Digital strategy in airports

As airports continue to become more ‘customer-centric’ their digital customer-facing technologies are increasingly embedded within the passenger journey. This study takes a customer-centric view of airport digital technology by exploring the ways that digital technologies are being applied within airports to improve passenger perspectives of service quality during their journey. The literature review develops a framework encompassing the themes of airport service quality (function, interaction and diversion) and digital strategy. This framework has been applied to six airports exhibiting high service quality. Currently, the findings suggest that the improvement of customer function involves the use of automated and self-service technologies providing passengers greater efficiency and effectiveness during processing points. Additionally, technology to improve experience during wait times may entail either aesthetic qualities, or provide some form of productivity to passengers. Alternatively, customer interaction is influenced by digital technology through constant passenger engagement during their journey. As the research nears completion, the influence of these themes on the framework will become more apparent.

Rabb Family/Stop & Shop collection, 1912-1989.

The Rabinovitz/Rabb family arrived in Boston from Russia in the 1890s. Around 1914 they founded Economy Grocery Stores, which became Stop & Shop in 1946. In addition to building their grocery company into a successful business, the family is known for its philanthropy and active involvement in the Jewish community. The collection contains materials relating to the Rabb family and to the business operations of Stop & Shop until 1989. The materials in this collection include historical sketches, newspaper clippings, press releases, correspondence, memoranda, minutes, reports, advertisements, certificates, speeches, interviews, films, and photographs.

自助银行集成应用系统CSBS

本文全面地论述了自助银行集成应用系统(CSBS)的研制开发及这一系统的结构、性能和软硬件特色。论文前一部分阐明了系统的开发背景，系统模型的建立，整体的系统结构（包括详细的软硬件设计）；接着从系统应用方面给出了一个使用说明；然后从系统的可靠性及系统的应用性能方面进行了总结以及介绍本人具体完成的工作；最后一部分探讨了一个解决银行业务系统安全的方案。CSBS自助银行集成应用系统是一个从事金融业务的专用系统，采用Client/Server软件结构，涉及终端通讯技术、磁卡技术、IC卡技术、打印技术，安全加密技术等许多硬件及软件技术。CSBS自助银行集成应用系统是一项完全依靠自身技术进行开发的高新技术项目，其功能超过国外同类系统，价格低于国外同类产品，使用存折、储蓄卡、信用卡、IC卡实现银行服务业务，具有明显的市场效益和应用前景。

基于SOA的银联智能商业平台的研究与实现

智能商业平台是大型企业商务应用的一个新兴领域，智能商业平台通过数据仓库、数据挖掘技术对企业的大量数据进行分析从而发现企业发展的内部规律，为企业的科学决策提供有效支持。目前的智能商业平台在体系结构上采用传统的集中式的IT架构，尚存在如下问题：1）不能与其它的信息系统间进行交互；2）采用重建系统的方式开发，不能有效利用现有信息系统资源；3）不能适应快速变化的业务需求进行灵活的系统扩充；4）由于系统的所有功能集中在同一服务器中，严重影响了系统的访问性能。 面对上述具有挑战的问题，本文将Web服务同智能商业平台相结合，从体系结构角度出发，提出一种基于SOA(Service-Oriented Architecture)的智能商业平台，并在银联需求基础上开发基于SOA的银联智能商业平台，解决传统智能商业平台无法与其它系统交互、资源浪费、不能灵活扩展及访问性能等方面的问题。 本文首先分析了国内外智能商业平台的研究现状，指出了其中尚未解决的问题，然后结合SOA的设计思想和传统的OOAD方法进行银联智能商业平台的业务流程建模，提出了面向服务的业务流程模型，并根据对用户需求的分析和理解设计了基于SOA的分层体系结构。然后文章着重阐述了服务管理层、核心服务层和应用服务层的设计思想与实现方法：1）服务管理层负责系统中所有服务的统一维护和管理，其中重点分析、讨论了基于UDDI的服务注册中心等核心技术；2）核心服务层是我们为了支撑上层应用服务所开发的大量底层服务，包括报表统计服务、多维分析服务、数据挖掘服务、用户管理、日志管理服务等，文中详细介绍了这些核心服务的设计和工作流程描述；3）应用层主要是各种系统功能的应用集成，提供了统一的门户交互系统，在这部分将着重给出统一门户集成的实现。 通过构建面向服务的业务流程和体系结构，基于SOA的银联智能商业平台在解决了传统智能商业平台问题的基础上还具有多项优势：标准化，构件化，可重用性，可扩展性，可互操作性等。

WPS orchestration using the Taverna workbench: The eScience approach

eScience is an umbrella concept which covers internet technologies, such as web service orchestration that involves manipulation and processing of high volumes of data, using simple and efficient methodologies. This concept is normally associated with bioinformatics, but nothing prevents the use of an identical approach for geoinfomatics and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) web services like WPS (Web Processing Service). In this paper we present an extended WPS implementation based on the PyWPS framework using an automatically generated WSDL (Web Service Description Language) XML document that replicates the WPS input/output document structure used during an Execute request to a server. Services are accessed using a modified SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interface provided by PyWPS, that uses service and input/outputs identifiers as element names. The WSDL XML document is dynamically generated by applying XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) to the getCapabilities XML document that is generated by PyWPS. The availability of the SOAP interface and WSDL description allows WPS instances to be accessible to workflow development software like Taverna, enabling users to build complex workflows using web services represented by interconnecting graphics. Taverna will transform the visual representation of the workflow into a SCUFL (Simple Conceptual Unified Flow Language) based XML document that can be run internally or sent to a Taverna orchestration server. SCUFL uses a dataflow-centric orchestration model as opposed to the more commonly used orchestration language BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) which is process-centric.

Mining biomedical information from scientific literature

The rapid evolution and proliferation of a world-wide computerized network, the Internet, resulted in an overwhelming and constantly growing amount of publicly available data and information, a fact that was also verified in biomedicine. However, the lack of structure of textual data inhibits its direct processing by computational solutions. Information extraction is the task of text mining that intends to automatically collect information from unstructured text data sources. The goal of the work described in this thesis was to build innovative solutions for biomedical information extraction from scientific literature, through the development of simple software artifacts for developers and biocurators, delivering more accurate, usable and faster results. We started by tackling named entity recognition - a crucial initial task - with the development of Gimli, a machine-learning-based solution that follows an incremental approach to optimize extracted linguistic characteristics for each concept type. Afterwards, Totum was built to harmonize concept names provided by heterogeneous systems, delivering a robust solution with improved performance results. Such approach takes advantage of heterogenous corpora to deliver cross-corpus harmonization that is not constrained to specific characteristics. Since previous solutions do not provide links to knowledge bases, Neji was built to streamline the development of complex and custom solutions for biomedical concept name recognition and normalization. This was achieved through a modular and flexible framework focused on speed and performance, integrating a large amount of processing modules optimized for the biomedical domain. To offer on-demand heterogenous biomedical concept identification, we developed BeCAS, a web application, service and widget. We also tackled relation mining by developing TrigNER, a machine-learning-based solution for biomedical event trigger recognition, which applies an automatic algorithm to obtain the best linguistic features and model parameters for each event type. Finally, in order to assist biocurators, Egas was developed to support rapid, interactive and real-time collaborative curation of biomedical documents, through manual and automatic in-line annotation of concepts and relations. Overall, the research work presented in this thesis contributed to a more accurate update of current biomedical knowledge bases, towards improved hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery.

A comunicação interna e a sua relação com a motivação dos trabalhadores

A presente proposta de Dissertação tem como objetivo principal analisar três canais de Comunicação Interna da empresa do Grupo Probos: Revista Interna; Self-Service; Caixa de Sugestões; e avaliar se estes contribuem para a motivação dos trabalhadores. O estudo da população envolveu 119 trabalhadores da empresa divididos por três secções: Administrativos, Técnicos e Operários que registaram as suas opiniões através de respostas a um instrumento de medição, o questionário. O questionário está dividido em quatro secções: Dados Sociodemográficos, Revista Interna, Caixa de Sugestões e Self-Service. As opiniões foram analisadas através do Excel da Microsoft e de uma escala de Likert de cinco pontos com o software para tratamento de dados quantitativos – IBM SPSS (versão 22). Como conclusão, no que diz respeito à Revista Interna os resultados apontam que nem todos os colaboradores inquiridos da empresa em estudo, consideram este canal comunicacional interno motivador para o seu desempenho profissional, mas valorizam a divulgação dos méritos e das novidades por seu intermédio. Relativamente aos canais Self-Service e Caixa de Sugestões, conclui-se que estes são ambos contributos para a motivação dos trabalhadores.

The internationalization process of mychild to São Paulo, Brazil

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

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.

The global shopper & brands communication at airports

This project aims to illuminate two perspectives on travel retail. On the one hand, it describes the main character of the shopping scenario at airports, namely the Global Shopper. It covers the entire profile of the referred character, the main nationalities that represent him and the current shopping trends of the passenger. Also estimates of the booming nationalities and the future purchasing trends are accurately presented. On the other hand, the travel retail market is analyzed from the airport brands’ perspective. It is described what is currently done in terms of brands communication in the top ten airports around the world and the expected future market retail trends. To accurately explore the Global Shopper behavior and purchasing preferences, a market research was conducted with a sample of 128 respondents, male and female, from different nationalities, age groups, occupation and education backgrounds. The essay tests hypothesis regarding the relevance of several variables in the purchasing process of the Global Shopper in order to understand the most pleasant way to approach consumers in travel retail. The main variables studied concern the reasons to shop at airports, to whom the passenger shops, the preferred category and brand of purchase, feelings while shopping abroad, impulsive buying behavior, brand loyalty, the use of mobile devices in the shopping process, brands communication at airports, pre-ordering online and the attitude towards self-service stores. Some findings were in accordance with expectations, while others were a surprise and may produce valuable recommendations for future travel retail practices. 4 The main relevant results concern two areas, namely pre-ordering online and self-service stores. Results showed a certain stress about not having enough time to choose between the various offerings in travel retail, as well as difficulty in dealing with crowed stores. However, pre-ordering online was not common, which would be an initiative that could solve the discomfort at airport’s stores. Moreover, self-service would promote efficiency in stores allowing passengers to save time if they already know how to go through the shopping process by themselves. Another possible recommendation concerns differentiating the strategy in travel retail for the two genders. Some differences were found in the categories bought by male and female, as well as to how brands should shape their approach concerning the demands of each gender.

Wikiloc: software libre y APIs de Google Maps para visualizar y compartir rutas GPS

Wikiloc es un servicio web gratuito para visualizar y compartir rutas y puntos de interés GPS. Utilizando software libre y la API de Google Maps, Wikiloc hace la función de base de datos personal de localizaciones GPS. Desde cualquier acceso a Internet un usuario de GPS puede cargar sus datos GPS y al momento visualizar la ruta y waypoints con distinta cartografía de fondo, incluidos servidores de mapas externos WMS (Web Map Service) o descargarlo a Google Earth para ver en 3D. Paralelamente se muestra el perfil de altura, distancia, desniveles acumulados y las fotos o comentarios que el usuario quiera añadir

La Comunidad geospacial y el acceso a datos oceanográficos

Nowadays, Oceanographic and Geospatial communities are closely related worlds. The problem is that they follow parallel paths in data storage, distributions, modelling and data analyzing. This situation produces different data model implementations for the same features. While Geospatial information systems have 2 or 3 dimensions, the Oceanographic models uses multidimensional parameters like temperature, salinity, streams, ocean colour... This implies significant differences between data models of both communities, and leads to difficulties in dataset analysis for both sciences. These troubles affect directly to the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies ( IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB)). Researchers from this Institute perform intensive processing with data from oceanographic facilities like CTDs, moorings, gliders… and geospatial data collected related to the integrated management of coastal zones. In this paper, we present an approach solution based on THREDDS (Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services). THREDDS allows data access through the standard geospatial data protocol Web Coverage Service, inside the European project (European Coastal Sea Operational Observing and Forecasting system). The goal of ECOOP is to consolidate, integrate and further develop existing European coastal and regional seas operational observing and forecasting systems into an integrated pan- European system targeted at detecting environmental and climate changes

Inglés a los tres años.

Experiencia pedagógica sobre la enseñanza del inglés en educación infantil llevada a acabo en el CRA Campos Góticos en Medina de Rioseco, Valladolid. Para estimular al niño y que aprenda sin presión o aburrimiento, propone realizar, a lo largo de la semana, sesiones cortas y variadas en esta lengua con canciones, rimas, cuentos, shows y vídeos, bajo el sistema del 'self-service', o sea un sistema de oferta variada en el que cada niño escoge lo que más le gusta y aprende según sus intereses personales.

Integración de la recomendación WMS-C en los estándares preexistentes en la IDE

La experiencia en el uso de los servicios de mapas basados en la especificación Web Map Service (WMS) del Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) ha demostrado que es necesario utilizar cachés de teselas para lograr un rendimiento aceptable en aplicaciones de difusión masiva, sin embargo no hay ningún mecanismo estándar para que los clientes de mapas aprovechen, a partir de la información proporcionada por el servidor de mapas, la disponibilidad de esta caché. A la espera de que la nueva recomendación WMTS se implante suficientemente, el mecanismo más extendido es la recomendación de perfil WMS-C de OsGeo. Para conseguir que la definición de mapas que contienen servicios WMSC sea lo más automática posible, se ha ampliado el servidor Geoserver para soportar un modelo de mapas de acuerdo con la recomendación WMC con algunas extensiones ad-hoc. La extensión desarrollada para Geoserver amplía su API REST para incluir soporte de WMC. De esta forma, cuando se registra una nueva configuración de mapa, mediante un documento WMC, en el que ciertas capas están cacheadas se procede automáticamente a la activación del cacheado mediante la extensión GeoWebCache. Para la utilización de las nuevas capacidades proporcionadas a Geoserver, se ha desarrollado un cliente de mapas que identifica la existencia de capas cacheadas y procede a utilizar, según convenga, los servicios cacheados y los servicios WMS tradicionales

Mejoras en el cliente WFS de gvSIG

Web Feature Service (WFS) es un estándar OGC que permite consultar y recuperar datos vectoriales y la información alfanumérica ligada a los mismos. Al contrario que el WMS que ha alcanzado una gran difusión, son pocos los ejemplos reales de uso de WFS para servir información geográfica. Esta situación es debida probablemente a una serie de problemas no resueltos a la hora de implementar en los diversos clientes SIG dicho estándar. La especificación de WFS necesitaría disponer de un mecanismo de paginación, consistente en poder pedirle al servidor un determinado número de fenómenos a partir de una posición dada. Esta funcionalidad, simplificaría considerablemente la creación de una “caché vectorial” de fenómenos. Actualmente la mayor parte de los clientes SIG hacen un uso muy simple del protocolo WFS, que se limita a realizar peticiones para un área determinada. Del mismo modo gvSIG no dispone de ninguna “caché de fenómenos”, que no es más que un servicio que sirve para almacenar temporalmente algunos fenómenos que ya han sido recuperados mediante una conexión WFS (o en general, mediante cualquier origen de datos vectorial). Frente a esto se planteó la mejora de el acceso a WFS para las próximas versiones de gvSIG, de modo que la aplicación fuera capaz de gestionar una caché de fenómenos de manera que se fuera completando con las diferentes peticiones hechas por las consultas WFS. Cuando un cliente hace una primera consulta WFS la cach se debería rellenar con la información devuelta por el servidor. Al cambiar el extent de gvSIG, lo primero que se tendría que hacer es consultar con la caché si ésta contiene la nueva área. Si la contiene, la caché devolvería los fenómenos y si no la contiene se encargaría de hacer la petición al servidor pero únicamente incluyendo la parte de área cuyos fenómenos no estén cacheados. Se presenta dicho desarrollo que permitirá optimizar el acceso al servicio WFS