The internal ribosomal entry site (IRES) functions as cap-independent translation initiation sites in eukaryotic cells. IRES elements have been applied as useful tools for bi-cistronic expression vectors. Current RNA structure prediction programs are unable to predict precisely the potential IRES element. We have designed a viral IRES prediction system (VIPS) to perform the IRES secondary structure prediction. In order to obtain better results for the IRES prediction, the VIPS can evaluate and predict for all four different groups of IRESs with a higher accuracy. RNA secondary structure prediction, comparison, and pseudoknot prediction programs were implemented to form the three-stage procedure for the VIPS. The backbone of VIPS includes: the RNAL fold program, aimed to predict local RNA secondary structures by minimum free energy method; the RNA Align program, intended to compare predicted structures; and pknotsRG program, used to calculate the pseudoknot structure. VIPS was evaluated by using UTR database, IRES database and Virus database, and the accuracy rate of VIPS was assessed as 98.53%, 90.80%, 82.36% and 80.41% for IRES groups 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. This advance useful search approach for IRES structures will facilitate IRES related studies. The VIPS on-line website service is available at http://140.135.61.250/vips/.

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For enterprises, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor to succeed their business. Effective customer relationships could help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs, preferences, or past transactions. In this context, many discussions have already been presented where Consumer Support Systems (CSS) is most recently introduced that alleviates the shortcomings in other approaches by a 4-layer framework of collaborative mechanisms to support effective information/service provision between enterprises and customers. Since in CSS customers get used to participate in various communities to share or co-learn information about their experiences or requests on enterprises, a comprehensive structure for such information is therefore necessary for its easy sharing or co-learning among these customers. For this need and as a pristine way for knowledge-sharing by ontology, we present in this paper a method for the construction of an ontology that describes customer information with an easy understood structure. The method starts from the specification of the ontology based on the experiences of customers, through the browsing of their new ideas, and ends with the verification of its consistency. To illustrate, the method is applied in an exemplified application for travel arrangement.

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