In: Health Policy, 2006, vol. 78, no. 1, p. 77-92
This paper investigates the determinants of regional variations in outpatient antibiotic consumption using Swiss data. The analysis contributes to the debate on appropriate antibiotic use by improving the understanding of its determinants, and may help to define more effective health care policies to reduce the resistance phenomenon. Findings suggest that Switzerland exhibits relatively low...
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In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006, vol. 4209, p. 316-328
As part of a Distributed Information Retrieval system a description of each remote information resource, archive or repository is usually stored centrally in order to facilitate resource selection. The acquisition of precise resource descriptions is therefore an important phase in Distributed Information Retrieval, as the quality of such representations will impact on selection accuracy, and...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2005.
The quality of web sites (or more in general interactive applications) may be improved taking into account the activity of usability evaluation, in which the quality for the endusers is defined and established. One of the most serious problems related to usability field is that usability evaluation methods often were not defined to be effectively reused by the people who did not invent them. The...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2005 ; 2005COM004.
A common opinion in the Requirements Traceability field is that solution design, i.e. the design of the application solutions, may be derived directly from requirements refinement; according to current industrial practices and to some specific experiences, this dissertation proposes a different thesis: the design process is not a fully rational and explicit sequence of actions; designers keep...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2006 ; 2006COM002.
Communication is virtually impossible when interlocutors lack the ability to negotiate meanings. The intended semantics of the language used by a sender should be perceived and mastered by its receiver/s. For this reason the sender should always vision and identify himself in the receiver in order to design the most clear and proper signs with respect to her/his knowledge. Web sites are complex...
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In this paper we propose to regard an Agent Communication Language (ACL) as a set of conventions to act on a fragment of institutional reality, defined in the context of an artificial institution. Within such an approach, we first reformulate a previously proposed commitment-based semantics for ACLs. In particular we show that all commonly used types of communicative acts can be defined in terms...
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The notion of artificial institution is crucial for the specification of open and dynamic interaction frameworks where heterogeneous and autonomous agents can interact to face problems in various fields, like for instance electronic commerce, business-to-business (B2B) applications, and personal assistant applications. In our view the specification of artificial institutions requires a clear...
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Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open...
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In this paper, the system is viewed as a construction based on the actors’ cognitive and social interactions. The system is the result of multiple – actor sense making (Weick 1995), but at the same time it orients social sense making. In this process each actor’s point of view is a representation of both the system and the context perceived as pertinent by the actor. In other words, the...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2003.
Web application development still needs to employ effective methods to accommodate some distinctive aspects of the requirements analysis process: capturing high-level communication goals, considering several user profiles and stakeholders, defining hypermedia-specific requirements (concerning navigation, content, information structure and presentation aspects), and reusing requirements for an...
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