J.M. de Souza

Building Tools for Emergent Design with COPPEER

In this work, we first present a model of emergent design which allows a community of designers to collectively translate a set of requirement specifications into a completed design. Then, we describe the COPPEER framework, an environment for developing and running collaborative peer-to-peer applications which directly supports the main requirements elicited in our proposal

Competence mining for team formation and virtual community recommendation

Currently, one problem faced by the organizations is the inability of the institution to know what it actually knows, in other words, the competences that the organization masters. This problem especially disturbs team formation for a design project, which must be composed of people with specific knowledge to execute different activities. Simple classification or a keyword approach is not sufficient for competence identification. The expertise of an employee or researcher often differs in small but significant details, and an approach is required to allow the accurate description of peoples competences and to implement a retrieval strategy that finds a person with a specific competence. We propose a technique to identify competences by mining employee documents, especially publications. We have chose a number of criteria, which is described in this paper, to find people with specific expertise and propose than to projects. Finally, a possible indication for a persons participation in a community is her/his published knowledge and expertise degree.

Peer-to-peer collaborative editing of ontologies

In This work we present COE, a peer-to-peer collaborative ontology editor, which supports creation, edition, sharing, and reuse of ontologies. COE was implemented on top of a general-purpose peer-to-peer framework, COPPEER. Ontologies are particularly useful as a design tool because they render the communication between people and the interoperability between systems easier. In large multidisciplinary design projects, ontologies can be a critical success factor. The collaborative creation of ontologies allows for better understanding among participants of a project and economy of resource among projects. Meanwhile, a P2P approach is expected to enable new modes of collaboration.

Peer-to-peer collaborative integration of dynamic ontologies

With the grown availability of large and specialized online ontologies, the questions about the integration of independently developed ontologies have become even more important. To facilitate the ontology integration process, this paper presents an ontology integration support module, that promotes the creation of new ontologies by reusing others. The hypothesis is that the ontology designer achieves a reduction in the time dedicated to create a new ontology, as well as obtain ontologies with better quality. The experimental use of the prototype developed showed evidence that the hypothesis can be confirmed.

Using Wavelets to Classify Documents

Currently, Fourier and cosine discrete transformations are used to classify documents. This article proposes a new strategy that uses wavelets in the representation and reduction of data text. Wavelets have been extensively used for dimensionality reduction in the field of signal processing. In this work, we show that a text document, after being subjected to a simple process of reorganization of its terms, can be treated like a signal and analyzed by signal processing tools. We demonstrate that this new representation is able to describe the most relevant features of documents in a synthetic representation and this new perspective improves the performance of the classification algorithm.

Assisting meeting facilitation through automated analysis of group dynamics

In many group work situations, meetings take up a reasonable amount of time. Several techniques have been introduced to streamline meetings and reach conclusions faster, many of which place an individual in the role of meeting facilitator. Facilitation involves intervening to produce desired results. Thus, a facilitator should be able to identify certain group dynamics and act accordingly. In this paper, we present and electronic idea generation system based on thinkLets dynamics and designed to measure group dynamics. This information is provided to the facilitator so he or she can decide whether or not to intervene.

A collaborative approach to the reuse of scientific experiments in the Bill of Experiments tool

This article presents the Bill of Experiments tool (BOE), a collaborative environment for the reuse of scientific experiments. The tool is a Web-based system aimed at scientists and suppliers of scientific artifacts. It is capable of pointing out the best alternatives for the accomplishment of scientific experiments based on cost criteria, deadline attainment and quality, in an analogy with the bill of materials process. With the aid of a scientific database on experiments we can describe a collaborative environment for the explicit description, combination, generation (design) and reuse of scientific knowledge. For this work we used concepts from various research areas, like knowledge management, databases, artificial intelligence workflow and CSCW. We present a study case applied to the biological area. We obtained the best alternatives for the experiments detailed accomplishment and an explanation of why the inference module was chosen, and the advantage of using CLP techniques over conventional optimization techniques. BOE acts as an Internet portal that unites researchers, institutions and companies in a paradigm similar to B2B.

Sharing the knowledge generated during a Water Resources project

This article focuses on the generation of knowledge chains as a way of retaining the knowledge generated during the execution of a water resources project. To create new chains we are making use of the knowledge stored in project tasks, and the ontology technology. The ontology concepts associated with a task are converted into knowledge units, which are filled with all the information related to it. The ontology structure will be used to create the sequence of the knowledge chain that includes the units created. The new chain will be presented and must be validated by the author to be added to the environment knowledge chains base.

Using Knowledge Management Techniques to Improve the Learning Process through the Exchange of Knowledge Chains

To complement the learning process and promote continuous learning, this paper proposes an environment that uses knowledge management techniques to improve the learning process for building personal knowledge through the exchange of knowledge chains in learning communities. Here we are using the generic model for the knowledge management cycle proposed by Stollenwerk The processes that are part of this model are: 1) knowledge identification; 2) knowledge capture; 3) knowledge selection and validation; 4) knowledge organization and storage; 5) knowledge sharing; 6) knowledge application and 7) creation of knowledge. The use of knowledge management became important in this work because it gave a theoretical foundation to the knowledge chains learning process specification.

CUMBIA: an agent framework to detect opportunities for collaboration

With the increase in adoption of remote work groups and teams working in non-collocated environments, several opportunities for interaction have been lost. Contact with colleagues and discovery of opportunities, previously easy due to physical proximity, is made harder with distance. In this paper, we describe an agent-based framework to assist users in finding opportunities for interaction that may have been overlooked.