The GREAT-ER (Geo-referenced Regional Exposure Assessment Tool for European Rivers) system was developed and validated by ECETOC (European Centre for Ecotoxicology and Toxicology of Chemicals), as an accurate aquatic chemical exposure prediction tool for use within environmental risk assessment schemes. The GREAT-ER 1.0 software calculates the distribution of predicted environmental concentrati...

OBJECTIVES Using Geographical Information System (GIS) as a tool to determine access to and gaps in providing HIV counselling and testing (VCT), treatment (ART) and mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services in conflict affected northern Uganda. METHODS Cross-sectional data on availability and utilization, and geo-coordinates of health facilities providing VCT, PMTCT, and ART were collecte...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Data on infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB) have been analyzed in the past without giving adequate attention to spatial variations. Earlier studies also attempted to display disease status of sub regions, usually census tracts, by categorizing them into quartiles, that helps the authorities to identify high- or low-risk areas. This approach is based mainly on bino...

BACKGROUND Nitrite (NO2-) and nitrate (NO3-) contaminations of groundwater are considered as one of the major health challenges in recent decades. This study aimed to evaluate the nitrite and nitrate concentrations in the drinking groundwater of Shiraz, South-central Iran by statistical models. METHODS From 43 active wells of Shiraz drinking water supplies, 344 samples were collected in the h...

XGobi is a data visualization system with state-of-the-art interactive and dynamic methods for the manipulation of views of data. It implements 2-D displays of projections of points and lines in high-dimensional spaces, as well as parallel coordinate displays and textual views thereof. Projection tools include dotplots of single variables, plots of pairs of variables, 3-D data rotations, variou...

OBJECTIVE To assess the feasibility of using Geographical Information System for mapping of road traffic injuries with an existing data source in a developing country. METHODS The study was a retrospectives case series of road traffic injury cases registered with the medico-legal office located in the three major trauma centers in Karachi for the period of January 1, 2004 till December 31st, ...

The objective of the present study is to assess the direct impact of a rapid change in climate on the amphibious and terrestrial ecosystems of the Weser Estuary, northern Germany, for the year 2050, discounting morphological adaptation. The status quo was documented on the basis of land cover classifications called ‘biotope types’. Elevation, soil type, vegetation and land use data were digitis...

The BASINS (Better Assessment Science Integrating point and Non-point Sources, Release 2) system, created under the auspice of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), uses An'Vie\\, as a framework to integrate several hydrologic/hydraulic and water quality models. The BASINS system also includes a national stream characteristic database that contains reach-scale data on mean stream widt...

INTRODUCTION Oceans, and indeed the entire planet, are changing at faster rates over broader scales than before and in fundamentally new ways. In a very short period of time, the bounty of the oceans has been depleted, and the ocean ecosystems have become seriously disrupted (Wright et al., 2007). The characteristic bounty and global circulation of oceans determine the importance of studying th...

, Case-based systems (CBS) are a type of knowledge-based system (KBS) based on case-based reasoning (CBR), in which the underlying philosophy is to use previous cases to interpret or solve a new problem. There are many advantages of CBR over rule-based reasoning, which is the method adopted by most current KBS for development control. The knowledge representation scheme of CBS is better than ru...