific 3-D measurement techniques, based on optical or opto-electronic principles of image capture, can today provide a complete set of results to quantify, without any risk for the patient, the actual state of the rachis and the effects induced by the disease on the whole postural performance. The book deals with theoretical and clinical aspects of spinal deformities. It covers topics such as 3-D acquisition, reconstruction and modelling techniques; 3-D biomechanical analysis; 3-D etiological and prognostic aspects; 3-D treatment of scoliosis; surface topography and internal 3-D spinal...

Ontology is gaining importance in areas such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and databases. Providing a general grounding in the field, this work focuses on the common scientific principles and problems arising from current tools, metholologies, and applications.