Assisting blog publication: annotation, model transformation, and crossblogging techniques

Although blogs exist from the beginning of the Internet, their use has considerablybeen increased in the last decade. Nowadays, they are ready for being used bya broad range of people. From teenagers to multinationals, everyone can have aglobal communication space.Companies know blogs are a valuable publicity tool to share information withthe participants, and the importance of creating consumer communities aroundthem: participants come together to exchange ideas, review and recommend newproducts, and even support each other. Also, companies can use blogs for differentpurposes, such as a content management system to manage the content of websites,a bulletin board to support communication and document sharing in teams,an instrument in marketing to communicate with Internet users, or a KnowledgeManagement Tool. However, an increasing number of blog content do not findtheir source in the personal experiences of the writer. Thus, the information cancurrently be kept in the user¿s desktop documents, in the companies¿ catalogues,or in another blogs. Although the gap between blog and data source can be manuallytraversed in a manual coding, this is a cumbersome task that defeats the blog¿seasiness principle. Moreover, depending on the quantity of information and itscharacterisation (i.e., structured content, unstructured content, etc.), an automaticapproach can be more effective.Based on these observations, the aim of this dissertation is to assist blog publicationthrough annotation, model transformation and crossblogging techniques.These techniques have been implemented to give rise to Blogouse, Catablog, andBlogUnion. These tools strive to improve the publication process considering theaforementioned data sources.

Observational constraints on the unified dark matter and dark energy model based on the quark bag model

In this work we investigate if a small fraction of quarks and gluons, which escaped hadronization and survived as a uniformly spread perfect fluid, can play the role of both dark matter and dark energy. This fluid, as developed in [1], is characterized by two main parameters: beta, related to the amount of quarks and gluons which act as dark matter; and gamma, acting as the cosmological constant. We explore the feasibility of this model at cosmological scales using data from type Ia Supernovae (SNeIa), Long Gamma-Ray Bursts (LGRB) and direct observational Hubble data. We find that: (i) in general, beta cannot be constrained by SNeIa data nor by LGRB or H(z) data; (ii) gamma can be constrained quite well by all three data sets, contributing with approximate to 78% to the energy matter content; (iii) when a strong prior on (only) baryonic matter is assumed, the two parameters of the model are constrained successfully. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.