In the past two decades, China has achieved a spectacular success in its economic growth. As a basic input for the production process, the forest resource has been one of the fundamental factors propping up the expansion of China's economy. When China is absorbing imports of timber products in the global market, studies of China's forestry system and its timber market incite greater interest. This paper represents a systematic approach to probe into the comprehensive realities of China's forestry system and its timber market. Econometric methods are applied in analyzing the demand and supply patterns. The empirical analysis is used to forecast the quantity demanded for timber products in China.

Life-expectancy and Life-years lost are frequently used and analyzed indices of survival. Life tables and Markov models are two exact approaches to calculate these indices; however cumbersome calculation limits their usage in real situations. Some simple approximation approaches have therefore been developed since a convenient and accurate approximation is critical both to develop a treatment plan of a patient by physicians and to assess health policies by health policy makers. These approximation approaches include the DEALE (Declining Exponential Approximation of Life Expectancy), new DEALEs, the IPH method (A method developed at Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa) and the Keyfitz approach. A new approach has been developed to achieve better accuracy and maintain ease of application by extending the Keyfitz approach. To make the new approach less dependent on age-stratified tabulations, a convenient formula for the EME (Established market economics) region is developed. Its accuracy, robustness, and ease of application are demonstrated.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), for providing patient specific advice, can only be accepted in clinical practice if they can fit in a clinician workflow. This would require such a CDSS to have diversified support capabilities, to be mobile, and to have flexible functionality. Such a system can be designed and developed only in a modular fashion where the high level abstractions describe the logic among different system components. Ontology, which is a formal specification of shared conceptualization, can be used to create a high level abstraction. Such decoupling of abstract CDSS logic from low level implementation facilitates developing and adding new applications and increases the reusability of different system components. In this research it is argued that a developed CDSS, according to ontology driven design with the ontological model of a problem domain expanded by a clinical decision support requirements, allows the creation of a system that is aligned with clinical workflow. In this research the proposed approach is illustrated with the CDSS for triaging pediatric hip pain (HP) in the Emergency Department. This application (called MET-HP) is created within the MET (Mobile Emergency Triage) environment that implements the ontology driven design principles. MET-HP is a mobile CDSS that includes a decision model derived from the analysis of retrospective chart data and it facilitates early triage of a child using incomplete data. Keywords. Ontology; ontological model; ontology driven design; ontological engineering; clinical decision support system; data mining; knowledge model; knowledge based system.

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