Research Report Year 2004 - 2005

Area1: Computer Science

Data Base, Information Systems and Software Engineering

a)      the Vth Framework IST European Project PARADIGMA (PARticipative Approach to Global DIsease MAnagement) which aims to develop and demonstrate, in a pilot study, an Internet based reference framework to share scientific resources and findings in the treatment of major diseases. It will provide a platform of information services - user oriented and optimised against social, cultural and technological constraints - supporting the Health Care Global System of the Euro-Mediterranean Community in a continuous improvement process. More information can be found at www.paradigmamed.com.

b)      the VIth Framework IST European Project INTEROP. INTEROP is a Network of Excellence project which officially started on 1st November 2003 with a planned duration of 3,5 years and involves 51 Partners mainly from Academia. The project is also associated with an VIth Framework IST European Project IP project called ATHENA. INTEROP aims to investigate and to develop techniques for achieving better interoperability among enterprises, by using combined approaches based on previous and new research in enterprise modelling, ontologies and software architectures. More information can be found at www.interop-noe.org.

In the area of dynamic taxonomies, three major topics have been investigated. First, a comprehensive analysis of the reducing power of dynamic taxonomies, and hence of the convergence of searches based on dynamic taxonomies. This analysis was validated by experiments conducted on real data. Second, the application of dynamic taxonomies to product selection in e-commerce. A model of user interaction was developed and dynamic taxonomies were shown to fit all user requirements for the initial thinning phase. The integration of dynamic taxonomies with a mechanism for intelligent product comparison based on color coding was also investigated. Finally, we started a preliminary investigation of the application of dynamic taxonomies to multimedia databases.

In the area of the development of methods and tools to manipulate data in Web environments the investigations concerned location based services. The architecture of MaGIS system (Multimodal and Geographycal access to Information Systems) has been designed for connecting users from various types of input devices: portables, palm computers or PCs, to remote and different relational Information Systems containing simply structured data (such as cinemas and their programs, free rooms in hotels and their range of prices or restaurants addresses with the type of cooking they are offering). Each query a MaGIS system user asks is related to a query point that is either an address specified within the query or the user position localized, as an example, by means of a Navigator System the mobile is near to (for example because used inside or near a car equipped with such systems). The Information Systems or Content Providers (CP) are databases with information on a set of Points of Interest (POI), such as those mentioned above. The answer set to a given query is the set of the POIs nearest neighbours to the query point; POIs in the answer set are usually retrieved from several CPs. In order to reduce the traffic of both queries and answer set data through the net and for reducing the time required by the process computing an answer-set we use a data structure called P-tree based on the R-tree structure due to Guttman. A P-tree is maintained as a cache memory on the application server and contains points from every remote db with their identifiers, their geographical qualification and the original CP. P-tree algorithms have been implemented and different strategies are under analysis.

- Publications

- Software Products

- Research Grants

Title of the project	Project leader	Funding organization	Kind of grant
PARADIGMA	Ospedale Maggiore di Milano	European Commission	EUMEDIS project
INTEROP	Univ. Bordeaux I	European Commission	Network of Excellence
“Quota 60%”	G. Berio	Università degli Studi di Torino	Local project