Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has long been known as a major cause of hospital-acquired (HA-MRSA) infections worldwide. For the past twenty years, an increasing number of studies ...have described its emergence in the community as well. In Portugal, a country with a high-prevalence of HA-MRSA, there are only limited data available on the epidemiology of MRSA in the community. We studied the prevalence of S. aureus and MRSA colonization among healthy adults in Portugal. Between February 2015 and December 2016, a longitudinal study was conducted in which 87 adults aged 25-50 years old were followed for six months. For each participant nasopharyngeal, oropharyngeal and saliva samples were obtained monthly and, in some cases, weekly. A total of 1,578 samples (n = 526 for each sampling site) were examined for the presence of S. aureus and MRSA by classical culture-based methods. Fifty-seven adults (65.5%) carried S. aureus at least once during the six months period of the study: 19.5% were persistent S. aureus carriers and 46.0% were intermittent carriers. Carriage rates per sampling site were 20.5% in nasopharynx, 18.3% in oropharynx, and 13.5% in saliva. Simultaneous screening of the three sampling sites increased detection of S. aureus, which overall occurred in 34.4% of the 526 sampling time-points. No MRSA were isolated. In conclusion, this study adds novel information about the MRSA scenario in the Portuguese community. Our results indicate that, in Portugal, MRSA does not seem to circulate among healthy adults without risk factors and therefore this age group does not constitute, at the current time, a reservoir of MRSA in the community.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Service contracts bind parties legally, regulating their behavior in the scope of a (business) service relationship. Given that there are legal consequences attached to service contracts, ...understanding the elements of a contract is key to managing services in an enterprise. After all, provisions in a service contract and in legislation establish obligations and rights for service providers and customers that must be respected in service delivery. The importance of service contracts to service provisioning in an enterprise has motivated us to investigate their representation in enterprise models. We have observed that approaches fall into two extremes of a spectrum. Some approaches, such as ArchiMate, offer an opaque “contract” construct, not revealing the rights and obligations in the scope of the governed service relationship. Other approaches, under the umbrella term “contract languages”, are devoted exactly to the formal representation of the contents of contracts. Despite the applications of contract languages, they operate at a level of detail that does not match that of enterprise architecture models. In this paper, we explore and bridge the gap between these two extremes. We address the representation of service contract elements with a systematic approach: we first propose a well-founded service contract ontology, and then extend the ArchiMate language to reflect the elements of the service contract ontology. The applicability of the proposed extension is assessed in the representation of a real-world cloud service contract.
Multi-level conceptual modeling addresses the representation of subject domains dealing explicitly with multiple classification levels. Despite the recent advances in multi-level modeling techniques, ...we believe that the literature in multi-level conceptual modeling would benefit from a theory that: (1) formally characterizes the nature of classification levels and (2) precisely defines the structural relations that may occur between elements of different classification levels. This work aims to fill this gap by proposing an axiomatic theory that can be considered a reference top-level ontology for types in multi-level conceptual modeling. The theory provides the modeler with basic concepts and patterns to articulate domains that require multiple levels of classification as well as to inform the development of well-founded languages for multi-level conceptual modeling. The whole theory is founded on a basic
instantiation
relation and characterizes the concepts of
individuals
and
types
, with types organized in levels related by instantiation. Further, it includes intra-level structural relations that are used to define expressive multi-level models and cross-level relations that allow us to account for and incorporate the different notions of power type in the literature.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of reference conceptual models to capture information about complex and sensitive business domains (e.g., finance, healthcare, space). ...These models play a fundamental role in different types of critical semantic interoperability tasks. Therefore, domain experts must be able to understand and reason with their content. In other words, these models need to be
cognitively tractable
. This paper contributes to this goal by proposing a model clustering technique that leverages on the rich semantics of ontology-driven conceptual models (ODCM). In particular, we propose a formal notion of
Relational Context
to guide the automated clusterization (or modular breakdown) of conceptual models. Such Relational Contexts capture all the information needed for understanding entities “qua players of roles” in the scope of an objectified (reified) relationship (relator). The paper also presents computational support for automating the identification of Relational Contexts and this modular breakdown procedure. Finally, we report the results of an empirical study assessing the cognitive effectiveness of this approach.
Competence-based approaches have received increased attention, as the demand for qualified people with the right combination of competences establishes itself as a major factor of organizational ...performance. This paper examines how competences can be incorporated into Enterprise Architecture modeling: (i) we identify a key set of competence-related concepts such as knowledge, skills, and attitudes, (ii) analyze and relate them using a reference ontology (grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology), and (iii) propose a representation strategy for modeling competences and their constituent elements leveraging the ArchiMate language, discussing how the proposed models can fit in enterprise competence-based practices. Our approach is intended to cover two tasks relevant to the combined application of Enterprise Architecture and Competence Modeling: ‘zooming in’ on competences, revealing the relations between competences, knowledge, skills, attitudes and other personal characteristics that matter in organizational performance, and ‘zooming out’ of competences, placing them in the wider context of other personal competences and overall organizational capabilities. An assessment of the representation is offered in the form of an empirical survey.
The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recognized in the management literature. Despite that, little attention has been given to ...integrate the notions of capabilities and resources in enterprise architecture descriptions. One notable exception is a recent proposal to extend the ArchiMate framework and language to include capability and resources and thus improve ArchiMate׳s coverage of portfolio management. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the concepts introduced in that proposal, focusing in particular on the resource, capability and competence concepts. We provide an account for these concepts in terms of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). The analysis allows us to identify semantic issues in the proposal and suggests well-founded recommendations for improvements. We revise the proposed metamodel in order to address the identified problems, thereby improving the semantic clarity and usefulness of the proposed language extension. Two real-world cases are modeled with the resulting metamodel to show the applicability of the constructs and relations in an industrial setting.
•We present an ontological analysis of resource, capability and competence for EA.•We found 13 issues on the original proposal with the ontological analysis.•We refactor the original metamodel to address the identified problems.•We present two use cases using the improved extension.•Our recommendations should lead to improved resource and capability oversight.
The concept of “service” has been characterized in different disciplines and by different authors from various points of view. This variety of characterizations has emerged because although this ...notion seems intuitive, it is far from trivial, with many interrelated perspectives. Given their importance in enterprise computing and Service Science in general, we believe that a clear account of services and service-related concepts is necessary and would serve as a basis for communication, consensus and alignment among approaches and perspectives. In this paper we propose a commitment-based account of the notion of service captured in a core reference ontology called UFO-S. We address the commitments established between service providers and customers, and show how such commitments affect the service lifecycle. Moreover, we show that the commitment-based account can serve to harmonize different notions of service in the literature.
•We present a core reference ontology for services called UFO-S.•UFO-S is based on the notion of service commitments and claims.•UFO-S focuses on service offer, service negotiation, and service delivery phases.•UFO-S is grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO).•This ontology is applied for harmonizing a number of service perspectives.
Abstract
Rhodolith beds built by free-living coralline algae are important ecosystems for marine biodiversity and carbonate production. Yet, our mechanistic understanding regarding rhodolith ...physiology and its drivers is still limited. Using three rhodolith species with different branching morphologies, we investigated the role of morphology in species’ physiology and the implications for their susceptibility to ocean acidification (OA). For this, we determined the effects of thallus topography on diffusive boundary layer (DBL) thickness, the associated microscale oxygen and pH dynamics and their relationship with species’ metabolic and light and dark calcification rates, as well as species’ responses to short-term OA exposure. Our results show that rhodolith branching creates low-flow microenvironments that exhibit increasing DBL thickness with increasing branch length. This, together with species’ metabolic rates, determined the light-dependent pH dynamics at the algal surface, which in turn dictated species’ calcification rates. While these differences did not translate in species-specific responses to short-term OA exposure, the differences in the magnitude of diurnal pH fluctuations (~ 0.1–1.2 pH units) between species suggest potential differences in phenotypic plasticity to OA that may result in different susceptibilities to long-term OA exposure, supporting the general view that species’ ecomechanical characteristics must be considered for predicting OA responses.
In many important subject domains, there are central real-world phenomena that span across multiple classification levels. In these subject domains, besides having the traditional type-level domain ...regularities (classes) that classify multiple concrete instances, we also have higher-order type-level regularities (metaclasses) that classify multiple instances that are themselves types. Multi-Level Modeling aims to address this technical challenge. Despite the advances in this area in the last decade, a number of requirements arising from representation needs in subject domains have not yet been addressed in current modeling approaches. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing an expressive multi-level conceptual modeling language (dubbed ML2). We follow a principled language engineering approach in the design of ML2, constructing its abstract syntax as to reflect a fully axiomatized theory for multi-level modeling (termed MLT*). We show that ML2 enables the expression of a number of multi-level modeling scenarios that cannot be currently expressed in the existing multi-level modeling languages. A textual syntax for ML2 is provided with an implementation in Xtext. We discuss how the formal theory influences the language in two aspects: (i) by providing rigorous justification for the language’s syntactic rules, which follow MLT* theorems and (ii) by forming the basis for model simulation and verification. We show that the language can reveal problems in multi-level taxonomic structures, using Wikidata fragments to demonstrate the language’s practical relevance.
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