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Thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) is a cytokine known to mature dendritics cells, lower pro-inflammatory IL-12 secretion, induce differentiation of anti-inflammatory FoxP3+ regulatory T cells (Treg). Moreover, Crohn's disease patients have shown a reduction of intestinal TSLP expression. To understand the role of TSLP in inflammation, we constructed Lactococcus lactis strain producing TSLP (LL-TSLP) and investigated the effect of its administration on dextran sulfate sodium (DSS)-induced colitis model in mice.LL-TSLP secrete an active molecule which lowers secretion of IL-12 by dendritic cells. Treatment with LL-TSLP, increases the amount of TGF-β secreted by T cells in Mesenteric Lymph Node in healthy mice. In acute DSS-induced colitis, LL-TSLP delayed the Disease Activity Index and lowered histological score and colonic INF-γ production. In a DSS-recovery model, LL-TSLP induced a better protective effect if the strain was administered at the beginning of the colitis. At Day 4 of colitis we observed an induction of Treg by LL-TSLP.TSLP showed an anti-inflammatory protective role in DSS-induced colitis. We have demonstrated that a short and early administration of LL-TSLP is more efficient than a long lasting treatment.

Operation Smile is a humanitarian volunteer-based organization that provides cleft care around the world. Successful primary surgery is the key to improving the quality of life of patients with oral clefts. A cleft surgery outcomes database and evaluation system has been developed and implemented. During Operation Smile’s “World Journey of Smiles” in November 2007, a total of 4100 patients were operated on during a 10-day period at 40 simultaneous missions in 25 countries. Photographs taken before surgery, right after surgery, and at the follow-up consultations were entered in a database and used as media to evaluate surgical outcomes objectively by independent unbiased evaluators. Data about complications collected during the postoperative consultations were also entered. A postoperative consultation, 6 months to 1 year after surgery was conducted at 24 sites, 19 of which sent back postoperative images; and most returned postoperative examination forms. At those 19 sites, 703 of 1917 patients returned for a 6- to 9-month postoperative visit, for a 36.67% return rate. After matching before and after pictures, 562 patients were able to be entered into the database, allowing 580 procedures to be evaluated. Feedback reports have been sent to 134 volunteer surgeons around the world. Results were compared among sites and locations; and the places where future actions were needed to improve the quality of surgery were identified. The current outcomes evaluation system has proven beneficial in tracking patient outcomes, auditing surgical performance, and providing feedback to surgeons and other team members. Challenges are discussed.

Metadata is needed to facilitate data sharing among geospatial information communities. Geographic Metadata Standards are available but tend to be general and complex in nature and also are not well suited to overcome semantic heterogeneities across vocabularies of different domains and user communities. Current formalizations of metadata standards are not flexible enough to allow reuse and extension of metadata specifications, in particular for Web based information systems. In order to address this problem we propose a methodology to create community specific metadata profiles for the Semantic Web by reusing metadata specifications and domain vocabularies encoded as resources for the Web. This ensures that these community profiles are semantically compatible so they can be used in Web based information systems. The ISO-19115:2003 geographic metadata standard is the most general standard available and is being used in conjunction with the Web Ontology Language as the expression medium to test the methodology for each one of the possible extensions documented in ISO-19115:2003. It is shown that it is possible to extend and reuse metadata specifications and vocabularies distributed in the Web using the Web Ontology Language, by utilizing the language's flexibility to create restrictions on inherit properties and to make interferences on web distributed resources. Examples from the area of Hydrology are provided to demonstrate the technical details of the approach.

In recent years, a number of data identification technologies have been developed which purport to permanently identify digital objects. In this paper, nine technologies and systems for assigning persistent identifiers are assessed for their applicability to Earth science data (ARKs, DOIs, XRIs, Handles, LSIDs, OIDs, PURLs, URIs/URNs/URLs, and UUIDs). The evaluation used four use cases that focused on the suitability of each scheme to provide Unique Identifiers for Earth science data objects, to provide Unique Locators for the objects, to serve as Citable Locators, and to uniquely identify the scientific contents of data objects if the data were reformatted. Of all the identifier schemes assessed, the one that most closely meets all of the requirements for an Unique Identifier is the UUID scheme. Any of the URL/URI/IRI-based identifier schemes assessed could be used for Unique Locators. Since there are currently no strong market leaders to help make the choice among them, the decision must be based on secondary criteria. While most publications now allow the use of URLs in citations, so that all of the URL/URI/IRI based identification schemes discussed in this paper could potentially be used as a Citable Locator, DOIs are the identification scheme currently adopted by most commercial publishers. None of the identifier schemes assessed here even minimally address identification of scientifically identical numerical data sets under reformatting.