Clinical study data is usually collected without knowing what kind of data is going to be collected in advance. In addition, all of the possible data points that can apply to a patient in any given clinical study is almost always a superset of the data points that are actually recorded for a given patient. As a result of this, clinical data resembles a set of sparse data with an evolving data schema. To help researchers at the Moffitt Cancer Center better manage clinical data, a tool was developed called GURU that uses the Entity Attribute Value model to handle sparse data and allow users to manage a database entity’s attributes without any changes to the database table definition. The Entity Attribute Value model’s read performance gets faster as the data gets sparser but it was observed to perform many times worse than a wide table if the attribute count is not sufficiently large. Ultimately, the design trades read performance for flexibility in the data schema.

Abstract Pervasive environments are physical spaces saturated with devices collecting data, controlling the environment, and interacting with users. These environments support human users in their everyday tasks so that the users can focus on their own tasks and access services and resources whenever and wherever they want. Such environments are also called smart spaces. Knowledge-based systems would enable realizing a variety of intelligent applications for pervasive environments. Generally, such systems recognize the situation in the environment from sensor data and utilize automated reasoning techniques to respond to the situation and the needs of the users. However, building knowledge-based systems for pervasive environments presents challenges. This dissertation focuses on the challenge of data and knowledge representations. Knowledge-based systems utilize expressive knowledge representations that are verbose and require sufficient resources in order to use them. Most devices in pervasive environments cannot handle these representations as the devices have limited resources for computation, storage, and communication. The main aim of this dissertation is to tackle this challenge. That is, on the one hand, pervasive environments demand data and knowledge representations that do not require many resources from the resource-constrained devices; and on the other hand, the representations should be compatible with the knowledge-based systems. Specifically, a general solution is required that enables many applications to use the same data with minimal effort from application developers. This dissertation presents a novel representation, Entity Notation (EN), to tackle these challenges. EN is designed as a general lightweight representation for data and knowledge. EN expresses entities, their properties, and property values. This structure resembles the triple structure of Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). Hence, sensor data in EN syntax can be transformed into common knowledge models in a straightforward manner and utilized with ease by knowledge-based systems. EN Schema is designed for transferring advanced knowledge models. Moreover, EN also offers an approach to shorten the format with templates and prefixes. This way, EN can be utilized by resource-constrained devices and environments. Our evaluation verifies that small devices can utilize EN to transfer data and knowledge to devices realizing intelligent functions, such as inference. Moreover, the expressive power of EN is comparable with the alternative representations. Finally, resource consumption is verified by prototypes. Based on the evaluation, we can conclude that EN can facilitate harnessing the full potential of pervasive environments. / Tiivistelmä Kaikkialla läsnäolevat ympäristöt ovat fyysisiä tiloja täynnä laitteita, jotka keräävät dataa, ohjaavat ympäristöä ja ovat vuorovaikutuksessa käyttäjien kanssa. Nämä ympäristöt tukevat ihmisiä päivittäisissä tehtävissä siten, että ihmiset voivat keskittyä tehtäviinsä sekä käyttää erilaisia palveluja ja resursseja ajanhetkestä ja paikasta riippumatta. Tällaisia ympäristöjä kutsutaan myös älykkäiksi tiloiksi. Tietämysjärjestelmät mahdollistavat monia sovellusskenaarioita näihin ympäristöihin. Nämä järjestelmät tunnistavat ympäristössä vallitsevan tilanteen sensoridatan avulla ja hyödyntävät automaattista päättelyä reagoidakseen tilanteeseen ja käyttäjien tarpeisiin. Tietämysjärjestelmien kehitys näihin ympäristöihin on kuitenkin haasteellista. Tämä väitöskirja keskittyy datan ja tiedon esitystavan haasteisiin. Tietämysjärjestelmät käyttävät ilmaisuvoimaisia tietämyksen esitysmalleja, joiden monimuotoisuus puolestaan edellyttää riittäviä resursseja. Monet laitteet eivät pysty käsittelemään näitä esitysmalleja koska niillä ei ole riittäviä laskenta-, kommunikaatio- ja tallennusresursseja. Väitöskirjan päätavoite on ratkaista tämä haaste: Toisaalta dataa ja tietämyksen esitysmalleja on voitava käsitellä niukoilla resursseilla; toisaalta esitysmallien on oltava yhteensopivia erilaisten tietämysjärjestelmien kanssa. Erityisesti tarvitaan yleisratkaisu, joka voidaan yhdistää useaan sovellukseen vähäisellä sovelluskehitystyöllä. Tämä väitöskirja esittää ratkaisuksi uuden datan ja tietämyksen esitystavan, Entity Notation -mallin (EN). EN on suunniteltu yleiseksi ja kevyeksi tiedon ja tietämyksen esitystavaksi. EN ilmaisee entiteettejä sekä niiden ominaisuus-arvopareja. Tämä rakenne muistuttaa RDF-kuvauskieltä sekä OWL-ontologiakieltä. Täten sensoridata EN-kielessä voidaan muuttaa suoraviivaisesti yleisiksi tietämysmalleiksi ja hyödyntää helposti tietämysjärjestelmissä. EN Schema on suunniteltu tietämysmallien siirtämiseen. EN tarjoaa myös tavan lyhentää muotoa mallineilla ja etuliitteillä. Näin EN-esitystapaa voidaan hyödyntää resurssirajoitteisissa laitteissa ja ympäristöissä. Tehdyt kokeet osoittavat, että pienet laitteet voivat käyttää EN-esitystapaa tiedon ja tietämyksen siirtämiseen älykkäitä toimintoja toteuttaviin laitteisiin. Lisäksi EN-esitystavan ilmaisuvoimaisuus on verrattavissa vaihtoehtoisiin esitystapoihin. Prototyyppien avulla tarkistettiin resurssien tehokas käyttö. Kokeiden perusteella voidaan todeta, että EN-esitystapa helpottaa läsnäolevien ympäristöjen täyden potentiaalin hyödyntämistä.

[...] Nos principales contributions peuvent être résumées en trois points :1. la proposition d’un système de classification de documents centrés sur les entités à l’aide d’un profil d’entité et de méta critères dans le contexte de filtrage de documents. Nous avons mis en place une approche qui est indépendante des entités et qui utilise les principes du transfert de connaissances. En effet, notre approche permet l’apprentissage à partir d’un ensemble de données annotées pour un pool d’entités tout en étant capables de catégoriser des documents concernant des entités pour lesquels aucune donnée annotée n’a été fournie ;2. la proposition d’un nouveau modèle de langue diachronique pour étendre la définition de profil d’entité afin de permettre la mise à jour de celui-ci. En effet, le suivi d’une entité nommée implique de pouvoir distinguer une information déjà connue d’une information nouvelle. Le modèle de langue diachronique permet la mise à jour automatique du profil d’entité tout en minimisant le bruit apporté ;3. la proposition d’une méthode pour découvrir la popularité d’une entité afin d’améliorer la cohérence d’un modèle de classification sur tous les aspects temporels liés à une entité. Pour détecter l’importance d’un document au regard d’une entité, nous proposons d’utiliser, entre autres, des indicateurs temporels qui peuvent varier d’une entité à l’autre. Nous proposons de regrouper les entités en fonction de leur popularité sur le Web à chaque instant pour tenter d’améliorer la cohérence des modèles et ainsi augmenter les performances des classificateurs.[...] / [...] Our main contributions are:1. We propose an entity centric classification system, which helps finding documents that are related to an entity based on its profile and a set of meta criteria. We propose to use the classification result to filter out unrelated documents. This approach is entity independent and uses transfer learning principles. We trained the classification system with a set of annotated concerning a set of entities and we categorized documents that concerns other entities;2. We introduce a diachronical language model, which extends our definition of entity profile in order to add to the capability of updating an entity profile. Tracking an entity implies to distinguish between a known piece of information from a new one. This new language model enables automatic update of entity profile while minimizing the noise;3. We develop a method to detect the entity popularity in order to enhance the coherence of a classification model concerning temporal aspects. In order to detect the importance of a document regarding an entity, we propose to use temporal sensors, which may vary from an entity to another. We cluster entities sharing the same amount of popularity on the Web at each time t to enhance the coherence of classification model and thus improve classifier performances.[...]

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis describes and introduces novel methods for knowledge discovery and presents a software system that is able to extract information from biomedical literature, review interesting connections between various biomedical concepts and in so doing, generates new hypotheses. The experimental results obtained by using methods described in this thesis, are compared to currently published results obtained by other methods and a number of case studies are described. This thesis shows how the technology, resented can be integrated with the researchers own knowledge, experimentation and observations for optimal progression of scientific research. / South Africa

Magister Commercii - MCom / In South Africa today those who lead sport are facing increasing scrutiny which has inevitably resulted in questioning governance practices. The transition of many sports from predominantly volunteer administered organizations anchored in an amateur ethos, to professionally managed entities catering to a more sophisticated market place has created unique challenges for the governance of sport sponsorship. This evolution gives rise to possible conceptual linkage between sport sponsorship and corporate governance or none thereof. This study focuses on the ABSA-Premier Soccer League (PSL) sponsorship transaction as a case study to explore this linkage. The research is aimed at finding the nexus between sport sponsorship and corporate governance principles, namely accountability and transparency in the conclusion of this transaction. The research consists of four phases; literature review which provides a detailed analysis of all primary and secondary material available on this topic. The second phase is a qualitative case study research methodology which comprises of in-depth interviews with targeted stakeholders. The third part presents the research findings and discussion section, and lastly the way forward through reflections and recommendations including highlighting potential future research areas. This work is timely when there has been generally a heightened evolution in sport sponsorship and its focus was to explore the nexus and compliance to the founding principles of the organizations (laws of governance). Factually, good corporate governance aims at ensuring a higher degree of transparency in an organization by encouraging full disclosure of transactions in the company accounts as well as accountability. Academics have been exploring the notion of sports sponsorship and corporate governance with much of the debates grounded on understanding its commercial value. The focus for this study is on the conceptual nexus or non-thereof, between sponsorship and corporate governance. Information was collected through in-depth and experience interviews, documented reviews and analysis (such as the review and analysis of the constitution of the South Africa football Association, PSL, financial/banking sector policy regulations, South African Sports Act, corporate governance reports, annual reports, scholarly journals, academic books, conference papers and Parliamentary Monitoring Group documents etc. to mention but a few. / South Africa

This thesis describes the development and in-depth empirical investigation of a method, called BootMark, for bootstrapping the marking up of named entities in textual documents. The reason for working with documents, as opposed to for instance sentences or phrases, is that the BootMark method is concerned with the creation of corpora. The claim made in the thesis is that BootMark requires a human annotator to manually annotate fewer documents in order to produce a named entity recognizer with a given performance, than would be needed if the documents forming the basis for the recognizer were randomly drawn from the same corpus. The intention is then to use the created named en- tity recognizer as a pre-tagger and thus eventually turn the manual annotation process into one in which the annotator reviews system-suggested annotations rather than creating new ones from scratch. The BootMark method consists of three phases: (1) Manual annotation of a set of documents; (2) Bootstrapping – active machine learning for the purpose of selecting which document to an- notate next; (3) The remaining unannotated documents of the original corpus are marked up using pre-tagging with revision. Five emerging issues are identified, described and empirically investigated in the thesis. Their common denominator is that they all depend on the real- ization of the named entity recognition task, and as such, require the context of a practical setting in order to be properly addressed. The emerging issues are related to: (1) the characteristics of the named entity recognition task and the base learners used in conjunction with it; (2) the constitution of the set of documents annotated by the human annotator in phase one in order to start the bootstrapping process; (3) the active selection of the documents to annotate in phase two; (4) the monitoring and termination of the active learning carried out in phase two, including a new intrinsic stopping criterion for committee-based active learning; and (5) the applicability of the named entity recognizer created during phase two as a pre-tagger in phase three. The outcomes of the empirical investigations concerning the emerging is- sues support the claim made in the thesis. The results also suggest that while the recognizer produced in phases one and two is as useful for pre-tagging as a recognizer created from randomly selected documents, the applicability of the recognizer as a pre-tagger is best investigated by conducting a user study involving real annotators working on a real named entity recognition task.

The aim of this thesis is to estimate the investment value of Pivovar Holba a.s. by the valuation date of 1.1. 2015. After an introduction of the company a financial and strategic analysis is conducted. These are followed by the valuation of value drivers and their prognosis, which serves as a basis for a financial plan. Afterwards, the company is valuated based on the knowledge from previous chapters using three methods out of which the greatest emphasis is put on DCF entity. Conclusions of this thesis may serve as a basis for the owner's or potential investors's future decisions.

This thesis concerns valuation of OEZ s.r.o.. DCF entity method and market comparable approach were apllied to valuation. The thesis contains strategis analysis, financial analysis of company, value generator and financial plan.

Diploma thesis is focused on non-governmental and non-profit organisation's specifications. It is aimed mainly on church-based legal entity, foundations and endowment funds, civil associations, public beneficial association and universities. One chapter describes financial management of above-mentioned organisations and its specificities including planning, fundraising, operational management and evaluation. Methods of establishment, creation, cancellation, cessation and management of the organisation are described from legal point of view. In one part of the thesis I have concentrated on tax allowances within income tax, Vehicle Excise Duty, immovable property tax, capital transfer tax, gift tax and real estate-transfer tax. The following chapter focuses on accounting and its differences compared to companies. The aim of the practical part is to analyze the financial management of registered legal entity, which is estabilished by church-based legal entity -The Archdiocese Caritas Prague. The analysis focuses on content and progress of costs and revenues in period 2005 -2007.

The goal of the thesis is to find out the value of the company New World Resources N. V. to date 31st of December 2008. In the beginning of the thesis is itroduced company profile, then is this thesis divided into four parts. In the introduction of each part are shortly characterized essential theoretical aspects, which are then used in practical application. The result of strategic analysis is prediction of sales. In the financial analysis there is interpreted financial health of the society. In the third part are estimated generators of values and then is arranged the financial plan, which is basis for the final valuation. Market value of the company is determinated by income approach, especially by the method of DCF Entity. This thesis includes also methods of market comparison.