Orchestration of heterogeneous middleware services and its application to a comand and control platform

MSC Dissertation in Computer Engineering

The intersection of people, technology and local space. PPGIS and Web in practice for participatory planning

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Is ambient intelligence a truly human-centric paradigm in industry? Current research and application scenario

Based on the paper presented at the International Conference “Autonomous Systems: inter-relations of technical and societal issues”, organized by IET with the support of the Portuguese-German collaboration project on “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Robotics” (DAAD/CRUP) at FCT-UNL, Biblioteca da UNL, Campus de Caparica on 5-6 November 2009.

Collaborative web applications

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

BIWiki - Using a Business Intelligence Wiki to Form a Virtual Community of Practice for Portuguese Master's Students

Web 2.0 software in general and wikis in particular have been receiving growing attention as they constitute new and powerful tools, capable of supporting information sharing, creation of knowledge and a wide range of collaborative processes and learning activities. This paper introduces briefly some of the new opportunities made possible by Web 2.0 or the social Internet, focusing on those offered by the use of wikis as learning spaces. A wiki allows documents to be created, edited and shared on a group basis; it has a very easy and efficient markup language, using a simple Web browser. One of the most important characteristics of wiki technology is the ease with which pages are created and edited. The facility for wiki content to be edited by its users means that its pages and structure form a dynamic entity, in permanent evolution, where users can insert new ideas, supplement previously existing information and correct errors and typos in a document at any time, up to the agreed final version. This paper explores wikis as a collaborative learning and knowledge-building space and its potential for supporting Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs). In the academic years (2007/8 and 2008/9), students of the Business Intelligence module at the Master's programme of studies on Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence at Instituto Superior de Estatistica e Gestao de Informacao of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, have been actively involved in the creation of BIWiki - a wiki for Business Intelligence in the Portuguese language. Based on usage patterns and feedback from students participating in this experience, some conclusions are drawn regarding the potential of this technology to support the emergence of VCoPs; some provisional suggestions will be made regarding the use of wikis to support information sharing, knowledge creation and transfer and collaborative learning in Higher Education.

Culture boundaries in semantic web

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Environmental Decision-making utilizing a Web GIS to Monitor Hazardous Industrial Emissions in the Valencian community of Spain

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Web Processing Services for Forestry and Environmental Applications

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Dynamic adaptation of interaction models for stateful web services

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Smart windows with permanent memory effect

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Química e Bioquímica

Efficient paraconsistent reasoning with rules and ontologies for the semantic web

Ontologies formalized by means of Description Logics (DLs) and rules in the form of Logic Programs (LPs) are two prominent formalisms in the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. While DLs adhere to the OpenWorld Assumption and are suited for taxonomic reasoning, LPs implement reasoning under the Closed World Assumption, so that default knowledge can be expressed. However, for many applications it is useful to have a means that allows reasoning over an open domain and expressing rules with exceptions at the same time. Hybrid MKNF knowledge bases make such a means available by formalizing DLs and LPs in a common logic, the Logic of Minimal Knowledge and Negation as Failure (MKNF). Since rules and ontologies are used in open environments such as the Semantic Web, inconsistencies cannot always be avoided. This poses a problem due to the Principle of Explosion, which holds in classical logics. Paraconsistent Logics offer a solution to this issue by assigning meaningful models even to contradictory sets of formulas. Consequently, paraconsistent semantics for DLs and LPs have been investigated intensively. Our goal is to apply the paraconsistent approach to the combination of DLs and LPs in hybrid MKNF knowledge bases. In this thesis, a new six-valued semantics for hybrid MKNF knowledge bases is introduced, extending the three-valued approach by Knorr et al., which is based on the wellfounded semantics for logic programs. Additionally, a procedural way of computing paraconsistent well-founded models for hybrid MKNF knowledge bases by means of an alternating fixpoint construction is presented and it is proven that the algorithm is sound and complete w.r.t. the model-theoretic characterization of the semantics. Moreover, it is shown that the new semantics is faithful w.r.t. well-studied paraconsistent semantics for DLs and LPs, respectively, and maintains the efficiency of the approach it extends.

m-SportGIS

Information technologies (ITs), and sports resources and services aid the potential to transform governmental organizations, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities development, respectively. Spatial data is a crucial source to support sports planning and management. Low-cost mobile geospatial tools bring productive and accurate data collection, and their use combining a handy and customized graphical user interface (GUI) (forms, mapping, media support) is still in an early stage. Recognizing the benefits — efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens — that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve with information resulted from the employment of a low-cost data collection platform, this project presents the development of a mobile mapping application (app) — m-SportGIS — under Open Source (OS) technologies and a customized evolutionary software methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova, OpenLayers) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Android operating system) product, taking advantage of device’s capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to an integrated Web Map Service (WMS), was created a local and customized Tile Map Service (TMS) to serve up cached data, regarding the IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican regions. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sports facilities, which resulted and stored data feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sports resources.