The latest paradigm shift in government, termed Transformational Government, puts the citizen in the centre of attention. Including citizens in the design of online one-stop portals can help governmental organisations to become more customer focussed. This study describes the initial efforts of an Australian state government to develop an information architecture to structure the content of the...

global forum for non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) and a wide range of other partners to share information and approaches on the elimination, prevention and control of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The primary mission of the network is to coordinate the activities of members in an attempt to bridge gaps in funding and programme support to endemic countries. The NTD NGDO N...

During the 15th World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine in Amsterdam, May 2007 (15WCDEM), a targeted agenda program (TAP) about the public health aspects of large-scale floods was organized. The main goal of the TAP was the establishment of an overview of issues that would help governmental decision-makers to develop policies to increase the resilience of the citizens during floods. D...

Almost 5 million Syrians have been registered as refugees since the conflict started in 2011. Their mental health and psychosocial needs continue to grow as the situation at home gets more complicated. Syrian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and mental health professionals have been offering their support to help meet these needs. They have set up various centres and teams on the ground th...

In support to this strike, we developed a pioneering project using the Internet as a democratic media. The aim of this project, named “Cyber-Rally for the Brazilian Universities”, was to increase the pressure on the governmental authorities by allowing the society to express its opinion to them. The Rally home page [1] was used by people to easily send protestation messages to about 800 Brazili...

The coordination of human organ transplants is a difficult task that involves legal, clinical, organisational and human aspects within a complex distributed environment of hospitals and governmental institutions. We propose a Multi-Agent Architecture that is the kernel of an Intelligent Decision Support System to coordinate the Spanish activity in organ transplants. The different agents of the ...

The purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics of social support and the influencing factors on social support in nursing home environments. Observations and staff questionnaires from two central Florida nursing homes were used in this grounded theory study to answer the following questions: (1) How is social support manifested? and (2) What are influences on social support? Soci...

In highly evolutive medical domains, decision support systems have to easily be modifiable by medical experts themselves. In the field of blood transfusion, the evolution of medical knowledge and governmental regulation impose a continuous adaptation of decision support systems. Explicit domain ontologies is then a prerequisite for the construction of such extensible systems. We have chosen to ...

The UK contribution to the Ebola epidemic in west Africa has been run by the Department for International Development, with major support from the British military. We now have around 800 troops in Sierra Leone including the primary casualty receiving ship the RFA (Royal Fleet Auxiliary) Argus offshore as a logistic support platform. Soldiers from the UK Royal Engineers have built seven Ebola t...

Authentication is central to computer security and almost every use of computerised systems. With the explosion of online e-commerce, banking, social web sites and governmental services, the problem of finding secure, usable and efficient authentication systems is more acute than ever. The risks of security failure are obvious, and unusable or inefficient systems additionally risk loss of custo...