Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio State University. / Bibliography: leaves 108-109. Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006. / Prepared for: Dept. of Health Administration. Bibliography: leaves 165-173. Also available online.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:23:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2001-11-26Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:50:28Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ishikawa_mi_me_prud.pdf: 658123 bytes, checksum: e1d7f4d23437dc8bb19a8805ed344335 (MD5) / O grande avanço tecnológico desta década, na área de Sensoriamento Remoto, pode ser percebido quando são observadas as grandes mudanças nas características dos sistemas orbitais mais tradicionais, bem como da nova geração de sistemas sensores desenvolvidos com o intuito de auxiliar, cada vez mais, as tarefas de identificação de alvos na superfície terrestre, devido à grande melhoria na resolução espacial. Produtos orbitais de alta resolução, com grau de detalhamento em torno do metro, permitem um melhor aproveitamento das imagens em aplicações cartográficas. O mercado de mapeamento urbano atualmente é ainda quase inteiramente baseado em fotografias aéreas. Porém, o Sensoriamento Remoto orbital vem passando por uma grande evolução tecnológica desde o final de 1999, quando foi lançado pela empresa norte-americana Space Imaging o satélite IKONOS. Este satélite possui sensores capazes de gerar imagens com lmetro de resolução espacial no modo pancromático e 4 metros no modo multiespectral. Estas imagens permitem o mapeamento da cobertura e uso do solo de maneira detalhada e continuada, desde que sejam usados métodos e/ou técnicas apropriadas. Este trabalho teve como objetivo fazer um estudo do potencial de uso das imagens geradas pelo satélite IKONOS, produto Geo, no que diz respeito a escala máxima de utilização em aplicações cartográficas. O procedimento para verificar a exatidão cartográfica baseou-se na análise estatística das discrepâncias entre as coordenadas de pontos no terreno, obtidas através do GPS, e as coordenadas dos pontos homólogos extraídas da imagem IKONOS, através da análise da existência de tendências e da precisão. Como resultado final, chegou-se a conclusão que a imagem IKONOS/Geo utilizada é adequada a escala 1:50000 e menores. / The huge technological advancement that occurred in this decade, in the field of Remote Sensing, can be well perceived when we observe the great changes that occurred in the characteristics of the more traditional orbital systems, as well as of those which belong to the new generation of sensor systems developed with the aim of helping, more and more, the tasks of identification of targets on the Earth surface, due to the improvement on the spatial resolution. Orbital products of high resolution with the possibility of showing details of about one meter in size allow a better employment of imagery in cartographic applications. The urban mapping market is nowadays almost totally based on aerial photography. However, the orbital Remote Sensing is getting through a immense technological evolution since the end of 1999, when the satellite IKONOS was launched by a north American company called Space Imaging. This satellite has sensors capable of generating images with 1 meter resolution in the panchromatic mode and 4 meter resolution in the multispectral mode. These imagery allow mapping the land cover and use in a detailed and continuous manner, providing the appropriate methods and/or techniques are used. This dissertation aimed at studying the potential use of such imagery obtained by IKONOS satellite, Geo Product, specially with respect to the maximum scale of employment for cartographic applications. The approach for the checking the cartographic accuracy was based upon the statistical analysis of discrepancies between the coordinates on the ground, obtained by the use of GPS, and the coordinates of homologue points extracted from the IKONOS imagery, through the analysis of existence of trend and also by the analysis of precision. As a final result, it has been found that the IKONOS/Geo imagery is useful for mapping at 1:50.000 and smaller scales.

In this work, data quality control and mitigation tools have been developed for improving the accuracy of photovoltaic (PV) system performance assessment. These tools allow to demonstrate the impact of ignoring erroneous or lost data on performance evaluation and fault detection. The work mainly focuses on residential PV systems where monitoring is limited to recording total generation and the lack of meteorological data makes quality control in that area truly challenging. Main quality issues addressed in this work are with regards to wrong system description and missing electrical and/or meteorological data in monitoring. An automatic detection of wrong input information such as system nominal capacity and azimuth is developed, based on statistical distributions of annual figures of PV system performance ratio (PR) and final yield. This approach is specifically useful in carrying out PV fleet analyses where only monthly or annual energy outputs are available. The evaluation is carried out based on synthetic weather data which is obtained by interpolating from a network of about 80 meteorological monitoring stations operated by the UK Meteorological Office. The procedures are used on a large PV domestic dataset, obtained by a social housing organisation, where a significant number of cases with wrong input information are found. Data interruption is identified as another challenge in PV monitoring data, although the effect of this is particularly under-researched in the area of PV. Disregarding missing energy generation data leads to falsely estimated performance figures, which consequently may lead to false alarms on performance and/or the lack of necessary requirements for the financial revenue of a domestic system through the feed-in-tariff scheme. In this work, the effect of missing data is mitigated by applying novel data inference methods based on empirical and artificial neural network approaches, training algorithms and remotely inferred weather data. Various cases of data loss are considered and case studies from the CREST monitoring system and the domestic dataset are used as test cases. When using back-filled energy output, monthly PR estimation yields more accurate results than when including prolonged data gaps in the analysis. Finally, to further discriminate more obscure data from system faults when higher temporal resolution data is available, a remote modelling and failure detection framework is ii developed based on a physical electrical model, remote input weather data and system description extracted from PV module and inverter manufacturer datasheets. The failure detection is based on the analysis of daily profiles and long-term PR comparison of neighbouring PV systems. By employing this tool on various case studies it is seen that undetected wrong data may severely obscure fault detection, affecting PV system s lifetime. Based on the results and conclusions of this work on the employed residential dataset, essential data requirements for domestic PV monitoring are introduced as a potential contribution to existing lessons learnt in PV monitoring.

In order to make a step towards the idea of the Semantic Web it is necessary to research ways how to retrieve semantic information from documents published on the current Web 2.0. As an answer to growing amount of data published in a form of relational tables, the Odalic system, based on the extended TableMiner+ Semantic Table Interpretation algorithm was introduced to provide a convenient way to semantize tabular data using knowledge base disambiguation process. The goal of this thesis is to propose an extended algorithm for the Odalic system, which would allow the system to gather semantic information for tabular data describing products from e-shops, which have very limited presence in the knowl- edge bases. This should be achieved by using a machine learning technique called classification. This thesis consists of several parts - obtaining and preprocessing of the product data from e-shops, evaluation of several classification algorithms in order to select the best-performing one, description of design and implementation of the extended Odalic algorithm, description of its integration into the Odalic system, evaluation of the improved algorithm using the obtained product data and semantization of the product data using the new Odalic algorithm. In the end, the results are concluded and possible...

In today&lsquo / s world, knowledge is the most powerful factor for the success of the organizations. One of the most important resources to reach this knowledge is the huge data stored in their databases. In the analysis of this data, DM techniques are essentially used. In this thesis, firstly, a comprehensive literature review on DM techniques for the quality improvement in manufacturing is presented. Then one of these techniques is applied on a case study. In the case study, the customer quality perception data for driver seat quality is analyzed. Decision tree approach is implemented to identify the most influential variables on the satisfaction of customers regarding the comfort of the driver seat. Results obtained are compared to those of logistic regression analysis implemented in another study.

Orientador: Erivaldo Antonio da Silva / Resumo: O grande avanço tecnológico desta década, na área de Sensoriamento Remoto, pode ser percebido quando são observadas as grandes mudanças nas características dos sistemas orbitais mais tradicionais, bem como da nova geração de sistemas sensores desenvolvidos com o intuito de auxiliar, cada vez mais, as tarefas de identificação de alvos na superfície terrestre, devido à grande melhoria na resolução espacial. Produtos orbitais de alta resolução, com grau de detalhamento em torno do metro, permitem um melhor aproveitamento das imagens em aplicações cartográficas. O mercado de mapeamento urbano atualmente é ainda quase inteiramente baseado em fotografias aéreas. Porém, o Sensoriamento Remoto orbital vem passando por uma grande evolução tecnológica desde o final de 1999, quando foi lançado pela empresa norte-americana Space Imaging o satélite IKONOS. Este satélite possui sensores capazes de gerar imagens com lmetro de resolução espacial no modo pancromático e 4 metros no modo multiespectral. Estas imagens permitem o mapeamento da cobertura e uso do solo de maneira detalhada e continuada, desde que sejam usados métodos e/ou técnicas apropriadas. Este trabalho teve como objetivo fazer um estudo do potencial de uso das imagens geradas pelo satélite IKONOS, produto Geo, no que diz respeito a escala máxima de utilização em aplicações cartográficas. O procedimento para verificar a exatidão cartográfica baseou-se na análise estatística das discrepâncias entre as coordenadas de pontos no terreno, obtidas através do GPS, e as coordenadas dos pontos homólogos extraídas da imagem IKONOS, através da análise da existência de tendências e da precisão. Como resultado final, chegou-se a conclusão que a imagem IKONOS/Geo utilizada é adequada a escala 1:50000 e menores. / Abstract: The huge technological advancement that occurred in this decade, in the field of Remote Sensing, can be well perceived when we observe the great changes that occurred in the characteristics of the more traditional orbital systems, as well as of those which belong to the new generation of sensor systems developed with the aim of helping, more and more, the tasks of identification of targets on the Earth surface, due to the improvement on the spatial resolution. Orbital products of high resolution with the possibility of showing details of about one meter in size allow a better employment of imagery in cartographic applications. The urban mapping market is nowadays almost totally based on aerial photography. However, the orbital Remote Sensing is getting through a immense technological evolution since the end of 1999, when the satellite IKONOS was launched by a north American company called Space Imaging. This satellite has sensors capable of generating images with 1 meter resolution in the panchromatic mode and 4 meter resolution in the multispectral mode. These imagery allow mapping the land cover and use in a detailed and continuous manner, providing the appropriate methods and/or techniques are used. This dissertation aimed at studying the potential use of such imagery obtained by IKONOS satellite, Geo Product, specially with respect to the maximum scale of employment for cartographic applications. The approach for the checking the cartographic accuracy was based upon the statistical analysis of discrepancies between the coordinates on the ground, obtained by the use of GPS, and the coordinates of homologue points extracted from the IKONOS imagery, through the analysis of existence of trend and also by the analysis of precision. As a final result, it has been found that the IKONOS/Geo imagery is useful for mapping at 1:50.000 and smaller scales. / Mestre

M.Ing. / The Internet is evolving into a global communication infrastructure that is expected to support an overabundance of new applications such as IP telephony, interactive TV, and e-commerce. The existing best effort service is no longer sufficient. It is not enough to provide differentiated services and to meet QoS requirements of these different traffic types. As a result, there is an urgent need to provide more services that are powerful such as guaranteed services, flow protection etc, merged in one IP network, referred to as Integrated Services Packet-Switching Network (ISPN) in this thesis. To provide these services, QoS aware network architectures are required to implement the services. This dissertation presents a survey on two network architectures: Fair Queuing (FQ) and Scalable Core (SCORE), which attempt to provide QoS solutions in ISPN. We theoretically analyse scheduling as an important element in providing QoS in these architectures. The important thread in scheduling is performance and implementation complexity. SCORE based scheduling have less implementation complexity but cannot exactly match the high performance of FQ solutions, which suffer implementation complexity. The contribution of this work is a feedback protocol that minimises congestion in SCORE scheduling scheme called Core stateless fair queuing (CSFQ). The flow rates are adjusted by sending rate signal to a transmitting node from a receiving node, to adjust ill-behaved flow rate during congestion to a fair share rate of receiving node. We use CSFQ based theoretical analysis and simulations to demonstrate the performance of the feedback protocol.

No / Purpose – This paper aims to examine the role of e-commerce in hospital pharmacy in the procurement of pharmaceuticals and determine how this has improved the internal pharmaceutical supply chain. Whilst e-commerce is in its infancy in this area it is still considered to be an important facet of supply chain management. E-trading within NHS pharmacies is conducted via electronic data interchange (EDI) offering proven benefits and ensuring the efficient and effective transmission of data between remote parties. Design/methodology/approach – The data were collected via a case-study in an NHS trust pharmacy supported and by questionnaires distributed to NHS and community pharmacies in the north-west of England. Findings – The findings support the view that there are benefits to be gained from introducing EDI into a purchasing department as the next logical step towards a total e-commerce solution (internet-based) and instigating quality improvements. It also proposes that the implementation and use of e-commerce in hospital pharmacies can be aligned with progress made in small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and questions why, if such benefits can be realised, the use of e-commerce systems are not more widespread. Research limitations/implications – The implications of this research is that it offers a “snap-shot” of progress made-to-date of e-commerce in NHS Pharmacy, which can provide guidance for mangers and healthcare professionals managing their e-commerce/quality improvement agenda. The research conducted was restricted to a specific regional area of the NHS and could be applied to a larger national sample group. Future research within this field should also consider the cost of not introducing e-commerce in pursuing quality improvement. Originality/value – This discussion offers an insight into how a pharmacy approached EDI, and this is further supported by recent research conducted into examining the pharmacy systems in operation in the north-west of England and accompanying EDI systems and an analysis of EDI uptake and use in a sample of pharmacies in the same region, the latter being supported by anecdotal evidence of pros and cons to using EDI and potential barriers to its introduction.

M. Tech. Business Information / Improved Data Quality Management is the desired outcome of managers for many government departments if not all. The constant use of manual systems, the utilization of legacy information systems, the results from departmental mergers and other agency acquisitions, by the South African government departments contributes significantly to poor data quality which leads to fruitless expenditure, fraud and corruption, duplication of processes, none-aligned departmental priorities and service delivery challenges. Literature reveals that there are documents that have been developed to manage the quality of data such as South African Quality Assessment Framework document, which guides and evaluates government organizations on how to achieve quality statistics focusing mainly on the meta-data; however they do not cover other dimensions of Data Quality Management. This research focuses into the strategy of Data Quality Management in government organizations and Data Quality Management tools applied using a conceptual model based on the Technology-Organization-Environment framework.