Background: Varicocele occurs in approximately 15% to 20% of the male population and it is the most common cause of poor semen parameters. It has been demonstrated that patients with varicocele have poor chromatin packing, DNA damage and nuclear anomalies than the healthy men. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate sperm chromatin integrity and semen parameters in these patients after...

Active integrity constraints have been introduced in the database community as a way to restore integrity. We view active integrity constraints as programs of Dynamic Logic of Propositional Assignments DL-PA and show how several semantics of database repair that were proposed in the literature can be characterised by DL-PA formulas. We moreover propose a new definition of repair. For all these ...

In this paper we will describe how constraints involving integrity and security can be speciied in the active object-oriented knowledge-base system MOKUM. Also we will indicate how they are implemented.

Because of the increased need of data sharing among multiple organizations like governmental organizations, financial corporations and medical hospitals, it is critical to ensure data integrity so that effective decisions can be made based on these data. An important component of any solution for assessing data integrity is represented by techniques and tools to evaluate the trustworthiness of ...

A database D may be inconsistent wrt a given set IC of integrity constraints. Consistent Query Answering (CQA) is the problem of computing from D the answers to a query that are consistent wrt IC . Consistent answers are invariant under all the repairs of D, i.e. the consistent instances that minimally depart from D. Three classes of repair have been considered in the literature: those that min...

The comparison of two data sets can reveal a great deal of information about the time-varying nature of an observed process. For example, suppose that the points in a data set represent a customer’s activity by their location in n-dimensional space. A comparison of the distribution of points in two such data se.ts can indicate how the customer activity has changed between the observation period...

In this report we describe the main ideas underlying PRIMUS, a system for discovery of first-order integrity constraints guided by heuristics, currently under development.

We describe the existing statistics-related methods of testing structural integrity for aerospace structures, describe their drawbacks, how they can be overcome, and compare the resulting techniques.

Existing belief merging operators take advantage of all the models from the bases, including those contradicting the integrity constraints. In this paper, we show that this is not suited to every merging scenario. We study the case when the bases are ”rationalized” with respect to the integrity constraints during the merging process. We define in formal terms several independence conditions for...

A database D may be inconsistent wrt a given set IC of integrity constraints. Consistent Query Answering (CQA) is the problem of computing from D the answers to a query that are consistent wrt IC . Consistent answers are invariant under all the repairs ofD, i.e. the consistent instances that minimally depart from D. Three classes of repair have been considered in the literature: those that mini...