A contrastive analysis of epistemic modality in scientific English

[ES] This paper investigates the use of epistemic expressions in scientific English. The main aim of this research is to analyse if native speakers of English use epistemic modality in the same way than non-native speakers of English and to detect the most outstanding cognitive implications of this fact. The corpus used in this research contains 50 research papers written by native English speakers and 50 scientific papers written by Spanish researchers who use English to communicate internationally. As epistemic modals are used to indicate the possibility of some piece of knowledge, this paper focuses on epistemic modal verbs in order to detect if native speakers of English and non-native speakers of English communicate modality in the same way, or if there are differences in frequency and use. The results obtained in this analysis indicated that there are differences in the frequency of use of epistemic expressions, even if the intention of the writers is the same.

Forecasting and visualization of wildfires in a 3D geographical information system

[EN]This paper describes a wildfi re forecasting application based on a 3D virtual environment and a fi re simulation engine. A novel open source framework is presented for the development of 3D graphics applications over large geographic areas, off ering high performance 3D visualization and powerful interaction tools for the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) community. The application includes a remote module that allows simultaneous connection of several users for monitoring a real wildfi re event.