Digital cultural heritage standards: from silo to semantic web

This paper is a survey of standards being used in the domain of digital cultural heritage with focus on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) created by the Library of Congress in the United States of America. The process of digitization of cultural heritage requires silo breaking in a number of areas-one area is that of academic disciplines to enable the performance of rich interdisciplinary work. This lays the foundation for the emancipation of the second form of silo which are the silos of knowledge, both traditional and born digital, held in individual institutions, such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Disciplinary silo breaking is the key to unlocking these institutional knowledge silos. Interdisciplinary teams, such as developers and librarians, work together to make the data accessible as open data on the "semantic web". Description logic is the area of mathematics which underpins many ontology building applications today. Creating these ontologies requires a human-machine symbiosis. Currently in the cultural heritage domain, the institutions' role is that of provider of this  open data to the national aggregator which in turn can make the data available to the trans-European aggregator known as Europeana. Current ingests to the aggregators are in the form of machine readable cataloguing metadata which is limited in the richness it provides to disparate object descriptions. METS can provide this richness.

MARC: A Novel Framework for Detecting MITM Attacks in eHealthcare BLE Systems

Real-time and ubiquitous patient monitoring demands the use of wireless data acquisition through resource constrained medical sensors, mostly configured with No-input No-output (NiNo) capabilities. Bluetooth is one of the most popular and widely adopted means of communicating this sensed information to a mobile terminal. However, over simplified implementations of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) protocol in eHealth sector is susceptible to several wireless attacks, in particular the Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. The issue arises due to a lack of mutual authentication and integrity protection between the communicating devices, which may lead to compromise of confidentiality, availability and even the integrity of this safety-critical information. This research paper presents a novel framework named MARC to detect, analyze, and mitigate Bluetooth security flaws while focusing upon MITM attack against NiNo devices. For this purpose, a comprehensive solution has been proposed, which can detect MITM signatures based upon four novel anomaly detection metrics: analyzing Malicious scan requests, Advertisement intervals, RSSI levels, and Cloned node addresses. The proposed solution has been evaluated through practical implementation and demonstration of different attack scenarios, which show promising results concerning accurate and efficient detection of MITM attacks.

Challenges encountered by local health volunteers in early diagnosis and prompt treatment of malaria in Myanmar artemisinin resistance containment zones

Background

After artemisinin resistance was reported, the Myanmar artemisinin resistance containment (MARC) project was initiated in 2011. One of the activities of MARC is to train volunteers for early diagnosis and prompt treatment by providing rapid diagnostic tests (RDT) and artemisinin combination therapy. This study aimed to fulfil the gap of information on the challenges faced by malaria volunteers in artemisinin-containment areas.

Methods

A cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted in 11 townships in MARC areas to assess the challenges in early diagnosis of malaria and treatment by malaria volunteers using qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Results

Altogether 405 volunteers participated in the study. Although 97.5 % of volunteers can interpret a positive result for malaria, only 41.2 % correctly stated the persistence of a positive result in recently infected cases. Over 80 % knew the effects of temperature and humidity on performance of the malaria RDT. Unexpectedly, 15.1 % perceived that expired RDTs can still be useful for diagnosis although 98.3 % of respondents cited that the overall results of RDTs were reliable. Although most of them knew the treatment for malaria based on RDT results, some could not give the correct answer, while a few (2 %) mentioned artesunate monotherapy for RDT-negative cases. Training received by volunteers was also varied in study sites and 92.1 % believed that it was not sufficient. A certain portion of them faced the problem of regular supply of RDTs (9.9 %) and drugs (47.5 %), interpretation of result of RDTs (30 %), and performing blood test (20 %). The median RDT tested per month (25th, 75th percentile) was 6.0 (2.0, 15.0) indicating the need for prioritization based on endemicity. Regular reporting, supervision, monitoring system, and proper refresher training using uniform content of guideline to correct misconception of the volunteers, were needed to be strengthened. Moreover, the reliable and regular supply of materials and exchange system for expired RDTs and anti-malarials was important in the effectiveness of volunteers in MARC zones.

Conclusions

Adequate refresher training, monitoring, supervision, and regular reliable supply of RDTs and anti-malarials were needed for capacity strengthening of volunteers in MARC zones.