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With the increasing need for timely submission of data to state and national public health registries, current manual approaches to data acquisition and submission are insufficient. In clinical practice, federal regulations are now mandating the use of data messaging standards, i.e., the Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard, to facilitate the electronic exchange of clinical (patient) data. In both research and public health practice, we can also leverage FHIR® ‒ and the infrastructure already in place for supporting exchange of clinical practice data ‒ to enable seamless exchange between the electronic medical record and public health registries. That said, in order to understand the current utility of FHIR® for supporting the public health use case, we must first measure the extent to which the standard resources map to the required registry data elements. Thus, using a systematic mapping approach, we evaluated the level of completeness of the FHIR® standard to support data collection for three public health registries (Trauma, Stroke, and National Surgical Quality Improvement Program). On average, approximately 80% of data elements were available in FHIR® (71%, 77%, and 92%, respectively; inter-annotator agreement rates: 82%, 78%, and 72%, respectively). This tells us that there is the potential for significant automation to support EHR-to-Registry data exchange, which will reduce the amount of manual, error-prone processes and ensure higher data quality. Further, identification of the remaining 20% of data elements that are "not mapped" will enable us to improve the standard and develop profiles that will better fit the registry data model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced visualization of medical imaging has been a motive for research due to its value for disease analysis, surgical planning, and academical training. More recently, attention has been turning toward mixed reality as a means to deliver more interactive and realistic medical experiences. However, there are still many limitations to the use of virtual reality for specific scenarios. Our intent is to study the current usage of this technology and assess the potential of related development tools for clinical contexts. This paper focuses on virtual reality as an alternative to today's majority of slice-based medical analysis workstations, bringing more immersive three-dimensional experiences that could help in cross-slice analysis. We determine the key features a virtual reality software should support and present today's software tools and frameworks for researchers that intend to work on immersive medical imaging visualization. Such solutions are assessed to understand their ability to address existing challenges of the field. It was understood that most development frameworks rely on well-established toolkits specialized for healthcare and standard data formats such as DICOM. Also, game engines prove to be adequate means of combining software modules for improved results. Virtual reality seems to remain a promising technology for medical analysis but has not yet achieved its true potential. Our results suggest that prerequisites such as real-time performance and minimum latency pose the greatest limitations for clinical adoption and need to be addressed. There is also a need for further research comparing mixed realities and currently used technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health Level Seven (HL7®) is a standard for exchanging information between medical information systems. It is widely deployed and covers the exchange of information in several functional domains. It is very important and crucial to achieve interoperability in healthcare. HL7 competences are needed by all professionals touching information technology in healthcare. However, learning the standard has always been long and difficult due to its large breadth as well as to large and complex documentation. In this paper, we describe an innovative active learning approach based on solving problems from real clinical scenarios to learn the HL7 standard, quickly. We present the clinical scenarios used to achieve learning. For each scenario, we describe and discuss the learning objectives, clinical problem, clinical data, scaffolding introduction to the standard, software used, and the work required from the students. We present and discuss the results obtained by implementing the proposed approach during several semesters as part of a graduate course. Our proposed method has proven that HL7 can be learned quickly. We were successful in enabling students of different backgrounds to gain confidence and get familiar with a complex healthcare standard without the need for any software development skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

mmWave MIMO with large antenna array has attracted considerable interest from the academic and industry communities, as it can provide larger bandwidth and higher spectrum efficiency. However, with hundreds of antennas, the number of RF chains required by mmWave MIMO is also huge, leading to unaffordable hardware cost and power consumption in practice. In this article, we investigate low RF-complexity technologies to solve this bottleneck. We first review the evolution of low RF-complexity technologies from microwave frequencies to mmWave frequencies. Then, we discuss two promising low RF-complexity technologies for mmWave MIMO systems in detail, that is PAHP and LAHP, including their principles, advantages, challenges, and recent results. We compare the performance of these two technologies to draw some insights about how they can be deployed in practice. Finally, we conclude this article and point out some future research directions in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISO 20022 is making strong inroads in financial market infrastructures where an open international messaging standard is required. New developments indicate that ISO 20022 is rapidly gaining traction in domestic markets too, particularly for the next generation of real-time payments systems. This paper looks at the progress made by ISO 20022, the advantages it brings to the world of real-time payments, and the implications of a single standard emerging that replaces proprietary domestic standards and crosses the traditional boundary between value and volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overlap of transmission ranges between wireless networks as a result of mobility is referred to as dynamic coexistence. The interference caused by coexistence may significantly affect the performance of wireless body area networks (WBANs) where reliability is particularly critical for health monitoring applications. In this paper, we analytically study the effects of dynamic coexistence on the operation of IEEE 802.15.4-based health monitoring WBANs. The current IEEE 802.15.4 standard lacks mechanisms for effectively managing the coexistence of mobile WBANs. Considering the specific characteristics and requirements of health monitoring WBANs, we propose the dynamic coexistence management (DCM) mechanism to make IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs able to detect and mitigate the harmful effects of coexistence. We assess the effectiveness of this scheme using extensive OPNET simulations. Our results indicate that DCM improves the successful transmission rates of dynamically coexisting WBANs by 20%–25% for typical medical monitoring applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable the timely broadcast dissemination of event-driven messages to interested vehicles. Especially when dealing with broadcast communication, data dissemination protocols must achieve a high degree of scalability due to frequent deviations in the network density. In dense networks, suppression techniques are designed to prevent the so-called broadcast storm problem. In sparse networks, protocols incorporate store-carry-forward mechanisms to take advantage of the mobility of vehicles to store and relay messages until a new opportunity for dissemination emerges. Despite numerous efforts, most related works focus on either highway or urban scenarios, but not both. Highways are mostly addressed with a single directional dissemination. For urban scenarios, protocols mostly concentrate on either using infrastructure or developing methods for selecting vehicles to perform the store-carry-forward task. In both cases, dense networks are dealt with suppression techniques that are not optimal for multi-directional dissemination. To fill this gap, we present an infrastructure-less protocol that combines a generalized time slot scheme based on directional sectors and a store-carry-forward algorithm to support multi-directional data dissemination. By means of simulations, we show that our protocol scales properly in various network densities in both realistic highway and urban scenarios. Most importantly, it outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in terms of delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and number of transmissions. Compared to these solutions, our protocol presents up to seven times lower number of transmissions in dense highway scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study that explored standards for biodiversity data by applying the Darwin Core standards focused on applications of standards to old data in a specific format. Topics covered include Darwin Core documentation review, analysis of mammal research collection elements and use of Guiding Principles. Conclusions indicated the simple and flexible standard allowing ease in the migration of data along with lack of field restrictions.

IEEE 1394 (FireWire) and Ethernet Audio/Video Bridging are two standards-based networking technologies that allow for the transport of synchronized, low-latency, real-time audio and video data. Each networking technology has its own methods and techniques for establishing connection streams between devices residing on the networks. This paper introduces these two significant networking technologies and describes how interoperability between the two technologies has been achieved via an audio gateway. A common control protocol, XFN, is introduced. The paper describes how XFN can be used to control the parameters of these disparate networks via a graphic patchbay application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Objective of the proposed architecture is to enable representing an electronic document as a multi-layered structure of executable digital objects, which is extensible and without a need to support any particular formats or user interfaces. IODA layers are intended to reflect document content organization levels rather then system abstraction or functional levels, as in software architecture models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The feasibility of blind channel estimation without the aid of any pilot-training symbols is investigated for the HomePlug power-line standard. This standard uses orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and a custom windowing function for the purposes of spectral shaping. The latter feature makes blind channel estimation a difficult challenge. Theoretical and simulation results demonstrate that blind channel estimation is possible, however, through the exploitation of certain HomePlug standard signal features and eigenvalue decomposition. It should be noted that this paper is not a comparison of various channel estimation techniques (i.e., trained versus semiblind versus blind), but an assessment of 1) whether a blind estimation technique is feasible with the HomePlug power-line standard and 2) to determine its effectiveness in a typical power-line setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The procedures undertaken during the construction of chronologies often result in large quantities of data, typically in many associated files. The management of these data files, especially maintaining the relationships between processed and raw data, becomes increasingly difficult as a collection grows. To maintain a high level of accountability it is necessary to ensure that any derived or processed data can be replicated by independent researchers. Due primarily to practical limitations, some authors publish only subsets of the processed and/or raw data that constitute a chronology, making the process of independent scientific scrutiny difficult and on occasions impossible. There are associated problems when master chronologies are utilised for the purpose of dating specimens. Maintaining the relationships between chronologies and specimens is extremely important for accountability purposes, especially when errors are detected or revisions required. In these circumstances it is highly desirable to locate all specimens that have been dated with the original chronology to ascertain the implications of changes. This paper describes a new relational database design that addresses these problems and which has been implemented in the Corina dendrochronology application and web service. The new Corina system enables the data and analyses for all chronology building and cross-dating processes to be stored and documented, enabling scrutiny at every stage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Emerging applications with high data rates will need to transport bulk data reliably in wireless sensor networks. ARQ (Automatic Repeat request) or Forward Error Correction (FEC) code schemes can be used to provide reliable transmission in a sensor network. However, the naive ARQ approach drops the whole frame, even though there is a bit error in the frame and the FEC at the bit level scheme may require a highly complex method to adjust the amount of FEC redundancy. We propose a bulk data transmission scheme based on erasure-resilient code in this paper to overcome these inefficiencies. The sender fragments bulk data into many small blocks, encodes the blocks with LT codes and packages several such blocks into a frame. The receiver only drops the corrupted blocks (compared to the entire frame) and the original data can be reconstructed if sufficient error-free blocks are received. An incidental benefit is that the frame error rate (FER) becomes irrelevant to frame size (error recovery). A frame can therefore be sufficiently large to provide high utilization of the wireless channel bandwidth without sacrificing the effectiveness of error recovery. The scheme has been implemented as a new data link layer in TinyOS, and evaluated through experiments in a testbed of Zigbex motes. Results show single hop transmission throughput can be improved by at least 20% under typical wireless channel conditions. It also reduces the transmission time of a reasonable range of size files by more than 30%, compared to a frame ARQ scheme. The total number of bytes sent by all nodes in the multi-hop communication is reduced by more than 60% compared to the frame ARQ scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IEEE 802.11p is one of the most promising future wireless standards due to the increasing demand of vehicular communication applications. At the time of writing, the document of the standard is in draft and much research is still required to study and improve the performance of transceivers in common vehicular scenarios. In this paper, we present a framework to evaluate the PHY layer of IEEE 802.11p systems in realistic situations. We detail the design and implementation of an FPGA-based real-time vehicular channel emulator. Contrarily to commercial emulators, ours is cheap, very flexible, and reconfigurable. We show its capabilities by evaluating performance in different high-speed scenarios. We also study the importance of coding and the benefits of using IEEE 802.11p instead of IEEE 802.11a in vehicular environments. Towards this aim, we developed a reference IEEE 802.11p PHY transceiver software model that can be taken as a convenient starting point for transceiver design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is often performed through simulation. These simulations necessarily abstract away from reality in many ways. However, the impact of these abstractions on the results of the simulations has received only limited attention. Moreover, many studies on the accuracy of simulation have studied either the physical layer and per link effects or routing protocol effects. To the best of our knowledge, no other work has focused on the study of the simulation abstractions with respect to MAC protocol performance. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental study of two often used abstractions in the simulation of WSN MAC protocols. We show that a simple SNR-based reception model can provide quite accurate results for metrics commonly used to evaluate MAC protocols. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of what the main sources of deviation are and thereby how the simulations can be improved to provide even better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC does not fully satisfy the strict wireless body sensor network (BSN) requirements in healthcare systems highlights the need for the design and analysis of new scalable MAC solutions, which guarantee low power consumption to all specific sorts of body sensors and traffic loads. While taking the challenging healthcare requirements into account, this paper aims for the study of energy consumption in BSN scenarios. For that purpose, the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC limitations are first examined, and other potential MAC layer alternatives are further explored. Our intent is to introduce energy-aware radio activation polices into a high-performance distributed queuing medium access control (DQ-MAC) protocol and evaluate its energy-saving achievements, as a function of the network load and the packet length. To do so, a fundamental energy-efficiency theoretical analysis for DQ-MAC protocols is hereby for the first time provided. By means of computer simulations, its performance is validated using IEEE 802.15.4 MAC system parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Source privacy plays a key role in communication infrastructure protection. It is a critical security requirement for many mission critical communications. This is especially true for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) due to node mobility and lack of physical protection. Existing cryptosystem-based techniques and broadcasting-based techniques cannot be easily adapted to MANET because of their extensive cryptographic computation and/or large communication overhead. In this paper, we first propose a novel unconditionally secure source anonymous message authentication scheme (SAMAS). This scheme enables message sender to transmit messages without relying on any trusted third parties. While providing source privacy, the proposed scheme can also provide message content authenticity. We then propose a novel communication protocol for MANET that can ensure communication privacy for both message sender and message recipient. This protocol can also protect end-to-end routing privacy. Our security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. The theoretical analysis and simulation show that the proposed scheme is efficient and can provide high message delivery ratio. The proposed protocol can be used for critical infrastructure protection and secure file sharing in mobile ad hoc networks where dynamic groups can be formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: “Global Interoperability Using Semantics, Standards, Science and Technology” is a concept that is predicated on the assumption that the semantic integration, frameworks and standards that support information exchange, and advances in science and technology can enable information-systems interoperability for many diverse users. This paper recommends technologies and approaches for enabling interoperability across a wide spectrum of political, geographical, and organizational levels, e.g. coalition, federal, state, tribal, regional, non government, and private. These recommendations represent steps toward the goal of the Semantic Web, where computers understand information on web sites through knowledge representations, agents, and ontologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the last years Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have gained ground for content sharing between communities, determining a real revolution on the Internet. The characteristics of P2P systems make them a very good choice for multimedia content distribution over IP networks. However, although P2P technology gives new opportunities to define an efficient multimedia streaming application, at the same time it involves a set of technical challenges and issues due to the best-effort service offered by the Internet and its dynamic and heterogeneous nature. The most of existent protocols for video communications over P2P mainly focus on tree topology maintenance, without paying any attention to the encoding problem. The idea of this paper is to propose a multipoint video broadcast framework over a heterogeneous content distribution P2P network. In the proposed system the source generates the video flow by using an MPEG-4/FGS encoder, in such a way that no losses occur at the Baselayer stream even in the presence of short-term bandwidth fluctuations. Although in the past the FGS was not employed due to its encoding complexity, today, thanks to advances in hardware technology, we were able to develop an MPEG-4/FGS encoder on low-cost PCs which turned out to be more feasible and appealing for its flexibility. The FGS layer is sent together with the Base layer, but with a lower priority. The source uses a rate controller to regulate the encoding rate of the Base layer. To this aim, a protocol is defined in order to provide the source with information related to the most stringent bottleneck link on the overlay network. A technique to reorganize the content distribution tree is proposed and discussed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework a case study is introduced; improvements obtained with respect to several reference cases where FGS is not applied are also shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Belgian federal government's June 2004 decision to promote the use of open standards has been reinforced by the launch of BELGIF [BELgian Government Interoperability Framework], launched by the ICEG working group of the Belgian government in May 2005, and the 2006 decision to mandate ODF as the standard office document exchange format by September 2008. This paper discusses the issues surrounding the BELGIF implementation and ODF mandate and the challenges still to overcome, given that interoperability defines how technical systems, people and organisations work together, in a country with three languages and five layers of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the PL8 64-bit GNU compiler collection front end was introduced with the IBM z990 system, it laid the foundation to move toward an open-standard development environment for the i390 layer of IBM System z™ host firmware. However, when the z990 system was developed, the proprietary project development library system and the table of contents object file format for i390 code were still being used. With the IBM System z9™, we have moved to a fully open-standard development environment. This paper describes the steps we took to get there, to improve code performance, development efficiency, and regression testing, and to develop base functionality for important System z9 features such as enhanced driver maintenance. We also discuss plans to further enhance the development environment for future systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the challenges of developing and deploying multimedia metadata standards. Metadata in multimedia is used for multimedia life-cycle management, content structure organization, content description, and controlled terms. Order is still elusive despite several metadata standardization efforts. The specification levels of metadata representation include domain modeling, metadata scheme representation, schema definition, semantics representation and metadata encoding. Descriptive Metadata Scheme-1 is metadata for Material Exchange Format. TV-Anytime, on the other hand, is metadata for electronic program guides, user preferences, user consumption habits, and defining other information for targeting a specific audience.

This study proposes a scheme for Self-Organization Management Protocols of higher-level nodes to contest member nodes with multi-hop form hierarchical clusters, introduce the ‘20/80 Rule’ for determining the ratio of headers to member nodes, and develop a new cluster-based routing protocol that integrates the inter-cluster on-demand routing and the intra-cluster table-driven routing applied in the Sensor Networks for further consumer applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of standards addresses the problem of high-speed data transmission on serial or serial-parallel data lines. Serial-parallel data transmission means the transmitted information is distributed on parallel data lines. Even though several standards exist, there are only a few basic techniques used in most of these standards. This paper is giving an overview of these different basic techniques used in the physical layer of today's data transmission standards, for example DVI/HDMI, USB2.0, Infiniband, SFI5, etc. [1--9]. The main focus lies on the approaches used for physical signaling, line coding and information synchronization in serial and serial-parallel systems. In addition, currently discussed techniques to improve data transmission in the future will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides an introduction to data transport applications using generic framing procedure (GFP) in which layer 2 or 3 protocols are encapsulated for transport over a synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) physical layer network. Discussion of Internet Protocol and Ethernet over SONET/SDH; Reason of GFP for providing two schemes for handling data transport protocols; Information on data transport using virtual concatenation.

Describes the generic framing procedure (GFP) protocol developed to overcome data transport inefficiencies or deficiencies with the asynchronous transfer mode and packet over synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) protocols. Information about GFP 64B/65B block coding; Ways to handle the consequence of a larger SONET/SDH channel than that needed to carry the GFP signal; Potential extensions to transparent GFP.

Provides an overview of generic framing procedure (GFP), a standardized traffic adaptation protocol for broadband transport applications. Frame structure of GFP; Processes of GFP that are client-independent; Modes of client signal payload adaptation defined for GFP.

Provides information on a study which examined electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and their application in different types of trading relationships. Nature of EDI; Discussions and recommendations; Conclusions.

This paper proposes a performance evaluation model to analyze the transmission delay time in the multilink HDLC procedure, which is a standard data link layer protocol in the OSI reference model to realize an effective and reliable transmission protocol on standard HDLC procedure. This paper proposes a delay time model consisting of three submodels, i.e.,the send station model, the transmission line model, and the receive station model. In an asynchronous balance mode over a point-to-point configuration, the total delay time of the system is composed of delay time from departure time of an information frame at the said station to arrival at the receive station and time consumed for frame sequence number rearrangement at the receive station. Characteristics of the multilink HDLC procedure are evaluated in numerical. examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on benefits of electronic data interchange (EDI). Computer-to-computer exchange of business documents between trading partners; Slow growth of the EDI user base in the United States; Confusion over data transmission standards; External influences that can make EDI attractive.

Background: To implement standardized machine-processable clinical sequencing reports in an electronic health record (EHR) system, the International Organization for Standardization Technical Specification (ISO/TS) 20428 international standard was proposed for a structured template. However, there are no standard implementation guidelines for data items from the proposed standard at the clinical site and no guidelines or references for implementing gene sequencing data results for clinical use. This is a significant challenge for implementation and application of these standards at individual sites.Objective: This study examines the field utilization of genetic test reports by designing the Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) for genomic data elements based on the ISO/TS 20428 standard published as the standard for genomic test reports. The goal of this pilot is to facilitate the reporting and viewing of genomic data for clinical applications. FHIR Genomics resources predominantly focus on transmitting or representing sequencing data, which is of less clinical value.Methods: In this study, we describe the practical implementation of ISO/TS 20428 using HL7 FHIR Genomics implementation guidance to efficiently deliver the required genomic sequencing results to clinicians through an EHR system.Results: We successfully administered a structured genomic sequencing report in a tertiary hospital in Korea based on international standards. In total, 90 FHIR resources were used. Among 41 resources for the required fields, 26 were reused and 15 were extended. For the optional fields, 28 were reused and 21 were extended.Conclusions: To share and apply genomic sequencing data in both clinical practice and translational research, it is essential to identify the applicability of the standard-based information system in a practical setting. This prototyping work shows that reporting data from clinical genomics sequencing can be effectively implemented into an EHR system using the existing ISO/TS 20428 standard and FHIR resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]