Jorge Gustavo Rocha

SGML documents: where does quality go?

Quality control in electronic publications should be one of the major concerns of everyone who is managing a project. Big projects, like digital libraries, try to gather information from a series of different sources: libraries, museums, universities, and other scientific or cultural organizations. Collecting and treating information from several different sources raises very interesting problems, one being the assurance of quality. Quality in electronic publications can be reflected in several forms, from the visual aspects of the interface, to linguistic and literary aspects, to the correctness of data. With SGML we can solve part of the problem, structural/syntactic correctness. SGML provides a nice way to specify the structure of documents keeping a complete separation between structure (syntax) and typesetting. Today there are lots of editors and environments that can assist the user producing well-formed and valid SGML documents (validating their structure). However, current software still gives the user too much freedom. The user has full control of the data being introduced, creating a margin for errors. In this context there are situations where pre-conditions over the information being introduced should be enforced in order to prevent the user from introducing erroneous data; we shall call this process data semantics validation. The idea is to constrain the values of some structural elements of a document according to its final purpose. This way the user (who writes the documents according to that DTD) will not have full control of his data; he will be forced to obey certain domain range limitations or certain information relationships. SGML does not have the necessary constructs to implement this extra validation task. In this paper we will present and discuss ways of associating a constraint language with the SGML model. We will present the steps towards the implementation of that language. In the end, we present a new SGML authoring and processing model which has an extra validation task: semantic validation. Along the paper we will show some case studies that could have their quality improved with this new working scheme.

A New Competitive Implementation of the Electromagnetism-Like Algorithm for Global Optimization

The Electromagnetism-like (EM) algorithm is a population-based stochastic global optimization algorithm that uses an attraction-repulsion mechanism to move sample points towards the optimal. In this paper, an implementation of the EM algorithm in the Matlab environment as a useful function for practitioners and for those who want to experiment a new global optimization solver is proposed. A set of benchmark problems are solved in order to evaluate the performance of the implemented method when compared with other stochastic methods available in the Matlab environment. The results confirm that our implementation is a competitive alternative both in term of numerical results and performance.Finally, a case study based on a parameter estimation problem of a biology system shows that the EM implementation could be applied with promising results in the control optimization area.

Where the Streets Have Known Names

Street names provide important insights into the local culture, history, and politics of places. Linked open data provide a wealth of knowledge that can be associated with street names, enabling novel ways to explore cultural geographies. This paper presents a three-fold contribution. We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between street names and the entities that they refer to. The method is based on Wikidata, a knowledge base derived from Wikipedia. The accuracy of this mapping is evaluated on a sample of streets in Rome. As this approach reaches limited coverage, we propose to tap local knowledge with (2) a simple web platform. Users can select the best correspondence from the calculated ones or add another entity not discovered by the automated process. As a result, we design (3) an enriched OpenStreetMap web map where each street name can be explored in terms of the properties of its associated entity. Through several filters, this tool is a first step towards the interactive exploration of toponymy, showing how open data can reveal facets of the cultural texture that pervades places.

State of Art Survey On: Large Scale Image Location Recognition

Image location recognition is a well known process of retrieving the precise location from the contents of the photographs. New photographs are compared to a large geocoded database and the result is both the position and orientation.

Tiling 3d terrain models

W3DS clients should be able to request 3D scenes, either using the getscene or gettile operations, and directly display them without any additional manipulation or geographic positional correction. In this paper we will discuss how tiles should be served to W3DS clients, since 3D tiles are more difficult to manage than 2D tiles. While 2D tiles just need to be placed side by side, 3D tiles also have to fit along the z axis. The volume and complexity of 3D information requires more complicated logic on the client side. Clients can decide that geographic features far away from the viewer can have less detail than those near the observer. For that reason, 3D clients may want to join together tiles of different resolutions. We will show an algorithm to perfectly slice 3D terrain models using the GDAL and CGAL libraries. It can be used in existing W3DS services to improve the quality of visualisations.

Web 3D Service Implementation

In this paper we describe an open source implementing of the Web 3D Service (W3DS) based on the OGC’s draft proposal. The implementation was developed on top of the open source java-based map server GeoServer, as a community module. With an open source implementation available, test beds can be promoted to better know the strengths and limitations of the current proposal. Without practical interoperability assessments demonstrated, W3DS barely become a 3D standard in urban management applications.

Designing a bidirectional workflow for OpenStreetMap data integration in an INSPIRE based SDI

More educated people, with more sophisticated devices, are creating new trends: crowded source data and citizen science. Citizens are able to capture data and to reason about it. They are producers and consumers of their own data. Meanwhile, local administration is struggling with less resources and more pressure to become more efficient. In this paper we try to bridge the gap between these two different worlds, apart from each other, proposing a workflow. We discuss the advantages and the technical challenges we might face if crowded source data can be used by the administration. To make this possible, we take advantage of the existing European regulation, the INSPIRE directive, and designed a workflow to implement the rules regarding data specifications to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to combine it seamless with official existing datasets.

Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2014

Radiation incidences (angles) that are used in Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) treatments have a significant influence in the treatment clinical outcome. In clinical practice, the angles are usually chosen after a lengthy trial and error procedure that is significantly dependent on the planner’s experience and time availability. The use of optimization models and algorithms can be an important contribution to the treatment planning, improving the quality of the solution reached and decreasing the time spent on the process. This paper describes a Dynamically Dimensioned Search (DDS) approach for IMRT beam angle optimization. Several different sets of parameters and search options were analyzed. Computational tests show that the final outcome is strongly influenced by these choices. This motivated the use of a crossvalidation based procedure for choosing the algorithm’s configuration, considering a set of ten retrospective treated cases of head-and-neck tumors at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology of Coimbra.