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Copyright of Revista Cubana de Ciencias Informáticas is the property of Universidad de las Ciencias Informaticas (UCI) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To assess the current level of engagement between backyard poultry keepers and veterinarians in New Zealand; to understand the opportunities and barriers for improving access to poultry health care; and to gauge the interest of backyard poultry keepers in participating in a voluntary national poultry health information system. Backyard poultry were defined as any bird species kept for non-commercial purposes. Separate cross-sectional surveys were administered to backyard poultry keepers and veterinarians in New Zealand over 12-week periods starting 22 March 2021 and 03 May 2021 respectively. The veterinarian survey was advertised in the monthly update e-mail from the Veterinary Council of New Zealand, while the survey for backyard poultry keepers was advertised on various online platforms that focus on raising backyard poultry. Results for quantitative variables were reported as basic descriptive statistics, while qualitative free-text responses from open-ended questions were explored using thematic analysis. A total of 125 backyard poultry keepers and 35 veterinarians completed the survey. Almost half (56/125; 44.8%) of backyard poultry keepers reported that they had never taken their birds to a veterinarian, with common reasons being difficulty finding a veterinarian, cost of treatment, and perceptions that most visits result in the bird being euthanised. The majority (113/125; 90.4%) of backyard poultry keepers reported that a general internet search was their primary source for poultry health advice. However, it remains unclear if owners were satisfied with the advice found online, as many cited that having access to reliable health information would be an incentive for registering with a poultry health information system. Of the veterinarian responses, 29/35 (82.9%) reported treating an increasing number of poultry in the last 5 years, although many (27/35; 77.1%) suggested they would be hesitant to increase their poultry caseload due to concerns over their lack of knowledge and confidence in poultry medicine; a lack of clinic resources to treat poultry; concerns over the cost-effectiveness of treatments; and a general feeling of helplessness when treating poultry, with most consultations being for end-stage disease and euthanasia. The results of this study highlight opportunities for increased engagement between backyard poultry keepers and veterinarians, including making available accurate poultry health information and providing veterinarians with improved training in poultry medicine. The results also support the development of a poultry health information system in New Zealand to further enhance health and welfare in backyard poultry populations. Abbreviations: MPI: Ministry for Primary Industries [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a systematic survey of the existing database system performance evaluation models based on the queueing theory. The continuous evolution of the methodologies developed is classified according to the mathematical modeling language used. This survey covers formal models - from queueing systems and queueing networks to queueing Petri nets. Some fundamentals of the queueing system theory are presented and queueing system models are classified according to service time distribution. The paper introduces queueing networks and considers several classification criteria applicable to such models. This survey distinguishes methodologies, which evaluate database performance at the integrated system level. Finally, queueing Petri nets are introduced, which combine modeling power of queueing networks and Petri nets. Two performance models within this formalism are investigated. We find that an insufficient amount of research effort is directed into the area of NoSQL data stores. Vast majority of models developed focus on traditional relational models. These models should be adapted to evaluate performance of non-relational data stores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's data-driven world, organizations which make use of the transactional data they have accumulated over time to come up with a more realistic picture of their operations can make more informed decisions towards attaining their goals and interests. However, due to the huge volumes of these accumulated transactional data, they cannot just be easily and readily used for reporting and analysis purposes. With this, a data warehouse is needed to store these accumulated data obtained from different sources within an organization where other decision-support applications can be built on to guide management decisions. In this study, a financial data warehouse was developed with a multidimensional construct that splits time, finance unit, account, and time dimensions, which is updated periodically with the accumulated transactional data sourced from a financial database of a university, and accessible via a Representational State Transfer application programming interface (REST API). To demonstrate the API's functionalities, we have created a data visualization tool which we integrated into our university web portal and subjected it to usability testing by its target end-users. It was shown that most of the respondents find the tool useful. Also, a query performance test was conducted comparing the execution of certain queries on the source transactional database and on the data warehouse. Result showed that the query time was greatly reduced by an average of over 50% when these queries were executed on the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data warehouse systems are used for decision-making purposes. The Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools are commonly used to query and analysis of results on such systems. It is complex task for non-technical users (executives, managers etc.,) to query the data warehouse using OLAP tool keeping in view the schema knowledge. For such data warehouse users, a natural language interface is a viable solution that transparently access data to fulfil their requirement. As data warehouse contain several times more data (that increase with incremental refreshes) than the operational systems. So keyword-based searching in such systems cannot be performed similar to database based natural language systems. Existing natural language interfaces to data warehouse commonly explore keywords in data instances directly that takes more than sufficient time in generating results. This paper proposes a Logical Schema-based Mapping (LSM) technique to reduce search space in the data warehouse data instances. It performs mapping of the natural language query keywords with logical schema of the data warehouse to identify the elements prior to search in the data instances. The retrieved matches for a keyword are ranked based on six criteria proposed in this paper. Further, an algorithm has been presented which is developed upon the proposed criteria. Targeted search in the data instances is then performed efficiently after the identification of schema elements. The in-depth experiments have been carried out on real dataset to evaluate the system with respect to completeness, accuracy and performance parameters. The results show that LSM technique outperforms the existing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents research results of the two-year pedagogical experiment comparing test scores in three subjects (Database Systems, Management, IT English) taught either in the ICT-supported way, or in the traditional face-to-face way at the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. The main research objective was to find out whether ICT contribute to increasing learners' knowledge and consequently to forming key competences. Didactic tests as the main tool were used within the pedagogical experiment which followed the "pre-test - instruction - post-test - post-test2" structure. The research sample included 687 respondents. Obtained results proved there were no statistically significant differences in learners' knowledge in both approaches to instruction. The results were discussed from two important points of view: (1) teachers' and learners' ability to use the potential of ICT in teaching/learning and (2) the role of teaching/learning styles in the ICT-supported instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years European universities have been adapting their curricula to the new European Higher Education Area, which implies the use of active learning methodologies. In most database courses, project-based learning is the active methodology that is widely used, but the authors of this paper face context constraints against its use. This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results obtained from the use of collaborative learning in both cross-curricula competences and subject-specific ones in the "Introduction to Databases" course at the Barcelona School of Informatics. Relevantly, this analysis demonstrates the positive impact that this methodology had, allowing us to conclude that it is not only project-based learning that is suitable for these kinds of courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Graphics processing units have proved its capability for general purpose computing in many research areas. In this paper, we propose the mechanism and implementation of a database system that encrypts and decrypts data by using GPU. The proposed mechanism is mainly designed for a database system that requires data encryption and decryption to support high security level or ODBS. By exploiting the computation capability of GPU, we achieve not only a fast encryption and decryption time per operation but also a higher overall performance of a database system by offioading computation to GPU. Moreover, the proposed system includes a mechanism which can decide whether to offload computation to GPU or not for more performance gain. We implemented the AES algorithm based on CUDA framework and integrate with MySQL, a commodity database system. Our evaluation demonstrates that the encryption and decryption on GPU shows eight times better performance compared that on CPU when the data size is 16 MB. We also show that the proposed system alleviates the utilization of CPU and the overall performance of database system is improved by offioading heavy encrypting and decrypting computation to GPU. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper we present a formal model of semantics for newly introduced operators of cisets, ciset relations. The notion of alternate worlds is used to formalize the information content of a ciset and ciset relations. A ciset represents a collection of (regular) sets. Similarly, a ciset relation represents a collection of (regular) relations. Once this collection has been identified, any ciset relational operator can be applied on the collection of (regular) relations represented by ciset relations involved. This approach is computationally inefficient and is introduced solely to fully explain in a formal way, the semantics of newly introduced operators. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Internet is a business development environment that has major advantages over traditional environment. From a financial standpoint, the initial investment is much reduced and, as yield, the chances of success are considerably higher. Developing an online business also depends on the manager's ability to use the best solutions, sustainable on a long term. The current trend is to decrease the costs for the technical platform by adopting open-source license products. This article aims to answer two basic questions: "Which is the optimal elementary platform available for online business?; The chosen platform supports solutions to increase performance? "and "Adopting such a solution has the effect of increasing profitability?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accumulation of data in electronic format is increasing at an exponential rate. Valuable transaction data will remain static and unexploited until analyzed to acquire knowledge. This work aims at enhancing a data mining technique called Metapattern generation. Domain knowledge is exploited in our approach and integrated with an existing Data Mining algorithm to generate interesting patterns that were not generated by the existing traditional techniques. Furthermore, new techniques are employed to enable the original algorithm to cope with incremental data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Decision support systems are computer based programs which assists decision makers in effective and efficient decision making. Outliers are the data sets which are highly irrelevant with respect to main data sets. Spatial outliers are the spatial objects with distinct features from their surrounding neighbours. In this paper we have proposed a decision support system for strategic decision makers to establish an industry. We have shown how spatial outlier detection techniques may be used to aid decision makers. Each site is evaluated based upon multiple decision variables. Here, we use two different outlier detection algorithms to detect a site which is most unsuitable to establish an industry. We also perform an experiment on a synthetic dataset of fifteen different sites to locate ambiguous sites. We found that decision making process for site selection may be improved by using spatial outlier detection techniques. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Studii şi Cercetări de Calcul Economic şi Cibernetică Economică is the property of Studii si Cercerari de Calcul Economic si Cibernetica Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Providing efficient access to XML documents is crucial, as XML has become the most important technique to exchange data in WWW. DOM is a popular object-oriented user interface to manipulate XML documents. Several concurrency control protocols have been proposed for DOM by analyzing the read/write behaviors of DOM operations. However, none of them exploit the semantics of DOM operations for enhancing concurrency. Semantics were introduced in object databases to develop concurrency control protocols. And this research is motivated by the success of this approach on object databases. In this paper, we analyze the commutativity relationship between DOM operations and propose a new semantic-based protocol for DOM, namely the SCD protocol. SCD not only allows non-serializable schedules to be executed, but also preserves the correctness of the resulting schedules. Our simulation results show that SCD outperforms other DOM-based protocols in its higher throughput and shorter response time. There are two major contributions in this paper. First, the semantics of DOM operations are analyzed formally. Second, based on the semantic analysis, a new way to design DOM-based concurrency control protocol is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates software issues, protocols, and technologies involved in the design and implementation of modern electronic service delivery systems. This investigation is carried out through a case study, namely, the implementation of a system capable of delivering student grades within a university setting through different types of connecting devices, including Personal/Laptop computers, WAP-enabled devices (Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), smart phone,… etc.) and regular SMS-based phones. The implemented system utilizes the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to represent the web data content, whereas the Extensible Style Language Transformation (XSLT) style sheets are used to customize the presentation of such content on different connected devices. Several lessons have been learned from this case study, including the easiness with which different access devices can be accommodated by the Web/WAP/XML implementation and the steep learning curve which new programmers must go through to be ready for this type of implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) has developed a central database system that replaces many manual processes and streamlines many other administrative procedures. The history of the Central Database Project is provided, and major accomplishments are described. These improvements have increased CCE's ability to comply with state and Federal regulations and with human resources policies. Daily operations are improved with easier access to data and analysis and administrative overhead is controlled, allowing staff to focus on program development and delivery. Finally, the improved technological capacity should increase technological credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing works on processing of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents have been concentrated on query optimisation, storage problems, documents transformation, compressing methods and normalisation. There are only few papers on concurrency control in accessing and modifying XML documents, which are stored in XML database systems. The aim of this paper is to analyse and compare the quantity of concurrency control methods for XML database systems based on DOM API. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]