"This book seeks to establish the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards, and ways to accelerate the adoption of these standards"--Provided by publisher.

With its nuanced presentation of the theoretical and practical implications, this book expands our understanding of how property rights work in today's world.

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of John Mylopoulos on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Toronto, contains 25 high-quality papers, written by leading scientists in the field of conceptual modeling. The volume has been divided into six sections. The first section focuses on the foundations of conceptual modeling and contains material on ontologies and knowledge representation. The four sections on software and requirements engineering, information systems, information integration, and web and services, represent the chief current application domains of conceptual modeling. Finally, the section on implementations concentrates on projects that build tools to support conceptual modeling. With its in-depth coverage of diverse topics, this book could be a useful companion to a course on conceptual modeling.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) refers to the consistent and continuous use of digital information throughout the entire lifecycle of a built facility, including its design, construction and operation. In order to exploit BIM methods to their full potential, a fundamental grasp of their key principles and applications is essential. Accordingly, this book combines discussions of theoretical foundations with reports from the industry on currently applied best practices. The book’s content is divided into six parts: Part I discusses the technological basics of BIM and addresses computational methods for the geometric and semantic modeling of buildings, as well as methods for process modeling. Next, Part II covers the important aspect of the interoperability of BIM software products and describes in detail the standardized data format Industry Foundation Classes. It presents the different classification systems, discusses the data format CityGML for describing 3D city models and COBie for handing over data to clients, and also provides an overview of BIM programming tools and interfaces. Part III is dedicated to the philosophy, organization and technical implementation of BIM-based collaboration, and discusses the impact on legal issues including construction contracts. In turn, Part IV covers a wide range of BIM use cases in the different lifecycle phases of a built facility, including the use of BIM for design coordination, structural analysis, energy analysis, code compliance checking, quantity take-off, prefabrication, progress monitoring and operation. In Part V, a number of design and construction companies report on the current state of BIM adoption in connection with actual BIM projects, and discuss the approach pursued for the shift toward BIM, including the hurdles taken. Lastly, Part VI summarizes the book’s content and provides an outlook on future developments. The book was written both for professionals using or programming such tools, and for students in Architecture and Construction Engineering programs.

This User’s Guide is intended to support the design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, and quality evaluation of registries created to increase understanding of patient outcomes. For the purposes of this guide, a patient registry is an organized system that uses observational study methods to collect uniform data (clinical and other) to evaluate specified outcomes for a population defined by a particular disease, condition, or exposure, and that serves one or more predetermined scientific, clinical, or policy purposes. A registry database is a file (or files) derived from the registry. Although registries can serve many purposes, this guide focuses on registries created for one or more of the following purposes: to describe the natural history of disease, to determine clinical effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of health care products and services, to measure or monitor safety and harm, and/or to measure quality of care. Registries are classified according to how their populations are defined. For example, product registries include patients who have been exposed to biopharmaceutical products or medical devices. Health services registries consist of patients who have had a common procedure, clinical encounter, or hospitalization. Disease or condition registries are defined by patients having the same diagnosis, such as cystic fibrosis or heart failure. The User’s Guide was created by researchers affiliated with AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program, particularly those who participated in AHRQ’s DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions About Effectiveness) program. Chapters were subject to multiple internal and external independent reviews.

The topic of using views to answer queries has been popular for a few decades now, as it cuts across domains such as query optimization, information integration, data warehousing, website design, and, recently, database-as-a-service and data placement in cloud systems. This book assembles foundational work on answering queries using views in a self-contained manner, with an effort to choose material that constitutes the backbone of the research. It presents efficient algorithms and covers the following problems: query containment; rewriting queries using views in various logical languages; equivalent rewritings and maximally contained rewritings; and computing certain answers in the data-integration and data-exchange settings. Query languages that are considered are fragments of SQL, in particular, select-project-join queries, also called conjunctive queries (with or without arithmetic comparisons or negation), and aggregate SQL queries.