Serum procalcitonin levels show a rapid increase in children with sepsis, even in infants < 12 month old, and they have a better prognostic value than C-reactive protein or neutrophil count.

The multi licity of network management models may imply in some scenarios the use of multip P e management information languages defining the resources to be monaged. Each language has a different level of semantic expressiveness, which is not easily measurable. Also, these mono ement information models cannot be easily integrated due to the difficulty of tronjation of the semantics they contain. This article proposes the use of ontologies a s o new approach to im rove the semantic expressiveness of management information languages. OntoPogies are currently used, for instance, to provide Web pages and Web services the semantics they usuall lack (known today os the Semantic Web]. Applying ontologies to management inLrmation languages can also be useful for inte ration of information definitions specified by different management languages anda%ing behavior information tothem. urrently, there are several integrated network management models using different technologies for resource management, 'such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP), Desktop Management Interface (DMI) and Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). Even distributed processing technologies such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) have been applied to network management [l].Every integrated managcment-model has identified the need for a management information definition language to describe the resources to be managed (its management domain), in order to ensure cooperation between managers and agents. Therefore, each model has defined its own management information definition language, with different capabilities and exprcssiveness: * Structure of Management Information (SMI), with its dif--Guidelines for the Definition of Managed Objects (GDMO) -Management Information Format (MIF) for DMI 9 Managed Object FormatKommon Information Model (MOFICIM) for WBEM -Interface Definition Language (IDL) for CORBAThe problem arises when different management technologies are used for the same networked system. Interoperability among all different management models involved is necessaly to pr0vide.a unified view of the whole managed system. However, only syntactic translations among management languages have been applied to date. This implies that when the same resource is described by two different management information definition languages, it is possible to apply a direct translation between the defined structures of the descriptions, but not betwecn their meanings. The problem is to achieve integrated management using different models simultaneously. Semantic interoperability becomes necessary tu solve this question. ferent versions for SNMP for CMIP Meanwhile, ontologies have been successfully used to solve similar semantic problems in other domains such as the Semantic Web, where these knowledge-based techniques provide Web pages and services the semantics they usually lack.This article explores how ontologies can also be useful for network and system management as a way to unify heterogen...

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semi-quantitative procalcitonin levels under 10 ng/ml predict good outcome of children with meningococcal infection. It is a highly sensitive method to identify patients with an increased risk of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome or death.

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This study was designed to assess "tracking" of serum lipids and apolipoproteins in three age groups of Spanish children over a 5 year period. A total of 84 6-year-old, 89 10-year-old and 64 14-year-old children were evaluated in 1989 (with measurement of serum total cholesterol, triglycerides, lipoproteins and apolipoproteins A1 and B), and re-evaluated in 1994. Correlation coefficients between initial and final lipid and apolipoprotein values were as follows: total cholesterol, 0.66; low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, 0.65; high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, 0.61; triglycerides, 0.61; apolipoprotein A1, 0.60; apolipoprotein B, 0.66. When age groups were analysed separately, children who were 14 years old at the beginning of the study showed higher correlation coefficients, particularly for total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol ( > 0.7 in both cases). More than 70% of children who were in the top quintile of total, LDL or HDL cholesterol as well as apolipoprotein A1 or B in 1989 remained in the top quintile 5 years later.

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