Computer Science

Relational database (DB) management systems provide the standard means for structuring and querying large amounts of data. However, to access such data the exact structure of the DB must be know, and such a structure might be far from the conceptualization of a human being of the stored information. Ontologies help to bridge this gap, by providing a high level conceptual view of the information stored in a DB in a cognitively more natural way. Even in this setting, casual end users might not be familiar with the formal languages required to query ontologies. In this paper we address this issue and study the problem of ontology-based data access by means of natural language questions instead of queries expressed in some formal language. Specifically, we analyze how complex real life questions are and how far from the query languages accepted by ontology-based data access systems, how we can obtain the formal query representing a given natural language question, and how can we handle those questions which are too complex wrt the accepted query language. This research has been partially supported by FET project TONES (Thinking ON-tologiES), funded within the EU 6th Framework Programme under contract FP6-7603.

When relational data have access constraints that require certain at- tributes to be selected in queries, as in the case of (wrapped) Web sources ac- cessible via forms, a recursive query plan is needed to answer queries at best. We present a query plan optimisation technique for several classes of queries that minimises the number of accesses according to a novel, strong notion of mini- mality. We provide experimental evidence of the effectiveness of our technique.

When relational data have access constraints that require certain attributes to be selected in queries, as in the case of (wrapped) Web sources accessible via forms, a recursive query plan is needed to answer queries at best. We present a query plan optimisation technique for several classes of queries that minimises the number of accesses according to a novel, strong notion of minimality. We provide experimental evidence of the effectiveness of our technique.

We present file guidelines of a new project whose main task is to exploit mobile computers, comlected via a Wireless Networks, in Personal Health systems, computerizing patient clinical records with sophisticated solutions for taking clinical infommtion at the point of care.

This paper describes the Patient Record Manager and the Workflow toolset of the wirelessbased e-health system Ward-In-Hand, developed inside an IST European project and currently in use within three hospital wards: Italy, Spain and Germany. The lack of homogeneity in the healthcare organisations required a suitable implementation of WorkFlow automation tools to create and manage the execution of the caregiving processes, customising them to local ward needs. Solutions for this problem, as well as the integration of the workflow organiser, to be used by individual health professional during daily activity, with the Patient record Manager are discussed.