LPA Customer Applications
LPA was founded in 1981. Since then, its engineers have been involved in many interesting client projects which have used LPA software products supplied. This page details some of these customer stories.
LPA Customer Application Stories
Umsatzsteuer Rechnungsausstellung
TPA Steuerberatung has developed an innovative tool together with LexisNexis that offers advice in the highly complex area of sales tax.
The result is a digital assistant for sales tax questions or individual invoice issues on the incoming and outgoing side. It makes the daily work easier for tax consultants and lawyers: Using a decision tree, the tool chooses the right branch depending on the answers and adapts its follow-up questions accordingly. The tool ensures the legal assessment is correct from the start and later problems in tax audits or accusations of financial criminal law can be avoided.
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ErbRechner (Lexis Nexis Austria)
ErbRechner is an inheritance calculation tool for lawyers. Key questions, such as worthiness and unworthiness, can only be answered by a professional who specialises in inheritance calculations. The lawyer can record all assets, liabilities, estate, donations and all the heirs. ErbRechner will calculate the inherited and compulsory portions for all both as quotas and the actual amount. You can watch a video or read about ErbRechner here!.
Lexis Digital Tools
LexisNexis Austria have used VisiRule to produce a family of smart legal advisors. You can register for Lexis 360® and try out their many intelligent legal advisory tools
The Geschäftsfähigkeit tool is aimed at lawyers, and guides users through the many regulations and exceptions so as to provide specific answers as to whether or not a dubious legal transaction (in terms of age or decision-making ability) is effective. It comprises over 50 questions, but most users only are asked a few.
Read about the Geschäftsfähigkeit tool
Comply Express SmartCert
LPA worked closely with John Showell, Director of Comply Express in the early days of Comply Express SmartCert. John says:
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Much of the early logical question flow was prototyped and tested using VisiRule. VisiRule supports the rapid identification and verification of potentially quite complex logic. Once we had the charts and logic flow exposed, we were able to incorporate the logic in the new dedicated tool that we were building"
Qstory
LPA worked closely with Paddy Coleman, CEO of Qstory in the early days of Qstory. Paddy says:
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VisiRule, with Clive's generous support and help, really helped me at a crucial juncture when I needed to rapidly prototype the expert system for one of our most popular modules: QStory's root cause analysis tool for contact centre performance, the WhyDetector®. With VisiRule, creating logic charts was very intuitive and easy, even for a non programmer like me. But even better, once the charts had been built, we had a functioning expert system to test our logic using large sets of data. That saved us a huge amount of time and money."
Recent Risk Assessment Project
A recent project featured VisiRule running on Windows providing risk assessment on corporate data. The VisiRule chart used was developed in conjunction with business analysts to help assess the inherent risk in some 30,000 companies using monthly data over 5 years stored in Redis. Each record held enough data for VisiRule to execute its logic to completion and produce an indication of the associated risk. The workload was parallelized across processes by nature of asynchronous queue-based messaging. Each process was identical and competed to consume as many messages on the queue as possible. As a message is consumed, it pops off the queue so no other consumer ingests it. Scaleability is based on the number of consumers. The more consumers listening to the queue the faster the queue is digested. Each consumer contains its own copy of the same VisiRule (which by then is compiled into Prolog) logic. The benefits are great. No threads, parallel processing, location transparency and Fault tolerance. (A consumer can go down and when it comes back up it will just pick up where it left off) With just 2 VisiRule/Prolog servers, 2 million records are evaluated in just over 20 minutes. More server instances can be commissioned using AWS/EC2.
EMDS
LPA/VisiRule is part of the consortium behind the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) tool. EMDS is a GIS software package that supports environmental decision analysis and planning. EMDS integrates the latest technology from GIS as well as logic-based reasoning and other technologies. EMDS can provide explicit, practical decision support for strategic and tactical planning as well as adaptive management. EMDS can be applied to an extremely broad array of problems at virtually all spatial scales.
EMDS has been used to develop the Terrestrial Condition Assessment framework. The primary goal of the TCA is to assist land managers with identifying forest restoration needs at national, regional and forest scales. TCA lead Sarah Anderson states in Ecosystem Management Decision Support system keeps getting better, the following “EMDS generates really valuable information. It gives us the ecological integrity context across landscapes by bringing together and synthesizing all these different datasets to make an overall assessment of condition. It can be especially useful during the preplanning assessment stage to help forest planners get at the broader trends.”.
You can read about the TCA project and find out more about EMDS here.
Infermed Arezzo
In 1999 Imperial Cancer Research Technology and Dr Alan Montgomery provided seed funding to InferMed Ltd to commercialize PROforma. InferMed (Inference in Medicine) generated revenue in its first year of operations. PROforma had been developed by the late John Fox at ICRF using LPA Prolog.
Over the next 16 years InferMed and its customers implemented many apps using Arezzo, InferMed’s implementation of PROforma technology which made heavy use of the LPA Prolog engine. These apps were used in public health, clinical research, primary and secondary care and included:
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ORAMA (Optimal Renal Anaemia Management Assessment)
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Retrogram (HIV treatment) developed for Roche
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ARNO (for cancer pain control) implemented by Dr Robert Dunlop
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Support for nurses working in remote areas (for Queensland Health, Australia)
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Triage support for nurses handling 111 telephone calls
Several Arezzo apps were consulted millions of times by care professionals and the public.
MACRO is a web-based clinical trial management system using PROforma to ensure protocol-compliant collection of clinical trial data. Roche chose InferMed to implement MACRO at scale. For 10 years Roche used MACRO in major clinical trials worldwide. MACRO is also used by dozens of academic and charity clinical research groups in the UK and Europe.
NHS Direct’s symptom checkers / self-assessment tests (SATS), available on PC and mobile, ran for more than 5 years with zero unplanned outages. The service handled 10.7 million consultations in the first full year of operation, including sharp spikes of calls when flu scares were reported on radio. In that full year NHSD reported an annual saving of £57M to the NHS with the elimination of 1.5 million unnecessary GP appointments, 0.7 million A&E attendances/999 calls, and 0.6 million other face-to-face GP and A&E appointments.
Best Practice Advocacy Centre New Zealand. In use since 2005, and now with over 6 million uses by hundreds of GPs, BPAC provides a wide range of decision support modules for GPs in New Zealand. These were developed by InferMed’s client Murray Tilyard and co-workers at BPAC.
InferMed grew to employ more than 30 people and operated independently for 16 years.
In 2015 Elsevier acquired InferMed Ltd.
In 2022, Ennov acquired MACRO from Elsevier.
In 2021, Elsevier described how "Mobile AI helps health workers deliver prenatal care in rural India".
Specify4IT
Created for software developers, Specify4IT is a brand new software product for rigorously specifying a large variety of different information systems projects. It delivers much greater accuracy than any existing products, is compatible with most commercial software, is easy to use and suits a wide range of project types.
Software houses are the primary target market, Specify4IT allows them to specify client projects more effectively and then to deliver them more quickly with less manpower. These advantages allow software developers to obtain immediate and high return on their investment in Specify4IT.
CASSANDRA
CASSANDRA is a platform developed by KnowGravity in Zurich, Switzerland. It is assistant-based and guides the users through their tasks in business, systems and software engineering. It analyses project data from many familiar UML®-based CASE tools, generates the appropriate questions or proposes the next steps in order to move the process forward.
By turning UML models into precise xUML models (Executable UML), it becomes possible to define an environment in which such implementation-independent analysis models can be executed without considering technical details of the target platform. You can read about CASSANDRA here.
HOOF National Hunt Race Ratings are designed as a statistics-grounded value approach to horse racing over jumps in the UK. Unlike conventional race ratings, they offer the backer an authoritative guide to both form and value. The program which generates the ratings uses an implementation of Bayes’ theorem written in LPA Prolog to calculate each horse’s chance of winning. The resulting figures are then recalculated to give an edge in the backer’s favour. Hence the acronym: Horserace Optimum Odds Forecast.
"The power of Prolog lies not so much in the fact that it is a language originally designed for artificial intelligence applications, but that it is a language that enables us to interactively communicate with a computer in order to explore innovative ideas in domains such as engineering and/or philosophy. Prolog gives us the ability to focus on the essence of the problem to be solved (instead of dealing with technical implementation details) and allows us to quickly and iteratively create functional prototypes that verify the validity of new ideas. Furthermore, LPA's Prolog implementation offers more mundane programming aspects such as deep operating system integration, application embeddability and support of today's Web technologies to give us the opportunity to quickly turn promising prototypes into practical solutions suitable for day-to-day use."
InFlow
InFlow is a leading Social Network Analysis tool from OrgNet which performs network analysis AND network visualization in one integrated product -- no passing files back and forth between different programs like other tools.
What is mapped in one window is measured in the other window -- what you see, is what you measure. InFlow excels at what-if analysis -- change the network, get new metrics -- just 2 clicks of the mouse. You do not need to be an expert in statistics to use InFlow.
InFlow & Transmission Network Analysis (TNA)
You can read how InFlow has been used to model network transmission for contagious diseases. Transmission Network Analysis (TNA) is best applied early in an outbreak before a mass outbreak sets in to a local area. Tracking the early cases provides great insight into how, when, and where the contagion is spreading. Data collection is difficult but always proves worthy to the understanding and management of the outbreak.
In my many years of software development, this is the first time that things were better than expected! Working with the LPA team of engineers and its software has been a pleasure. They have managed not to just to meet my current needs but anticipate most of my future requirements. As such, the core software infrastructure for AllerGenius has remained intact and largely untouched for several years and through several incarnations of the product.
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Giovanni Melioli, MD Phenomix Ltd Genova, Italy
AllerGenius
AllerGenius is an expert system for the interpretation of allergen arrays. Precision medicine (PM) is changing the nature and scope of allergy diagnosis and treatment.
The advent of low-cost widely available allergen array tests has boosted the need for the expert interpretation of the various markers. AllerGenius allows allergists to access the most current and specialist interpretation of allergen arrays. Less skilled allergists can benefit from modern technology associated with a complete and dedicated interpretation system.
AllerGenius, with its hundreds of rules, can sort allergens and components according to different families, identify the risk, check the consistency of the laboratory results, and verify whether the IgE profile is consistent with the patient’s clinic. If required by the physician, AllerGenius can give first line therapeutic indications based on international guidelines.
PALTESTER
PALTESTER is a desktop software application from ESROE developed using LPA Prolog that enables the analysis of the identification performance of an automatic Radar ESM system. It was created to provide military analysts with tools to analyse the identification performance of ESROE’s THORONDIR emitter identification software used in operational Radar ESM systems.
