Ivan Torres Pisa

Thesaurus as a complex network

A thesaurus is one, out of many, possible representations of term (or word) connectivity. The terms of a thesaurus are seen as the nodes and their relationship as the links of a directed graph. The directionality of the links retains all the thesaurus information and allows the measurement of several quantities. This has lead to a new term classification according to the characteristics of the nodes, for example, nodes with no links in, no links out, etc. Using an electronic available thesaurus we have obtained the incoming and outgoing link distributions. While the incoming link distribution follows a stretched exponential function, the lower bound for the outgoing link distribution has the same envelope of the scientific paper citation distribution proposed by Tsallis and Albuquerque (Eur. Phys. J. B 13 (2000) 777). However, a better fit is obtained by simpler function which is the solution of Ricattis differential equation. We conjecture that this differential equation is the continuous limit of a stochastic growth model of the thesaurus network. We also propose a new manner to arrange a thesaurus using the “inversion method”.

Applying the semantic web to represent an individual's academic and professional background

The Lattes Platform is a web-based system that brings together the academic, professional and scientific histories of students, teachers, researchers and other professionals linked to scientific and technological careers. The data are entered by users themselves and are the subject of much research and forecasting in relation to how educational resources are directed in Brazil. In this paper, we report our experience in applying the Linked Data principles to this system. We have also demonstrated the potential of federated queries using data from DBPedia.

Professional Competence in Oncology: Challenges for Education

The oncology care is one of the most distinguished scenarios, considering cancer diagnosis plurality, treatment types, physical symptoms (from the treatment or the disease), and comorbidities, variety of socio-demographic and cultural profiles of patients and family, and also physical, material and technological resources. In this sense, the health professional that works in oncology has a daily challenges to ensure the quality of care and should be updated in these different aspects [1].