The continuous trend in computer science to lift programming to higher abstraction levels increases scalability and opens programming to a wider public. In particular, service-oriented programming and the support of semantics-based frameworks make application development accessible to users with almost no programming expertise. This monograph establishes requirement-centric scientific workflow design as an instance of consequent constraint-driven development. Requirements formulated in terms of user-level constraints are automatically transformed into running applications using temporal logic-based synthesis technology. The impact of this approach is illustrated by applying it to four very different bioinformatics scenarios: phylogenetic analysis, the dedicated GeneFisher-P scenario, the FiatFlux-P scenario, and microarray data analyses.

"Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient car -- not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes. To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), with additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has prepared this comprehensive, 1,400-page, handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality -- Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043)." - online AHRQ blurb, http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nurseshdbk/

This book demonstrates how to successfully manage and lead healthcare institutions by employing the logic of business model innovation to gain competitive advantages. Since clerk-like routines in professional organizations tend to overlook patient and service-centered healthcare solutions, it challenges the view that competition and collaboration in the healthcare sector should not only incorporate single-end services, therapies or diagnosis related groups. Moreover, the authors focus on holistic business models, which place greater emphasis on customer needs and put customers and patients first. The holistic business models approach addresses topics such as business operations, competitiveness, strategic business objectives, opportunities and threats, critical success factors and key performance indicators.The contributions cover various aspects of service business innovation such as reconfiguring the hospital business model in healthcare delivery, essential characteristics of service business model innovation in healthcare, guided business modeling and analysis for business professionals, patient-driven service delivery models in healthcare, and continuous and co-creative business model creation. All of the contributions introduce business models and strategies, process innovations, and toolkits that can be applied at the managerial level, ensuring the book will be of interest to healthcare professionals, hospital managers and consultants, as well as scholars, whose focus is on improving value-generating and competitive business architectures in the healthcare sector.

With the increasing number of neuroimaging studies appearing yearly in the literature, the need to consider the synthesis of the underlying data into new knowledge and research directions has never been more important. The development of large-scale databases and grid-enabled computing has laid the groundwork for mining these rich datasets beyond the scope of their initial collection. Additionally, meta-analyses of the summary results contained in published research articles have provided a powerful way to explore hidden trends in the neuroscience literature. In each case, the processing of data requires a careful consideration of the individual processing steps involved and how they can be assembled into reliable workflows. In results from published studies, the manner in which data were processed may influence meta-analytic results which can have implications on clinical interpretation. Several efforts now exist that provide tools for use in the construction of data processing workflows. However, careful thought must be given to ensuring appropriate, efficient, optimal, and replicable processing. The results obtained from data-mining and meta-analysis must tell a story about a collection of existing data. Also they must suggest novel and testable hypotheses for further investigation with implications for understanding of the brain in health and disease. Where they do, these new results and interpretations often provide fresh insights into the data that extend beyond the rationale for their original collection. In this volume, we have asked leaders in the field of neuroimaging data mining and meta-analysis to provide their thoughts on methods for efficient workflow design, interoperability with large-scale databases, and to discuss their work in exploring the richness of brain imaging data as well as the literature of published research results.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Task Models and Diagrams for User Interface Design, TAMODIA 2007, held in Toulouse, France, in November 2007. The workshop features current research and gives some indication of the new directions in which task analysis theories, methods, techniques and tools are progressing. The papers are organized in topical sections.

This book presents an agile and model-driven approach to manage scientific workflows. The approach is based on the Extreme Model Driven Design (XMDD) paradigm and aims at simplifying and automating the complex data analysis processes carried out by scientists in their day-to-day work. Besides documenting the impact the workflow modeling might have on the work of natural scientists, this book serves three major purposes: 1. It acts as a primer for practitioners who are interested to learn how to think in terms of services and workflows when facing domain-specific scientific processes. 2. It provides interesting material for readers already familiar with this kind of tools, because it introduces systematically both the technologies used in each case study and the basic concepts behind them. 3. As the addressed thematic field becomes increasingly relevant for lectures in both computer science and experimental sciences, it also provides helpful material for teachers that plan similar courses.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE'99 held in Heidelberg, Germany in June 1999. The 27 revised full papers presented together with 12 short research papers and two invited contributions were carefully selected from a total of 168 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on components, information systems management, method engineering, data warehouses, process modeling, CORBA and distributed information systems, workflow systems, heterogeneous databases, and information systems dynamics.