Proposal of a three level complexity model for office automation

Office automation is one of the fields where the complexity related with technologies and working environments can be best shown. This is the starting point we have chosen to build up a theoretical model that shows us a scene quite different from the one traditionally considered. Through the development of the model, the levels of complexity associated with office automation and office environments have been identified, establishing a relationship between them. Thus, the model allows to state a general principle for sociotechnical design of office automation systems, comprising the ontological distinctions needed to properly evaluate each particular technology and its virtual contribution to office automation. From this fact comes the model's taxonomic ability to draw a global perspective of the state-of-art in office automation technologies.

An integrated framework for office information systems design and management

Information Technologies are complex and this is true even in the smallest piece of equipment. But this kind of complexity is nothing comparejwith the one that arises when this technology interact with society. Office Automation has been traditionally considered as a technical field but there is no way to find solutions from a technical point of view when the problems are primarily social in their origin. Technology management has to change its focus from a pure technical perspective to a sociotechnical point of view. To facilitate this change, we propose a model that allows a better understanding between the managerial and the technical world, offering a coherent, complete and integrated perspective of both. The base for this model is an unfolding of the complexity found in information Technologies and a matching of these complexities with several levels considered within the Office, Office Automation and Human Factors dimensions. Each one of these domains is studied trough a set of distinctions that create a new and powerful understanding of its reality. Using this model we build up a map of Office Automation to be use^not only by managers but also by technicians because the primaty advantage of such a framework is that it allows a comprehensive evaluation of technology without requhing extensive technical knowledge. Thus, the model can be seen as principle for design and diagnosis of Office Automation and as a common reference for managers and specialist avoiding the severe limitations arising from the language used by the last

Un estudio del adjetivo en un corpus de textos escritos en inglés y español pertenecientes al discurso de especialidad de las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones

Esta investigación se enmarca dentro de los denominados lenguajes de especialidad que para esta tesis será el de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC). De todos los aspectos relacionados con el estudio de estos lenguajes que pudieran tener interés lingüístico ha primado el análisis del componente terminológico. Tradicionalmente la conceptualización de un campo del saber se representaba mayoritariamente a través del elemento nominal, así lo defiende la Teoría General de la Terminología (Wüster, 1968). Tanto la lexicología como la lexicografía han aportado importantes contribuciones a los estudios terminológicos para la identificación del componente léxico a través del cual se transmite la información especializada. No obstante esos primeros estudios terminológicos que apuntaban al sustantivo como elmentos denominativo-conceptual, otras teorías más recientes, entre las que destacamos la Teoría Comunicativa de la Terminología (Cabré, 1999) identifican otras estructuras morfosintácticas integradas por otros elementos no nominales portadores igualmente de esa carga conceptual. A partir de esta consideración, hemos seleccionado para este estudio el adjetivo relacional en tanto que representa otra categoría gramatical distinta al sustantivo y mantiene un vínculo con éste debido a su procedencia. Todo lo cual puede suscitar cierto interés terminológico. A través de esta investigación, nos hemos propuesto demostrar las siguientes hipótesis: 1. El adjetivo relacional aporta contenido especializado en su asociación con el componente nominal. 2. El adjetivo relacional es portador de un valor semántico que hace posible identificar con más precisión la relación conceptual de los elementos -adjetivo y sustantivo - de la combinación léxica resultante, especialmente en algunas formaciones ambiguas. 3. El adjetivo relacional, como modificador natural del sustantivo al que acompaña, podría imponer cierta restricción en sus combinaciones y, por tanto, hacer una selección discriminada de los integrantes de la combinación léxica especializada. Teniendo en cuenta las anteriores hipótesis, esta investigación ha delimitado y caracterizado el segmento léxico objeto de estudio: la ‘combinación léxica especializada (CLE)’ formalmente representada por la estructura sintáctica [adjR+n], en donde adjR es el adjetivo y n el sustantivo al que acompaña. De igual forma hemos descrito el marco teórico desde el que abordar nuestro análisis. Se trata de la teoría del Lexicón Generatvio (LG) y de la representación semántica (Pustojovsky, 1995) que propone como explicación de la generación de significados. Hemos analizado las distintas estructuras de representación léxica y en especial la estructura qualia a través de la cual hemos identificado la relación semántica que mantienen los dos ítems léxicos [adjR+n] de la estructura sintáctica de nuestro estudio. El estudio semántico de las dos piezas léxicas ha permitido, además, comprobar el valor denominativo del adjetivo en la combinación. Ha sido necesario elaborar un corpus de textos escritos en inglés y español pertenecientes al discurso de especialidad de las TIC. Este material ha sido procesado para nuestros fines utilizando distintas herramientas electrónicas. Se ha hecho uso de lexicones electrónicos, diccionarios online generales y de especialidad y corpus de referencia online, estos últimos para poder eventualmente validad nuetros datos. Asimismo se han utilizado motores de búsqueda, entre ellos WordNet Search 3.1, para obtener la información semántica de nuestros elementos léxicos. Nuestras conclusiones han corroborado las hipótesis que se planteaban en esta tesis, en especial la referente al valor denominativo-conceptual del adjetivo relacional el cual, junto con el sustantivo al que acompaña, forma parte de la representación cognitiva del lenguaje de especialidad de las TIC. Como continuación a este estudio se proponen sugerencias sobre líneas futuras de investigación así como el diseño de herramientas informáticas que pudieran incorporar estos datos semánticos como complemento de los ítems léxicos dotados de valor denominativo-conceptual. ABSTRACT This research falls within the field of the so-called Specialized Languages which for the purpose of this study is the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) discourse. Considering their several distinguishing features terminology concentrates our interest from the point of view of linguistics. It is broadly assumed that terms represent concepts of a subject field. For the classical view of terminology (Wüster, 1968) these terms are formally represented by nouns. Both lexicology and terminology have made significant contributions to the study of terms. Later research as well as other theories on Terminology such as the Communicative Theory of Terminology (Cabré, 1993) have shown that other lexical units can also represent knowledge organization. On these bases, we have focused our research on the relational adjective which represents a functional unit different from a noun while still connected to the noun by means of its nominal root. This may have a potential terminological interest. Therefore the present research is based on the next hypotheses: 1. The relational adjective conveys specialized information when combined with the noun. 2. The relational adjective has a semantic meaning which helps understand the conceptual relationship between the adjective and the noun being modified and disambiguate certain senses of the resulting lexical combination. 3. The relational adjective may impose some restrictions when choosing the nouns it modifies. Considering the above hypotheses, this study has identified and described a multi-word lexical unit pattern [Radj+n] referred to as a Specialized Lexical Combination (SLC) linguistically realized by a relational adjective, Radj, and a noun, n. The analysis of such a syntactic pattern is addressed from the framework of the Generative Lexicon (Pustojovsky, 1995). Such theory provides several levels of semantic description which help lexical decomposition performed generatively. These levels of semantic representation are connected through generative operations or generative devices which account for the compositional interpretation of any linguistic utterance in a given context. This study analyses these different levels and focuses on one of them, i.e. the qualia structure since it may encode the conceptual meaning of the syntactic pattern [Radj+n]. The semantic study of these two lexical items has ultimately confirmed the conceptual meaning of the relational adjective. A corpus made of online ICT articles from magazines written in English and Spanish – some being their translations - has been used for the word extraction. For this purpose some word processing software packages have been employed. Moreover online general language and specialized language dictionaries have been consulted. Search engines, namely WordNet Search 3.1, have been also exploited to find the semantic information of our lexical units. Online reference corpora in English and Spanish have been used for a contrastive analysis of our data. Finally our conclusions have confirmed our initial hypotheses, i.e. relational adjectives are specialized lexical units which together with the nouns are part of the knowledge representation of the ICT subject field. Proposals for new research have been made together with some other suggestions for the design of computer applications to visually show the conceptual meaning of certain lexical units.

Context-awareness in task automation services by distributed event processing

Everybody has to coordinate several tasks everyday, usually in a manual manner. Recently, the concept of Task Automation Services has been introduced to automate and personalize the task coordination problem. Several user centered platforms and applications have arisen in the last years, that let their users configure their very own automations based on third party services. In this paper, we propose a new system architecture for Task Automation Services in a heterogeneous mobile, smart devices, and cloud services environment. Our architecture is based on the novel idea to employ distributed Complex Event Processing to implement innovative mixed execution profiles. The major advantage of the approach is its ability to incorporate context-awareness and real-time coordination in Task Automation Services.

Improved ore processing assessed by digital image análisis of the ores: a key to the sustainable development of the Iberian Pyrite Belt

Mining in the Iberian Pyrite Belt (IPB), the biggest VMS metallogenetic province known in the world to date, has to face a deep crisis in spite of the huge reserves still known after ≈5 000 years of production. This is due to several factors, as the difficult processing of complex Cu-Pb-Zn-Ag- Au ores, the exhaustion of the oxidation zone orebodies (the richest for gold, in gossan), the scarce demand for sulphuric acid in the world market, and harder environmental regulations. Of these factors, only the first and the last mentioned can be addressed by local ore geologists. A reactivation of mining can therefore only be achieved by an improved and more efficient ore processing, under the constraint of strict environmental controls. Digital image analysis of the ores, coupled to reflected light microscopy, provides a quantified and reliable mineralogical and textural characterization of the ores. The automation of the procedure for the first time furnishes the process engineers with real-time information, to improve the process and to preclude or control pollution; it can be applied to metallurgical tailings as well. This is shown by some examples of the IPB.

StreamCloud: An Elastic Parallel-Distributed Stream Processing Engine

In recent years, applications in domains such as telecommunications, network security or large scale sensor networks showed the limits of the traditional store-then-process paradigm. In this context, Stream Processing Engines emerged as a candidate solution for all these applications demanding for high processing capacity with low processing latency guarantees. With Stream Processing Engines, data streams are not persisted but rather processed on the fly, producing results continuously. Current Stream Processing Engines, either centralized or distributed, do not scale with the input load due to single-node bottlenecks. Moreover, they are based on static configurations that lead to either under or over-provisioning. This Ph.D. thesis discusses StreamCloud, an elastic paralleldistributed stream processing engine that enables for processing of large data stream volumes. Stream- Cloud minimizes the distribution and parallelization overhead introducing novel techniques that split queries into parallel subqueries and allocate them to independent sets of nodes. Moreover, Stream- Cloud elastic and dynamic load balancing protocols enable for effective adjustment of resources depending on the incoming load. Together with the parallelization and elasticity techniques, Stream- Cloud defines a novel fault tolerance protocol that introduces minimal overhead while providing fast recovery. StreamCloud has been fully implemented and evaluated using several real word applications such as fraud detection applications or network analysis applications. The evaluation, conducted using a cluster with more than 300 cores, demonstrates the large scalability, the elasticity and fault tolerance effectiveness of StreamCloud. Resumen En los útimos años, aplicaciones en dominios tales como telecomunicaciones, seguridad de redes y redes de sensores de gran escala se han encontrado con múltiples limitaciones en el paradigma tradicional de bases de datos. En este contexto, los sistemas de procesamiento de flujos de datos han emergido como solución a estas aplicaciones que demandan una alta capacidad de procesamiento con una baja latencia. En los sistemas de procesamiento de flujos de datos, los datos no se persisten y luego se procesan, en su lugar los datos son procesados al vuelo en memoria produciendo resultados de forma continua. Los actuales sistemas de procesamiento de flujos de datos, tanto los centralizados, como los distribuidos, no escalan respecto a la carga de entrada del sistema debido a un cuello de botella producido por la concentración de flujos de datos completos en nodos individuales. Por otra parte, éstos están basados en configuraciones estáticas lo que conducen a un sobre o bajo aprovisionamiento. Esta tesis doctoral presenta StreamCloud, un sistema elástico paralelo-distribuido para el procesamiento de flujos de datos que es capaz de procesar grandes volúmenes de datos. StreamCloud minimiza el coste de distribución y paralelización por medio de una técnica novedosa la cual particiona las queries en subqueries paralelas repartiéndolas en subconjuntos de nodos independientes. Ademas, Stream- Cloud posee protocolos de elasticidad y equilibrado de carga que permiten una optimización de los recursos dependiendo de la carga del sistema. Unidos a los protocolos de paralelización y elasticidad, StreamCloud define un protocolo de tolerancia a fallos que introduce un coste mínimo mientras que proporciona una rápida recuperación. StreamCloud ha sido implementado y evaluado mediante varias aplicaciones del mundo real tales como aplicaciones de detección de fraude o aplicaciones de análisis del tráfico de red. La evaluación ha sido realizada en un cluster con más de 300 núcleos, demostrando la alta escalabilidad y la efectividad tanto de la elasticidad, como de la tolerancia a fallos de StreamCloud.

Data Processing Modeling in Decision Support Systems.

Due to the advancement of both, information technology in general, and databases in particular; data storage devices are becoming cheaper and data processing speed is increasing. As result of this, organizations tend to store large volumes of data holding great potential information. Decision Support Systems, DSS try to use the stored data to obtain valuable information for organizations. In this paper, we use both data models and use cases to represent the functionality of data processing in DSS following Software Engineering processes. We propose a methodology to develop DSS in the Analysis phase, respective of data processing modeling. We have used, as a starting point, a data model adapted to the semantics involved in multidimensional databases or data warehouses, DW. Also, we have taken an algorithm that provides us with all the possible ways to automatically cross check multidimensional model data. Using the aforementioned, we propose diagrams and descriptions of use cases, which can be considered as patterns representing the DSS functionality, in regard to DW data processing, DW on which DSS are based. We highlight the reusability and automation benefits that this can be achieved, and we think this study can serve as a guide in the development of DSS.

Herramienta Web para el modelado de consultas CEP (Complex Event Processing)

RESUMEN En los últimos años, debido al incremento en la demanda por parte de las empresas de tecnologías que posibiliten la monitorización y el análisis de un gran volumen de datos en tiempo real, la tecnología CEP (Complex Event Processing) ha surgido como una potencia en alza y su uso se ha incrementado notablemente en ciertos sectores como, por ejemplo, la gestión y automatización de procesos de negocios, finanzas, monitorización de redes y aplicaciones, así como redes de sensores inteligentes como el caso de estudio en el que nos centraremos. CEP se basa en un lenguaje de procesamiento de eventos (Event Processing Language,EPL) cuya utilización puede resultar bastante compleja para usuarios inexpertos. Esta complejidad supone un hándicap y, por lo tanto, un problema a la hora de que su uso se extienda. Este Proyecto Fin de Grado (PFG) pretende dar una solución a este problema, acercando al usuario la tecnología CEP mediante técnicas de abstracción y modelado. Para ello, este PFG ha definido un lenguaje de modelado específico dominio, sencillo e intuitivo para el usuario inexperto, al que se ha dado soporte mediante el desarrollo de una herramienta de modelado gráfico (CEP Modeler) en la que se pueden modelar consultas CEP de forma gráfica, sencilla y de manera más accesible para el usuario. ABSTRACT Over recent years, more and more companies demand technology for monitoring and analyzing a vast volume of data in real time. In this regard, the CEP technology (Complex Event Processing) has emerged as a novel approach to that end, and its use has increased dramatically in certain domains, such as, management and automation of business processes, finance, monitoring of networks and applications, as well as smart sensor networks as the case study in which we will focus. CEP is based on in the Event Processing Language (EPL). This language can be rather difficult to use for new users. This complexity can be a handicap, and therefore, a problem at the time of extending its use. This project aims to provide a solution to this problem, trying to approach the CEP technology to users through abstraction and modelling techniques. To that end, this project has defined an intuitive and simple domain-specific modelling language for new users through a web tool (CEP Modeler) for graphically modeling CEP queries, in an easier and more accessible way.