Bridging the gap between closed and open data. System proposal for the Portuguese Legislation

Esta dissertação apresenta uma proposta de sistema capaz de preencher a lacuna entre documentos legislativos em formato PDF e documentos legislativos em formato aberto. O objetivo principal é mapear o conhecimento presente nesses documentos de maneira a representar essa coleção como informação interligada. O sistema é composto por vários componentes responsáveis pela execução de três fases propostas: extração de dados, organização de conhecimento, acesso à informação. A primeira fase propõe uma abordagem à extração de estrutura, texto e entidades de documentos PDF de maneira a obter a informação desejada, de acordo com a parametrização do utilizador. Esta abordagem usa dois métodos de extração diferentes, de acordo com as duas fases de processamento de documentos – análise de documento e compreensão de documento. O critério utilizado para agrupar objetos de texto é a fonte usada nos objetos de texto de acordo com a sua definição no código de fonte (Content Stream) do PDF. A abordagem está dividida em três partes: análise de documento, compreensão de documento e conjunção. A primeira parte da abordagem trata da extração de segmentos de texto, adotando uma abordagem geométrica. O resultado é uma lista de linhas do texto do documento; a segunda parte trata de agrupar os objetos de texto de acordo com o critério estipulado, produzindo um documento XML com o resultado dessa extração; a terceira e última fase junta os resultados das duas fases anteriores e aplica regras estruturais e lógicas no sentido de obter o documento XML final. A segunda fase propõe uma ontologia no domínio legal capaz de organizar a informação extraída pelo processo de extração da primeira fase. Também é responsável pelo processo de indexação do texto dos documentos. A ontologia proposta apresenta três características: pequena, interoperável e partilhável. A primeira característica está relacionada com o facto da ontologia não estar focada na descrição pormenorizada dos conceitos presentes, propondo uma descrição mais abstrata das entidades presentes; a segunda característica é incorporada devido à necessidade de interoperabilidade com outras ontologias do domínio legal, mas também com as ontologias padrão que são utilizadas geralmente; a terceira característica é definida no sentido de permitir que o conhecimento traduzido, segundo a ontologia proposta, seja independente de vários fatores, tais como o país, a língua ou a jurisdição. A terceira fase corresponde a uma resposta à questão do acesso e reutilização do conhecimento por utilizadores externos ao sistema através do desenvolvimento dum Web Service. Este componente permite o acesso à informação através da disponibilização de um grupo de recursos disponíveis a atores externos que desejem aceder à informação. O Web Service desenvolvido utiliza a arquitetura REST. Uma aplicação móvel Android também foi desenvolvida de maneira a providenciar visualizações dos pedidos de informação. O resultado final é então o desenvolvimento de um sistema capaz de transformar coleções de documentos em formato PDF para coleções em formato aberto de maneira a permitir o acesso e reutilização por outros utilizadores. Este sistema responde diretamente às questões da comunidade de dados abertos e de Governos, que possuem muitas coleções deste tipo, para as quais não existe a capacidade de raciocinar sobre a informação contida, e transformá-la em dados que os cidadãos e os profissionais possam visualizar e utilizar.

Geography of the Information Society

All every day activities take place in space. And it is upon this that all information and knowledge revolve. The latter are the key elements in the organisation of territories. Their creation, use and distribution should therefore occur in a balanced way throughout the whole territory in order to allow all individuals to participate in an egalitarian society, in which the flow of knowledge can take precedence over the flow of interests. The information society depends, to a large extent, on the technological capacity to disseminate information and, consequently, the knowledge throughout territory, thereby creating conditions which allow a more balanced development, from the both the social and economic points of view thus avoiding the existence of info-exclusion territories. Internet should therefore be considered more than a mere technology, given that its importance goes well beyond the frontiers of culture and society. It is already a part of daily life and of the new forms of thinking and transmitting information, thus making it a basic necessity essential, for a full socio-economic development. Its role as a platform of creation and distribution of content is regarded as an indispensable element for education in today’s society, since it makes information a much more easily acquired benefit.”…in the same way that the new technologies of generation and distribution of energy allowed factories and large companies to establish themselves as the organisational bases of industrial society, so the internet today constitutes the technological base of the organisational form that characterises the Information Era: the network” (CASTELLS, 2004:15). The changes taking place today in regional and urban structures are increasingly more evident due to a combination of factors such as faster means of transport, more efficient telecommunications and other cheaper and more advanced technologies of information and knowledge. Although their impact on society is obvious, society itself also has a strong influence on the evolution of these technologies. And although physical distance has lost much of the responsibility it had towards explaining particular phenomena of the economy and of society, other aspects such as telecommunications, new forms of mobility, the networks of innovation, the internet, cyberspace, etc., have become more important, and are the subject of study and profound analysis. The science of geographical information, allows, in a much more rigorous way, the analysis of problems thus integrating in a much more balanced way, the concepts of place, of space and of time. Among the traditional disciplines that have already found their place in this process of research and analysis, we can give special attention to a geography of new spaces, which, while not being a geography of ‘innovation’, nor of the ‘Internet’, nor even ‘virtual’, which can be defined as one of the ‘Information Society’, encompassing not only the technological aspects but also including a socio-economic approach. According to the last European statistical data, Portugal shows a deficit in terms of information and knowledge dissemination among its European partners. Some of the causes are very well identified - low levels of scholarship, weak investments on innovation and R&D (both private and public sector) - but others seem to be hidden behind socio-economical and technological factors. So, the justification of Portugal as the case study appeared naturally, on a difficult quest to find the major causes to territorial asymmetries. The substantial amount of data needed for this work was very difficult to obtain and for the islands of Madeira and Azores was insufficient, so only Continental Portugal was considered for this study. In an effort to understand the various aspects of the Geography of the Information Society and bearing in mind the increasing generalised use of information technologies together with the range of technologies available for the dissemination of information, it is important to: (i) Reflect on the geography of the new socio-technological spaces. (ii) Evaluate the potential for the dissemination of information and knowledge through the selection of variables that allow us to determine the dynamic of a given territory or region; (iii) Define a Geography of the Information Society in Continental Portugal.

Automatic musical instrument recognition for multimedia indexing

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

Gestão do conhecimento e cultura organizacional: barreiras e facilitadores

Este trabalho incide sobre a gestão do conhecimento e cultura organizacional, as suas barreiras os seus facilitadores na Parque Escolar E.P.E. Este estudo teve por base o método quadripolar. Várias foram as atividades ao longo deste trabalho, inicialmente foi recolhida a documentação interna, nomeadamente diplomas legais, regulamentos, manuais de procedimentos, manuais de formações internas, entre outros documentos, que serviram de base ao reconhecimento da instituição, a sua evolução estrutural e de funcionamento. Para identificar as barreiras e os facilitadores na recuperação da informação nos três principais meios para o efeito: arquivo físico, file system e aplicações informáticas foram aplicados inquéritos aos produtores/ utilizadores de informação da Parque Escolar, E.P.E. Com base neste estudo foi possível identificar qual o recurso de recuperação de informação que traz mais dificuldades na sua utilização, se existem documentos exclusivos em papel ou exclusivos em formato digital, se os mesmos são recuperáveis com facilidade. Foi possível averiguar se os colaboradores da Parque Escolar, E.P.E. consideram os documentos que constam no Arquivo Físico mais fidedignos do que os documentos em formato digital guardados no file system ou nas aplicações informáticas. Em relação às aplicações informáticas foi ainda possível averiguar se os colaboradores consideram uteis as suas atualizações, ou se demonstram alguma resistência à mudança, e se consideram que tiveram o acompanhamento necessário para compreender e aplicar as alterações. Com este estudo esperamos ter contribuído para dar uma maior visibilidade à temática da gestão do conhecimento e como a cultura organizacional pode influenciar, criando barreiras ou facilitadores.

Industrie 4.0 Framework, Challenges and Perspectives

The world is increasingly in a global community. The rapid technological development of communication and information technologies allows the transmission of knowledge in real-time. In this context, it is imperative that the most developed countries are able to develop their own strategies to stimulate the industrial sector to keep up-to-date and being competitive in a dynamic and volatile global market so as to maintain its competitive capacities and by consequence, permits the maintenance of a pacific social state to meet the human and social needs of the nation. The path traced of competitiveness through technological differentiation in industrialization allows a wider and innovative field of research. Already we are facing a new phase of organization and industrial technology that begins to change the way we relate with the industry, society and the human interaction in the world of work in current standards. This Thesis, develop an analysis of Industrie 4.0 Framework, Challenges and Perspectives. Also, an analysis of German reality in facing to approach the future challenge in this theme, the competition expected to win in future global markets, points of domestic concerns felt in its industrial fabric household face this challenge and proposes recommendations for a more effective implementation of its own strategy. The methods of research consisted of a comprehensive review and strategically analysis of existing global literature on the topic, either directly or indirectly, in parallel with the analysis of questionnaires and data analysis performed by entities representing the industry at national and world global placement. The results found by this multilevel analysis, allowed concluding that this is a theme that is only in the beginning for construction the platform to engage the future Internet of Things in the industrial environment Industrie 4.0. This dissertation allows stimulate the need of achievements of more strategically and operational approach within the society itself as a whole to clarify the existing weaknesses in this area, so that the National Strategy can be implemented with effective approaches and planned actions for a direct training plan in a more efficiently path in education for the theme.

Initial dilemmas in IST research: design science and design research, a clarification of concepts

The inter-disciplinarity of information systems, applied discipline and activity of design, and the study from different paradigms perspectives explains the diversity of problems addressed. The context is broad and includes important issues beyond technology, as the application, use, effectiveness, efficiency and their organizational and social impacts. In design science, the research interest is in contributing to the improvement of the processes of the design activity itself. The relevance of research in design science is associated with the result obtained for the improvement of living conditions in organizational, inter-organizational and Society contexts. In the research whose results are artifacts, the adoption of design research as a process of research is crucial to ensure discipline, rigor and transparency. Based on a literature review, this paper clarifies the terms of design science and design research. This is the main motivation for presenting this paper, determinant for the phase in research in technologies and information systems which are the three research projects presented. As a result the three projects are discussed in relation to the concepts of design science and design research.

Microtheories for SDI - Accounting for diversity of local conceptualisations at a global level

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

Semantic enrichment of knowledge sources supported by domain ontologies

This thesis introduces a novel conceptual framework to support the creation of knowledge representations based on enriched Semantic Vectors, using the classical vector space model approach extended with ontological support. One of the primary research challenges addressed here relates to the process of formalization and representation of document contents, where most existing approaches are limited and only take into account the explicit, word-based information in the document. This research explores how traditional knowledge representations can be enriched through incorporation of implicit information derived from the complex relationships (semantic associations) modelled by domain ontologies with the addition of information presented in documents. The relevant achievements pursued by this thesis are the following: (i) conceptualization of a model that enables the semantic enrichment of knowledge sources supported by domain experts; (ii) development of a method for extending the traditional vector space, using domain ontologies; (iii) development of a method to support ontology learning, based on the discovery of new ontological relations expressed in non-structured information sources; (iv) development of a process to evaluate the semantic enrichment; (v) implementation of a proof-of-concept, named SENSE (Semantic Enrichment kNowledge SourcEs), which enables to validate the ideas established under the scope of this thesis; (vi) publication of several scientific articles and the support to 4 master dissertations carried out by the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from FCT/UNL. It is worth mentioning that the work developed under the semantic referential covered by this thesis has reused relevant achievements within the scope of research European projects, in order to address approaches which are considered scientifically sound and coherent and avoid “reinventing the wheel”.

Automatic extraction of concepts from texts and applications

The extraction of relevant terms from texts is an extensively researched task in Text- Mining. Relevant terms have been applied in areas such as Information Retrieval or document clustering and classification. However, relevance has a rather fuzzy nature since the classification of some terms as relevant or not relevant is not consensual. For instance, while words such as "president" and "republic" are generally considered relevant by human evaluators, and words like "the" and "or" are not, terms such as "read" and "finish" gather no consensus about their semantic and informativeness. Concepts, on the other hand, have a less fuzzy nature. Therefore, instead of deciding on the relevance of a term during the extraction phase, as most extractors do, I propose to first extract, from texts, what I have called generic concepts (all concepts) and postpone the decision about relevance for downstream applications, accordingly to their needs. For instance, a keyword extractor may assume that the most relevant keywords are the most frequent concepts on the documents. Moreover, most statistical extractors are incapable of extracting single-word and multi-word expressions using the same methodology. These factors led to the development of the ConceptExtractor, a statistical and language-independent methodology which is explained in Part I of this thesis. In Part II, I will show that the automatic extraction of concepts has great applicability. For instance, for the extraction of keywords from documents, using the Tf-Idf metric only on concepts yields better results than using Tf-Idf without concepts, specially for multi-words. In addition, since concepts can be semantically related to other concepts, this allows us to build implicit document descriptors. These applications led to published work. Finally, I will present some work that, although not published yet, is briefly discussed in this document.

Semantic relations extraction from unstructured information for domain ontologies enrichment

Based in internet growth, through semantic web, together with communication speed improvement and fast development of storage device sizes, data and information volume rises considerably every day. Because of this, in the last few years there has been a growing interest in structures for formal representation with suitable characteristics, such as the possibility to organize data and information, as well as the reuse of its contents aimed for the generation of new knowledge. Controlled Vocabulary, specifically Ontologies, present themselves in the lead as one of such structures of representation with high potential. Not only allow for data representation, as well as the reuse of such data for knowledge extraction, coupled with its subsequent storage through not so complex formalisms. However, for the purpose of assuring that ontology knowledge is always up to date, they need maintenance. Ontology Learning is an area which studies the details of update and maintenance of ontologies. It is worth noting that relevant literature already presents first results on automatic maintenance of ontologies, but still in a very early stage. Human-based processes are still the current way to update and maintain an ontology, which turns this into a cumbersome task. The generation of new knowledge aimed for ontology growth can be done based in Data Mining techniques, which is an area that studies techniques for data processing, pattern discovery and knowledge extraction in IT systems. This work aims at proposing a novel semi-automatic method for knowledge extraction from unstructured data sources, using Data Mining techniques, namely through pattern discovery, focused in improving the precision of concept and its semantic relations present in an ontology. In order to verify the applicability of the proposed method, a proof of concept was developed, presenting its results, which were applied in building and construction sector.

Apoio à decisão na análise inteligente de reclamações

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de Informação

BIOMedical search engine framework: lightweight and customized implementation of domain-specific biomedical search engines

The Smart Drug Search is publicly accessible at http://sing.ei.uvigo.es/sds/. The BIOMedical Search Engine Framework is freely available for non-commercial use at https://github.com/agjacome/biomsef

Gestor de vendes d'una botiga virtual

El projecte consisteix en el disseny i implementació d'una aplicació web utilitzant una de les tecnologies punteres en el desenvolupament d'aquest tipus d'aplicacions, J2EE, que compta amb un base d'instal·lacions que la poden allotjar força àmplia.

Estudi de com OWL amplia la funcionalitat d' RDF i aquest, a la vegada d' XML.

L'objectiu general d'aquest treball és conèixer el concepte de web semàntica i aprofundir-hi, i també entendre els principis bàsics d'algunes de les tecnologies en què recolza: les ontologies, l'XML, l'RDF i l'OWL.

Usabilitat en entorns de telèfons mòbils

Aquí es reuneix la documentació tècnica actual per a fer-ne un anàlisi de facilitat d'ús des del punt de vista de l'usuari. Se centra en les funcionalitats, les tecnologies actuals i les interfícies. La metodologia emprada per a fer les anàlisis i arribar a les conclusions consta de tres fases: fer un recull de la tecnologia i les funcionalitats necessàries i analitzar-ne la facilitat d'ús; establir grups d'usuaris amb necessitats comunes o perfils d'usuari, i definir els paràmetres de facilitat d'ús que fem servir en els tests d'usuaris-dispositius i en els dissenys de tests.