MediBot: An Ontology-Based Chatbot to Retrieve Drug Information and Compare its Prices

In this article, we present the MediBot. MediBot is a chatbot for querying drugs information. The presented system acted as a single access point for natural and simplified information retrieval of drugs, prices, and its risks. The chatbot has two modes of operation: Quick Response and Interactive modes. The first answers questions asked in natural language, while the second has three interactive tasks, namely Browser, Query, and Price Comparison. We present here the system architecture, the Linked Data Mashup’s construction process, and Chatbot MediBot’s activities modes, focusing on the new Price Comparison’s task. This task presents the best prices for medicines and their best potential substitutes extracted in real-time from the Web with the help of the information obtained from a linked data mashup.

Towards Rank-Aware Data Mashups

Data mashups are web applications that combine complementary (raw) data pieces from different data services or web data APIs to provide value added information to users. They became so popular over the last few years; their applications are numerous and vary from addressing transient business needs in modern enterprises. Even though data mashups have been the focus of many research works, they still face many challenging issues that have never been explored. The ranking of the data returned by a data mashup is one of the key issues that have received little consideration. Top-k query model ranks the pertinent answers according to a given ranking function and returns only the best results. This paper proposes two algorithms that optimize the evaluation of top-k queries over data mashups. These algorithms are built based on the web data APIs' access methods: bind probe and indexed probe.

Understanding How Open Government Data is Used in Capital Accumulation

This article examines the role of open government data in capital accumulation. Open government data is a relatively new phenomenon that involves the pro-active and regular release of government data, in the form of downloadable records, for use and re-use by anyone. Private capitalist enterprises are among those who make use of such data. Publicly produced data is transferred into the hands of private capital through a non-rivalrous form of enclosure. Capital then uses government datasets to create new commodities by the application of skilled labor to the data, in processes including data mashup and data visualization. Inherent in all commodity production is the extraction of surplus value from labor by capital. This, together with the process of enclosure, provides opportunities for capital accumulation from open government data.

MediBot: Um chatbot para consulta de riscos e informações sobre medicamentos

A automedicação sem orientação médica pode vir a acarretar pro- blemas de saúde por meio da intoxicação.O objetivo deste estudo consiste em apresentar MediBot - um chatbot para consulta de informações sobre medica- mentos e seus riscos. O MediBot permite a realização de consultas através de linguagem natural, transformado-as em consultas SPARQL sobre um Lin- ked Data Mashup envolvendo dados sobre medicamentos providos pelas fontes ANVISA e Sider. Por fim, MediBot apresenta-se como instrumento oportuno na promoção do acesso à informação por parte do público geral.