A core issue of the decision-making process in the medical field is to support the execution of analytical (OLAP) similarity queries over images in data warehousing environments. In this paper, we focus on this issue. We propose imageDWE, a non-conventional data warehousing environment that enables the storage of intrinsic features taken from medical images in a data warehouse and supports OLAP similarity queries over them. To comply with this goal, we introduce the concept of perceptual layer, which is an abstraction used to represent an image dataset according to a given feature descriptor in order to enable similarity search. Based on this concept, we propose the imageDW, an extended data warehouse with dimension tables specifically designed to support one or more perceptual layers. We also detail how to build an imageDW and how to load image data into it. Furthermore, we show how to process OLAP similarity queries composed of a conventional predicate and a similarity search predicate that encompasses the specification of one or more perceptual layers. Moreover, we introduce an index technique to improve the OLAP query processing over images. We carried out performance tests over a data warehouse environment that consolidated medical images from exams of several modalities. The results demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed imageDWE to manage images and to process OLAP similarity queries. The results also demonstrated that the use of the proposed index technique guaranteed a great improvement in query processing.

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An ambulance is the type of emergency vehicle that, in order, to accomplish its mission of transporting patients in critical condition to hospitals, they must run as fast as they can through a city streets' maze. Hence, it is necessary a real-time system that could obtain anytime ambulance location. Moreover, it should advice on the best routes based on speed and time for achieve the target, given that the survival of the patients depends on the efficiency of this service. In a city like Sao Paulo in Brazil, for example, during the night, there may be hundreds or even thousands of ambulances running in the city, thus knowing the precise location of these vehicles is quite important. Despite these needs, the process of acquire and identifying the position of every ambulance can be costly if it is based on a GPS on every ambulance and a dedicated communication system. Therefore, we address these challenges in this paper with a low-cost solution based on the Android ® Smartphone platform. Thus, we developed:(1) a low-cost integrated GSM antenna probing module that perform continuous wireless "war-driving" and triangulation to estimate the ambulance position accurately, (2) another module to send encrypted messages through SMS service containing the position information to a central (3) a visualization module allowing real-time analysis of ambulances mobility on the city map.

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