• Title/Summary/Keyword: Quality Management Information System

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Assessing the Applicability of Hysteresis Indices for the Interpretation of Suspended Sediment Dynamics in a Forested Catchment (산림유역의 부유토사 동태 해석을 위한 이력현상 지수의 적용성 평가)

  • Ki-Dae Kim;Su-Jin Jang;Soo-Youn Nam;Jae-Uk Lee;Suk-Woo Kim
    • Korean Journal of Environment and Ecology
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    • v.38 no.2
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    • pp.178-188
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    • 2024
  • The dynamics of suspended sediment (SS) in forested catchments vary depending upon human or natural disturbances, including land use change, forestry activity, forest fires, and landslides. Understanding the dynamics of SS originating from the potential sources within a forested catchment is crucial for establishing an effective water quality management strategy. Therefore, to suggest a systematic method for interpreting SS dynamics, we evaluated the performance and applicability of ten methods for calculating the hysteresis index based on observed hydrological data and two calculation models (Lawler's method and Lloyd's method) with five sampling intervals (50th, 25th, 10th, 5th, and 1st percentiles). Our results showed that Lloyd's method, which used a sampling interval at the 1st percentile, had the largest number of analyzable runoff events and exhibited the best performance. The results of this study can contribute to quantifying the hysteresis in the relationship between discharge and SS and provide useful information for interpreting SS dynamics.

The Effect of Expert Reviews on Consumer Product Evaluations: A Text Mining Approach (전문가 제품 후기가 소비자 제품 평가에 미치는 영향: 텍스트마이닝 분석을 중심으로)

  • Kang, Taeyoung;Park, Do-Hyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.63-82
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    • 2016
  • Individuals gather information online to resolve problems in their daily lives and make various decisions about the purchase of products or services. With the revolutionary development of information technology, Web 2.0 has allowed more people to easily generate and use online reviews such that the volume of information is rapidly increasing, and the usefulness and significance of analyzing the unstructured data have also increased. This paper presents an analysis on the lexical features of expert product reviews to determine their influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. The focus was on how unstructured data can be organized and used in diverse contexts through text mining. In addition, diverse lexical features of expert reviews of contents provided by a third-party review site were extracted and defined. Expert reviews are defined as evaluations by people who have expert knowledge about specific products or services in newspapers or magazines; this type of review is also called a critic review. Consumers who purchased products before the widespread use of the Internet were able to access expert reviews through newspapers or magazines; thus, they were not able to access many of them. Recently, however, major media also now provide online services so that people can more easily and affordably access expert reviews compared to the past. The reason why diverse reviews from experts in several fields are important is that there is an information asymmetry where some information is not shared among consumers and sellers. The information asymmetry can be resolved with information provided by third parties with expertise to consumers. Then, consumers can read expert reviews and make purchasing decisions by considering the abundant information on products or services. Therefore, expert reviews play an important role in consumers' purchasing decisions and the performance of companies across diverse industries. If the influence of qualitative data such as reviews or assessment after the purchase of products can be separately identified from the quantitative data resources, such as the actual quality of products or price, it is possible to identify which aspects of product reviews hamper or promote product sales. Previous studies have focused on the characteristics of the experts themselves, such as the expertise and credibility of sources regarding expert reviews; however, these studies did not suggest the influence of the linguistic features of experts' product reviews on consumers' overall evaluation. However, this study focused on experts' recommendations and evaluations to reveal the lexical features of expert reviews and whether such features influence consumers' overall evaluations and purchasing decisions. Real expert product reviews were analyzed based on the suggested methodology, and five lexical features of expert reviews were ultimately determined. Specifically, the "review depth" (i.e., degree of detail of the expert's product analysis), and "lack of assurance" (i.e., degree of confidence that the expert has in the evaluation) have statistically significant effects on consumers' product evaluations. In contrast, the "positive polarity" (i.e., the degree of positivity of an expert's evaluations) has an insignificant effect, while the "negative polarity" (i.e., the degree of negativity of an expert's evaluations) has a significant negative effect on consumers' product evaluations. Finally, the "social orientation" (i.e., the degree of how many social expressions experts include in their reviews) does not have a significant effect on consumers' product evaluations. In summary, the lexical properties of the product reviews were defined according to each relevant factor. Then, the influence of each linguistic factor of expert reviews on the consumers' final evaluations was tested. In addition, a test was performed on whether each linguistic factor influencing consumers' product evaluations differs depending on the lexical features. The results of these analyses should provide guidelines on how individuals process massive volumes of unstructured data depending on lexical features in various contexts and how companies can use this mechanism from their perspective. This paper provides several theoretical and practical contributions, such as the proposal of a new methodology and its application to real data.

A digital Audio Watermarking Algorithm using 2D Barcode (2차원 바코드를 이용한 오디오 워터마킹 알고리즘)

  • Bae, Kyoung-Yul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.2
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    • pp.97-107
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    • 2011
  • Nowadays there are a lot of issues about copyright infringement in the Internet world because the digital content on the network can be copied and delivered easily. Indeed the copied version has same quality with the original one. So, copyright owners and content provider want a powerful solution to protect their content. The popular one of the solutions was DRM (digital rights management) that is based on encryption technology and rights control. However, DRM-free service was launched after Steve Jobs who is CEO of Apple proposed a new music service paradigm without DRM, and the DRM is disappeared at the online music market. Even though the online music service decided to not equip the DRM solution, copyright owners and content providers are still searching a solution to protect their content. A solution to replace the DRM technology is digital audio watermarking technology which can embed copyright information into the music. In this paper, the author proposed a new audio watermarking algorithm with two approaches. First, the watermark information is generated by two dimensional barcode which has error correction code. So, the information can be recovered by itself if the errors fall into the range of the error tolerance. The other one is to use chirp sequence of CDMA (code division multiple access). These make the algorithm robust to the several malicious attacks. There are many 2D barcodes. Especially, QR code which is one of the matrix barcodes can express the information and the expression is freer than that of the other matrix barcodes. QR code has the square patterns with double at the three corners and these indicate the boundary of the symbol. This feature of the QR code is proper to express the watermark information. That is, because the QR code is 2D barcodes, nonlinear code and matrix code, it can be modulated to the spread spectrum and can be used for the watermarking algorithm. The proposed algorithm assigns the different spread spectrum sequences to the individual users respectively. In the case that the assigned code sequences are orthogonal, we can identify the watermark information of the individual user from an audio content. The algorithm used the Walsh code as an orthogonal code. The watermark information is rearranged to the 1D sequence from 2D barcode and modulated by the Walsh code. The modulated watermark information is embedded into the DCT (discrete cosine transform) domain of the original audio content. For the performance evaluation, I used 3 audio samples, "Amazing Grace", "Oh! Carol" and "Take me home country roads", The attacks for the robustness test were MP3 compression, echo attack, and sub woofer boost. The MP3 compression was performed by a tool of Cool Edit Pro 2.0. The specification of MP3 was CBR(Constant Bit Rate) 128kbps, 44,100Hz, and stereo. The echo attack had the echo with initial volume 70%, decay 75%, and delay 100msec. The sub woofer boost attack was a modification attack of low frequency part in the Fourier coefficients. The test results showed the proposed algorithm is robust to the attacks. In the MP3 attack, the strength of the watermark information is not affected, and then the watermark can be detected from all of the sample audios. In the sub woofer boost attack, the watermark was detected when the strength is 0.3. Also, in the case of echo attack, the watermark can be identified if the strength is greater and equal than 0.5.

A Study on the Retrieval of River Turbidity Based on KOMPSAT-3/3A Images (KOMPSAT-3/3A 영상 기반 하천의 탁도 산출 연구)

  • Kim, Dahui;Won, You Jun;Han, Sangmyung;Han, Hyangsun
    • Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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    • v.38 no.6_1
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    • pp.1285-1300
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    • 2022
  • Turbidity, the measure of the cloudiness of water, is used as an important index for water quality management. The turbidity can vary greatly in small river systems, which affects water quality in national rivers. Therefore, the generation of high-resolution spatial information on turbidity is very important. In this study, a turbidity retrieval model using the Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-3 and -3A (KOMPSAT-3/3A) images was developed for high-resolution turbidity mapping of Han River system based on eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm. To this end, the top of atmosphere (TOA) spectral reflectance was calculated from a total of 24 KOMPSAT-3/3A images and 150 Landsat-8 images. The Landsat-8 TOA spectral reflectance was cross-calibrated to the KOMPSAT-3/3A bands. The turbidity measured by the National Water Quality Monitoring Network was used as a reference dataset, and as input variables, the TOA spectral reflectance at the locations of in situ turbidity measurement, the spectral indices (the normalized difference vegetation index, normalized difference water index, and normalized difference turbidity index), and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived atmospheric products(the atmospheric optical thickness, water vapor, and ozone) were used. Furthermore, by analyzing the KOMPSAT-3/3A TOA spectral reflectance of different turbidities, a new spectral index, new normalized difference turbidity index (nNDTI), was proposed, and it was added as an input variable to the turbidity retrieval model. The XGBoost model showed excellent performance for the retrieval of turbidity with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.70 NTU and a normalized RMSE (NRMSE) of 14.70% compared to in situ turbidity, in which the nNDTI proposed in this study was used as the most important variable. The developed turbidity retrieval model was applied to the KOMPSAT-3/3A images to map high-resolution river turbidity, and it was possible to analyze the spatiotemporal variations of turbidity. Through this study, we could confirm that the KOMPSAT-3/3A images are very useful for retrieving high-resolution and accurate spatial information on the river turbidity.

A Study on the Realities of Custom-made Clothing Production in Middle-aged Women's Clothing Firms (중년여성복업체(中年女性服業體)의 맞춤복(服) 생산실태(生産實態) 연구(硏究))

  • Park, Yu-Jeong;Sohn, Hee-Soon
    • Journal of Fashion Business
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    • v.6 no.2
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    • pp.1-16
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    • 2002
  • The need for ready-to-wear clothing increases as the problem comes to arise from the fit of custommade clothing due to the characteristics of middle-aged women's somatotype. At this point of time, a study on the realities of production of custom-made clothing in middle-aged women's clothing business firms is of very greatly significance. Therefore, this study was intended to identify the problem and improvements through the survey research of production of custom-made clothing in middle-aged women's clothing business firms and further present the plan for development of custom-made clothing business. The questionnaire was framed based on the contents extracted from the preliminary questionnaire research for the pattern section chief of each business firm. Collected data were statistically processed using the SPSS 10.0 Windows program. As a result, the following findings were obtained: 1. The target age of the middle-aged women's clothing business firms ranged from more than 45 years to less than 50 years of age. Clothing business firms much made inroads into the ready-to-wear clothing market largely in the 1980s and the 1990s. Their active entry into the custom-made clothing market occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s. 2. In terms of the clothing production method of middle-aged women's clothing firms, some private boutique and designer brand clothing firms entered the clothing market with a focus on custom-made clothing in the beginning of its organization and introduced the production method of ready-to-wear clothing in accordance with changes in production methods and consumers' needs and wants. National brand clothing firms manufactured clothing with a focus on ready-to-wear clothing from the beginning of its organization, but at last they manufactured both partial custom-made and whole custom-made as the problem arose from ready-to-wear clothing. Seeing that their clothing production showed the ratio readyto-wear to custom-made clothing of 2.58:1. And it was found that the manufacture of ready-to-wear and custom-made clothing took into consideration the great difference in the pattern, size and design plan. The research of the clothing production process showed that whole custom-made and partial custommade were distinguished according to whether or not the sample was presented. 3. The ready-to-wear pattern of middle-aged women's clothing firms were used with a focus on the 'patternmaker-developed pattern' and company-developed pattern'. Most clothing businesses produced clothing in 4 to 5 basic sizes, which is found to be insufficient to complement the physical characteristics of middle-aged women with many specific somatotypes. In the pattern of custom-made clothing, the 'pattern of ready-to-wear were applied' or the 'customized pattern was developed'. Actual measurements were most used as the size of custom-made, and accordingly it is predicted that the level of satisfaction is higher with the fit of custom-made clothing than that of ready-to-wear. The selling place and the head office showed the similar percent as the place for measuring the size of custom-made clothing. Size measurers were mostly the shop master. And it was found that most clothing business firms had a problem when the measured size was applied to the pattern. Accordingly, it is necessary to provide education on size measurement for shop masters. 4. It was found that in the middle-aged women's clothing firms, the pattern correction of the length of sleeve, jacket and slacks occupied the highest percent. Accordingly, it is necessary to provide for the size system to complement the accurate somatotype characteristics of middle-aged women. 5. In custom-made clothing customer management, most firms engaged in customer somatotype management through size management. They provided customers with commodity information by informing them of the sales and event period and practiced human management for customers by maintaining the get-together and friendly relationship. 6. Middle-aged women's clothing businesses responded that it would be necessary to improve the fit of custom-made clothing and complement their pursuit for individuality as the plan to improve its quality. In consequence, it suggests that middle-aged women's clothing businesses should provide middle-aged women with the clothing of better-suited size and refined design. Middle-aged women's clothing businesses responded that it was the most urgent task to form the custom-made clothing manufacturing team as the plan to expand the custom-made clothing market, which is identified as their emphasis on the systematized production of custom-made clothing.

Improvement Plan to Facilitate a Landscape Architectural Promotion Facility and Complex System (조경진흥시설과 조경진흥단지 제도 활성화 방안 연구)

  • Kim, Yong-Gook;Kim, Shin-Sung
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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    • v.46 no.1
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    • pp.9-16
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    • 2018
  • Landscape architecture is an indispensable professional service in building sustainable land and urban environments. The landscape architecture industry is closely related to the promotion of the health and welfare of the people, urban revitalization and residential environment improvement as well as job creation. Despite various public interest values of landscape architecture, the growth engine of the landscape architecture industry, which is supposed to improve the quality of landscape services, has stagnated. In 2015, the Landscape Architecture Promotion Act was enacted to provide a landscape architectural promotion facility and complex system to support revitalization through the integration of the landscape architecture industry. The purpose of this study is to suggest an improvement plan to enhance the effectiveness of the landscape architectural promotion facility and complex system. The results of the analysis are as follows: First, workers and experts in landscape architecture recognized the need for policies and projects to promote the landscape architecture industry. Second, the industrial types suitable for the landscape architectural promotion facility were landscape design, landscape maintenance and management, and landscape construction industry. Meanwhile the industrial types suitable for a landscape architectural promotion complex were landscape trees and landscape facilities production and distribution. Third, the expected effect of the designation of the landscape architectural facility was 'the increase of the business opportunity through the expansion of the network'. On the other hand, that of the landscape architectural promotion complex was 'the activation of various information sharing'. Fourth, 'the size of the local government landscape architecture industry and the capacity to cultivate' was the most important among the designation criteria of the landscape architectural promotion facility. As for that of the landscape architectural promotion complex, the 'feasibility of promotion plan' was the most crucial. Fifth, 'tax benefit and deductible exemption' was considered as a necessary support method for the activation of the landscape architectural promotion facility, and 'maintenance and management fee support' was recognized in the case of the landscape architectural promotion complex.

High-resolution medium-range streamflow prediction using distributed hydrological model WRF-Hydro and numerical weather forecast GDAPS (분포형 수문모형 WRF-Hydro와 기상수치예보모형 GDAPS를 활용한 고해상도 중기 유량 예측)

  • Kim, Sohyun;Kim, Bomi;Lee, Garim;Lee, Yaewon;Noh, Seong Jin
    • Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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    • v.57 no.5
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    • pp.333-346
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    • 2024
  • High-resolution medium-range streamflow prediction is crucial for sustainable water quality and aquatic ecosystem management. For reliable medium-range streamflow predictions, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of forcings and to effectively utilize weather forecast data with low spatio-temporal resolutions. In this study, we presented a comparative analysis of medium-range streamflow predictions using the distributed hydrological model, WRF-Hydro, and the numerical weather forecast Global Data Assimilation and Prediction System (GDAPS) in the Geumho River basin, Korea. Multiple forcings, ground observations (AWS&ASOS), numerical weather forecast (GDAPS), and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), were ingested to investigate the performance of streamflow predictions with highresolution WRF-Hydro configuration. In terms of the mean areal accumulated rainfall, GDAPS was overestimated by 36% to 234%, and GLDAS reanalysis data were overestimated by 80% to 153% compared to AWS&ASOS. The performance of streamflow predictions using AWS&ASOS resulted in KGE and NSE values of 0.6 or higher at the Kangchang station. Meanwhile, GDAPS-based streamflow predictions showed high variability, with KGE values ranging from 0.871 to -0.131 depending on the rainfall events. Although the peak flow error of GDAPS was larger or similar to that of GLDAS, the peak flow timing error of GDAPS was smaller than that of GLDAS. The average timing errors of AWS&ASOS, GDAPS, and GLDAS were 3.7 hours, 8.4 hours, and 70.1 hours, respectively. Medium-range streamflow predictions using GDAPS and high-resolution WRF-Hydro may provide useful information for water resources management especially in terms of occurrence and timing of peak flow albeit high uncertainty in flood magnitude.

New Insights on Mobile Location-based Services(LBS): Leading Factors to the Use of Services and Privacy Paradox (모바일 위치기반서비스(LBS) 관련한 새로운 견해: 서비스사용으로 이끄는 요인들과 사생활염려의 모순)

  • Cheon, Eunyoung;Park, Yong-Tae
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.4
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    • pp.33-56
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    • 2017
  • As Internet usage is becoming more common worldwide and smartphone become necessity in daily life, technologies and applications related to mobile Internet are developing rapidly. The results of the Internet usage patterns of consumers around the world imply that there are many potential new business opportunities for mobile Internet technologies and applications. The location-based service (LBS) is a service based on the location information of the mobile device. LBS has recently gotten much attention among many mobile applications and various LBSs are rapidly developing in numerous categories. However, even with the development of LBS related technologies and services, there is still a lack of empirical research on the intention to use LBS. The application of previous researches is limited because they focused on the effect of one particular factor and had not shown the direct relationship on the intention to use LBS. Therefore, this study presents a research model of factors that affect the intention to use and actual use of LBS whose market is expected to grow rapidly, and tested it by conducting a questionnaire survey of 330 users. The results of data analysis showed that service customization, service quality, and personal innovativeness have a positive effect on the intention to use LBS and the intention to use LBS has a positive effect on the actual use of LBS. These results implies that LBS providers can enhance the user's intention to use LBS by offering service customization through the provision of various LBSs based on users' needs, improving information service qualities such as accuracy, timeliness, sensitivity, and reliability, and encouraging personal innovativeness. However, privacy concerns in the context of LBS are not significantly affected by service customization and personal innovativeness and privacy concerns do not significantly affect the intention to use LBS. In fact, the information related to users' location collected by LBS is less sensitive when compared with the information that is used to perform financial transactions. Therefore, such outcomes on privacy concern are revealed. In addition, the advantages of using LBS are more important than the sensitivity of privacy protection to the users who use LBS than to the users who use information systems such as electronic commerce that involves financial transactions. Therefore, LBS are recommended to be treated differently from other information systems. This study is significant in the theoretical point of contribution that it proposed factors affecting the intention to use LBS in a multi-faceted perspective, proved the proposed research model empirically, brought new insights on LBS, and broadens understanding of the intention to use and actual use of LBS. Also, the empirical results of the customization of LBS affecting the user's intention to use the LBS suggest that the provision of customized LBS services based on the usage data analysis through utilizing technologies such as artificial intelligence can enhance the user's intention to use. In a practical point of view, the results of this study are expected to help LBS providers to develop a competitive strategy for responding to LBS users effectively and lead to the LBS market grows. We expect that there will be differences in using LBSs depending on some factors such as types of LBS, whether it is free of charge or not, privacy policies related to LBS, the levels of reliability related application and technology, the frequency of use, etc. Therefore, if we can make comparative studies with those factors, it will contribute to the development of the research areas of LBS. We hope this study can inspire many researchers and initiate many great researches in LBS fields.

Context Prediction Using Right and Wrong Patterns to Improve Sequential Matching Performance for More Accurate Dynamic Context-Aware Recommendation (보다 정확한 동적 상황인식 추천을 위해 정확 및 오류 패턴을 활용하여 순차적 매칭 성능이 개선된 상황 예측 방법)

  • Kwon, Oh-Byung
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.19 no.3
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    • pp.51-67
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    • 2009
  • Developing an agile recommender system for nomadic users has been regarded as a promising application in mobile and ubiquitous settings. To increase the quality of personalized recommendation in terms of accuracy and elapsed time, estimating future context of the user in a correct way is highly crucial. Traditionally, time series analysis and Makovian process have been adopted for such forecasting. However, these methods are not adequate in predicting context data, only because most of context data are represented as nominal scale. To resolve these limitations, the alignment-prediction algorithm has been suggested for context prediction, especially for future context from the low-level context. Recently, an ontological approach has been proposed for guided context prediction without context history. However, due to variety of context information, acquiring sufficient context prediction knowledge a priori is not easy in most of service domains. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel context prediction methodology, which does not require a priori knowledge, and to increase accuracy and decrease elapsed time for service response. To do so, we have newly developed pattern-based context prediction approach. First of ail, a set of individual rules is derived from each context attribute using context history. Then a pattern consisted of results from reasoning individual rules, is developed for pattern learning. If at least one context property matches, say R, then regard the pattern as right. If the pattern is new, add right pattern, set the value of mismatched properties = 0, freq = 1 and w(R, 1). Otherwise, increase the frequency of the matched right pattern by 1 and then set w(R,freq). After finishing training, if the frequency is greater than a threshold value, then save the right pattern in knowledge base. On the other hand, if at least one context property matches, say W, then regard the pattern as wrong. If the pattern is new, modify the result into wrong answer, add right pattern, and set frequency to 1 and w(W, 1). Or, increase the matched wrong pattern's frequency by 1 and then set w(W, freq). After finishing training, if the frequency value is greater than a threshold level, then save the wrong pattern on the knowledge basis. Then, context prediction is performed with combinatorial rules as follows: first, identify current context. Second, find matched patterns from right patterns. If there is no pattern matched, then find a matching pattern from wrong patterns. If a matching pattern is not found, then choose one context property whose predictability is higher than that of any other properties. To show the feasibility of the methodology proposed in this paper, we collected actual context history from the travelers who had visited the largest amusement park in Korea. As a result, 400 context records were collected in 2009. Then we randomly selected 70% of the records as training data. The rest were selected as testing data. To examine the performance of the methodology, prediction accuracy and elapsed time were chosen as measures. We compared the performance with case-based reasoning and voting methods. Through a simulation test, we conclude that our methodology is clearly better than CBR and voting methods in terms of accuracy and elapsed time. This shows that the methodology is relatively valid and scalable. As a second round of the experiment, we compared a full model to a partial model. A full model indicates that right and wrong patterns are used for reasoning the future context. On the other hand, a partial model means that the reasoning is performed only with right patterns, which is generally adopted in the legacy alignment-prediction method. It turned out that a full model is better than a partial model in terms of the accuracy while partial model is better when considering elapsed time. As a last experiment, we took into our consideration potential privacy problems that might arise among the users. To mediate such concern, we excluded such context properties as date of tour and user profiles such as gender and age. The outcome shows that preserving privacy is endurable. Contributions of this paper are as follows: First, academically, we have improved sequential matching methods to predict accuracy and service time by considering individual rules of each context property and learning from wrong patterns. Second, the proposed method is found to be quite effective for privacy preserving applications, which are frequently required by B2C context-aware services; the privacy preserving system applying the proposed method successfully can also decrease elapsed time. Hence, the method is very practical in establishing privacy preserving context-aware services. Our future research issues taking into account some limitations in this paper can be summarized as follows. First, user acceptance or usability will be tested with actual users in order to prove the value of the prototype system. Second, we will apply the proposed method to more general application domains as this paper focused on tourism in amusement park.

The Current Status of Utilization of Palliative Care Units in Korea: 6 Month Results of 2009 Korean Terminal Cancer Patient Information System (말기암환자 정보시스템을 이용한 우리나라 암환자 완화의료기관의 이용현황)

  • Shin, Dong-Wook;Choi, Jin-Young;Nam, Byung-Ho;Seo, Won-Seok;Kim, Hyo-Young;Hwang, Eun-Joo;Kang, Jina;Kim, So-Hee;Kim, Yang-Hyuck;Park, Eun-Cheol
    • Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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    • v.13 no.3
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    • pp.181-189
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    • 2010
  • Purpose: Recently, health policy making is increasingly based on evidence. Therefore, Korean Terminal Cancer Patient Information System (KTCPIS) was developed to meet such need. We aimed to report its developmental process and statistics from 6 months data. Methods: Items for KTCPIS were developed through the consultation with practitioners. E-Velos web-based clinical trial management system was used as a technical platform. Data were collected for patients who were registered to 34 inpatient palliative care services, designated by Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs, from $1^{st}$ of January to $30^{th}$ of June in 2009. Descriptive statistics were used for the analysis. Results: From the nationally representative set of 2,940 patients, we obtained the following results. Mean age was $64.8{\pm}12.9$ years, and 56.6% were male. Lung cancer (18.0%) was most common diagnosis. Only 50.3% of patients received the confirmation of terminal diagnosis by two or more physicians, and 69.7% had an insight of terminal diagnosis at the time of admission. About half of patients were admitted to the units on their own without any formal referral. Average and worst pain scores were significantly reduced after 1 week when compared to those at the time of admission. 73.4% faced death in the units, and home-discharge comprised only 13.3%. Mean length of stay per admission was $20.2{\pm}21.2$ days, with median value of 13. Conclusion: Nationally representative data on the characteristics of patients and their caregiver, and current practice of service delivery in palliative care units were obtained through the operation of KTCPIS.