Automatic discovery and invocation of services will only be accepted in practise, if the non-functional, especially QoS, parameters are taken into consideration during matchmaking. In this paper we present how this can be achieved. As an example, we use the DIANE framework and explain how the concepts developed there can be extended to easily accommodate non-functional aspects. Thereby, these a...

FLOWS is a first-order logic ontology for Web services and a W3C Submission. In this article, we describe some of the motivation behind the development of FLOWS, together with its key features.

BACKGROUND Emergency medical communication centres (EMCCs) dispatch and allocate ambulance resources, and provide first-aid guidance to on-scene bystanders. We aimed to 1) evaluate whether dispatcher guidance improved bystander first aid in trauma, and 2) to evaluate whether dispatchers and on-scene emergency medical services (EMS) crews identified the same first aid measures as indicated. ME...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to summarise the authors’ experience in furthering the educative use of Information Technology and the internet in the primary schools of northeast Portugal. The main goal of the Programme “Internet in Schools” is the development of Information Technology in Portuguese schools. It focuses on the use of the technology, rather than on its immediate pedagogic...

In recent years, the combinatorics of argumentation with arguments that can attack each other has been studied extensively. Especially, attack graphs (put in the focus of attention by Dung's seminal work 1995) have proven to be a productive tool of analysis. In this paper a new style of algorithm is presented that computes the minimal admissible sets containing or attacking the argument. It is ...

Disaster planning is only as good as the assumptions on which it is based. However, some of these assumptions are derived from a conventional wisdom that is at variance with empirical field disaster research studies. Knowledge of disaster research findings might help planners avoid common disaster management pitfalls, thereby improving disaster response planning. To illustrate the point, this a...

BACKGROUND Approximately 24,000 Ontarians live in remote Indigenous communities with no road access. These communities are a subset of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN), a political grouping of 49 First Nations communities in Northern Ontario, Canada. Limited information is available regarding the status of emergency care in these communities. OBJECTIVE We aimed to understand emergency response sys...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to determine effectiveness of first aid dressings in extinguishing burning white phosphorous (WP), eliminating WP pieces from the surface, inhibiting re-ignition on the model (fresh bacon covered with military uniform), and preventing from late re-ignition caused by persistent WP pieces. MATERIAL AND METHODS Burning WP was extinguished with several dressin...

In the predicate calculus, variables provide a flexible indexing service that selects the actual arguments to a predicate letter from among possible arguments that precede the predicate letter (in the parse of the formula). In the process of selection, the possible arguments can be permuted, repeated (used more than once), and skipped. If this serviCe is withheld, so that arguments must be the ...