José M. Parente de Oliveira

Concept maps as the first step in an ontology construction method

A method is proposed to be used as the first step in the ontology acquisition process. This method is based on the use of concept maps as a means of expression for the expert, followed by an application that assists the expert in detailing the structure of the knowledge represented in the map. This application analyses the concept map, taking into account the map topology and key words used by the expert. From this analysis a series of questions are presented to the expert that, when answered, reduce the map ambiguity and identify some common patterns in ontological representations, such as generalizations and mereologic relations. This information can be used by the knowledge engineer during further knowledge acquisition sessions or to direct the expert to a further improvement of the map. The method was tested by a group of volunteers, most of them engineers working at the aerospace sector, and the results suggest that both the use of concept mapping as well as the refining step are acceptable from the point of view of the end user, supporting the claim that this method is viable as an option to reduce some of the difficulties in large scale ontology construction.

Simple Method for Ontology Automatic Extraction from Documents

There are many situations where it is needed to represent and analyze the concepts that describe a document or a collection of documents. One of such situations is the information retrieval, which is becoming more complex by the growing number and variety of document types. One way to represent the concepts is through a formal structure using ontologies. Thus, this article presents a fast and simple method for automatic extraction of ontologies from documents or from a collections of documents that is independent of the document type and uses the junction of several theories and techniques, such as latent semantic for the extraction of initial concepts, Wordnet and similarity to obtain the correlation between the concepts.

Conceptual Maps as the First Step in an Ontology Construction Method

In this paper a method is proposed to be used as the first step in the ontology construction process. This method, specially tailored to ontology construction for knowledge management applications, is based on the use of concept maps as a mean of expression for the expert, followed by an application that assists in the capture of the expert intention with the goal of further formalizing the map. This application analyses the concept map, taking into account the map topology and key words used by the expert. From this analysis a series of questions is presented to the expert that, when answered, reduce the map ambiguity and identify some common patterns in ontological representations, such as generalizations and mere logic relations. This information could then be used by the knowledge engineer during further knowledge acquisition sessions or to direct the expert to a further formalization or improvement of the map. The method was tested in a group of volunteers, all of them engineers working at the aerospace sector, and the results suggest that both the use of conceptual mapping as well as the intention capture step are acceptable from the point of view of the end user, supporting the claim that this method is viable as an option to reduce some of the difficulties in large scale ontology construction.

Allocation of avionics communication using Boolean satisfiability

During the design phase of avionics systems, the activity of selecting the physical components of an IMA platform and allocating the avionics systems applications into the chosen components may lead to several options to configure the given IMA architecture. The aeronautical industry already realized that this activity can be assisted by automated methods. Focusing on the communication allocation, this paper presents an approach for allocating applications data flows into physical communication resources of an IMA system able to deal with the main requirements, such as safety and performance, and also able to be extended to other criteria, as for instance maintainability and extensibility requirements. The approach is based on the Boolean satisfiability theory and linear programming. A case study is presented to evaluate its applicability.

A proposal for modeling learner interaction in educational adaptive hypermedia systems driven by a pedagogical model

Modeling learner interaction in educational adaptive hypermedia systems (EAHS) is not normally driven by the pedagogical model used in the system. It is argued in this paper that besides driving the modeling of learner interaction, the pedagogical model is a key aspect in modeling the system as a whole. This paper presents a proposal to define and present learner interaction based on problem-based learning. Though the proposed process has been used only in academic context, the preliminary use has indicated its potential of use in real contexts.

Desenvolvimento de um curso seguindo a Aprendizagem Baseada em Problemas: um estudo de caso

Resumo: Este trabalho avalia as iniciativas de combate a brecha digital por meio da introducao de computadores e do acesso a internet nas escolas da rede publica de ensino fundamental das cidades medias fluminenses. A analise divide o processo de informatizacao em tres estagios: a aquisicao de computadores , a implantacao de laboratorios de informatica e o acesso a internet com objetivo de identificar em que estagio se encontramos municipios em estudo. Abstract: This paper aimed at the medium size cities in Rio de Janeiro and their politics to control the digital divide through the introduction of computers and Internet on public schools. The analysis divided this process in three different stages from the acquisition of computers to Internet access. The appraisal pointed out the necessity of public policies to overcome the stages as the majority of these cities are still acquiring computers instead of implementing Internet access and combating the digital divide.

Representação da Interação do Aprendiz em Sistemas Hipermídia Adaptativos Educacionais que Utilizam a Aprendizagem Baseada em Problemas como Modelo Pedagógico

Webgrade is an on-line system for managing and publishing student grades on web. Webgrade provides: (1) to the teachers, features for managing grade plans, publishing student grades, and sending messages to the students by email; (2) to the students, access to their grades and number of absences to the classes, in a private and restrict page on the internet. All interactions between Webgrade and users are done by a web browser. Webgrade was developed with open-source technology and can be freely distributed under GPL.Resumo: Este artigo relata uma experiencia de inclusao digital (ID) do Programa de Extensao Onda Digital com 40 jovens carentes. O curso de Informatica Basica de 36 horas fez parte do programa educacional da ONG Eletrocooperativa. Este programa visa a formacao musical, melhoria das condicoes de trabalho e de cidadania de jovens afro-descendentes brasileiros. A experiencia de ID contou com a participacao de alunos do curso de graduacao em Ciencia da Computacao da UFBA, que atuaram como instrutores. O gerenciamento do curso, a elaboracao das aulas e do material didatico foram feitos com a utilizacao de ferramentas colaborativas livres. O proprio conteudo do curso de informatica foi baseado em solucoes livres, dentro do sistema operacional GNU/Linux. O resultado foi encorajador: dos 22 alunos que concluiram o curso com sucesso, 13 ja estao empregados em menos de 6 meses e 2 decidiram matricular-se em curso pre-vestibular. Acreditamos que iniciativas como esta despertam nos jovens a motivacao de engajar-se na universidade ou no mercado de trabalho. Abstract: This paper describes a digital inclusion (DI) experience of the OndaDigital Extension Program with 40 deprived teenagers. The IntroductoryInformatics Course had a total of 36 hours and was part of the EducationalProgram from the NGO Eletrocooperativa. Their program focuses on musicalformation, improvement of work condition and citizenship of afro-descendantsBrazilian youngsters. This DI experience counted with the participation ofstudents from the Computer Science undergraduate course of UFBA asmonitors and instructors. The management of the course, preparation oflessons and pedagogical material was done using a collaborative tool basedon free software. The course content was also based on free softwareapplications using GNU/Linux operating system. The results were veryencouraging: from the 22 students that successfully finished the course, 13found a job in less than six months and 2 decided to take preparatory coursesfor entering university. We believe that initiatives like this one motivateteenagers to aim for the university or enter the job market.

GO4SOA: Goal-Oriented Modeling for SOA

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a standard in business integration. In software engineering, several authors propose requirements elicitation from business goals. However, SOA application modeling does not address these goals, causing a gap that can hinder the application design. The work outlined in this paper proposes an approach to modeling SOA applications based on business goals. The goals are incorporated as semantic information to the application’s architecture and are preserved until its implementation. Thus, the components that perform a particular business goal can be identified from its architecture model, through detailed design, and implementation. Case study “Purchase Order” was selected to verify the proposed approach. The major contribution of this research is the application of business knowledge to improve the service’s descriptions in the application design. The case study indicated that business goals are preserved on models and implementation, making it easy to verify, through tracing its features, if the organization’s goals were addressed as completely as possible.

A Blocking Scheme for Entity Resolution in the Semantic Web

The amount and diversity of data in the Semantic Web has grown quite. RDF datasets has proportionally more problems than relational datasets due to the way data are published, usually without formal criteria. Entity Resolution is n important issue which is related to a known task of many research communities and it aims at finding all representations that refer to the same entity in different datasets. Yet, it is still an open problem. Blocking methods are used to avoid the quadratic complexity of the brute force approach by clustering entities into blocks and limiting the evaluation of entity specifications to entity pairs within blocks. In the last years only a few blocking methods were conceived to deal with RDF data and novel blocking techniques are required for dealing with noisy and heterogeneous data in the Web of Data. In this paper we present a blocking scheme, CER-Blocking, which is based on an inverted index structure and that uses different data evidences from a triple, aiming to maximize its effectiveness. To overcome the problems of data quality or even the very absence thereof, we use two blocking key definitions. This scheme is part of an ER approach which is based on a relational learning algorithm that addresses the problem by statistical approximation. It was empirically evaluated on real and synthetic datasets which are part of consolidated benchmarks found on the literature.

A Method for Measuring Semantic Similarity of Documents

With the documents increasing amount available in local or Web repositories, the comparison methods have to analyze large documents sets with different types and terminologies to obtain a response with minimum documents and with as much useful content to the user. For large documents sets where each document can contain many pages, it is impossible to compute the similarity using the entire document, to require creating solutions to analyze a few meaningful terms, in summary form. This article presents TextSSimily, a method that compares documents semantically considering only short text for comparison (text summary), using semantics to improve the set of responses and summaries to improve time to obtain results for large sets of documents. General Terms Semantic Retrieval, Documents Comparison.