Biodiversity Information Systems are complex software systems that present data management solutions to allow researchers to analyze species and their interactions. The complexity of these systems varies with the data handled, users targeted and environment in which they are executed. An open problem to be faced especially in a Web environment is data heterogeneity, and the diversity of user vocabularies and needs. This hampers query processing. This paper presents a tool based on Web services to expand and process biodiversity queries using ontology information. This solution relies on a new database organization, also described here, which combines in a single model data collected in the field with data found in archival sources. This tool is being tested using real case studies, within a large Web-based biodiversity system.

Automated healthcare planning (care-flow) systems are usually designed to afford the dynamicity of health environments, in which changes occur constantly as a patient's treatment progresses. This dynamic adaptation mechanism is based on blocks of activities, triggered and combined according to contextual data, producing a plan, which emerges from the interaction between these blocks and the context. However, tools that implement care-flow systems are still incipient, missing support for features like extensibility, collaboration and traceability of procedures. On the other hand, these features can be found in workflow systems that are widely used in a variety of environments (in business and scientific domains), with consolidated standards and technologies. However, workflow systems are not well suited to address the dynamicity of healthcare environments. In this paper we argue that care-flow and workflow systems have complementary characteristics and we present a software architecture that incorporates the emergent and context-driven approach of care-flow systems into workflow systems. We present a prototypical implementation validating the key concepts of our proposal, which uses an ontology representation of workflows combined with an ontology and SWRL rules.

Keywords:Scientific Workflows, Task Network Models and Nursing.Abstract: Healthcare and research environments have common characteristics and needs, such as managing people and resources, planning and conducting distributed activities, event-sensitive and monitoring processes. There are several examples in which Workflow Management Systems can aid healthcare management, systematizing, logging and automating activities. In this work we propose a context-driven approach to produce health workflows, which goes beyond an adaptation of workflows tasks to afford health procedures -as proposed in related work -departing from the rationale born from health professionals and materialized in CIG. This paper presents our proposal to support nursing processes through customization of workflows tools using as a starting point a comparative study of systems with respect to features required by healthcare professionals. 75

No abstract

No abstract