Cooperative database retrieval is a challenging problem: top k retrieval delivers manageable results only when a suitable compensation function (e.g. a weighted mean) is explicitly given. On the other hand skyline queries offer intuitive querying to users, but result set sizes grow exponentially and hence can easily exceed manageable levels. We show how to combine the advantages of skyline quer...

Knowledge about the optical properties μa,μs, and g of human blood plays an important role for many diagnostic and therapeutic applications in laser medicine and medical diagnostics. They strongly depend on physiological parameters such as oxygen saturation, osmolarity, flow conditions, haematocrit, etc. The integrating sphere technique and inverse Monte Carlo simulations were applied to measur...

Current web search engines return query-biased snippets for each document they list in a result set. For efficiency, search engines operating on large collections need to cache snippets for common queries, and to cache documents to allow fast generation of snippets for uncached queries. To improve the hit rate on a document cache during snippet generation, we propose and evaluate several scheme...

Skyline queries help users make intelligent decisions over complex data, where different and often conflicting criteria are considered. A challenging problem is to support skyline queries in distributed environments, where data is scattered over independent sources. The query response time of skyline processing over distributed data depends on the amount of transferred data and the query proces...

OBJECTIVES To assess the potential effect of two guideline discharge oxygen saturation (SpO(2)) recommendations (≥90% and ≥94%) in recovering bronchiolitis. METHODS AND PATIENTS Infants aged up to 18 months requiring therapeutic oxygen for SpO(2) (≤93%) had SpO(2) assessed in air every 2 h. Time from admission to re-establish feeding (>75% normal) and for SpO(2) to become stable for at least ...

Companies, government agencies, and other organizations are making their data available to the world over the Internet. They often use large online relational tables for this purpose. Users query such tables with front-ends that typically use menus or form fillin interfaces, but these interfaces rarely give users information about the contents and distribution of the data. Such a situation lead...

Case-based Reasoning (CBR) is a mature technology for building knowledge-based systems that are capable to produce useful results even if no answer matches the query exactly. Often the result sets presented to users are ordered by means of similarity and utility. However, for complex applications with knowledge intensive domains we have discovered that results sets enriched by calculated simila...