Pedro Luiz Pizzigatti Corrêa

A reference business process for ecological niche modelling

Ecological niche modelling combines species occurrence points with environmental raster layers in order to obtain models for describing the probabilistic distribution of species. The process to generate an ecological niche model is complex. It requires dealing with a large amount of data, use of different software packages for data conversion, for model generation and for different types of processing and analyses, among other functionalities. A software platform that integrates all requirements under a single and seamless interface would be very helpful for users. Furthermore, since biodiversity modelling is constantly evolving, new requirements are constantly being added in terms of functions, algorithms and data formats. This evolution must be accompanied by any software intended to be used in this area. In this scenario, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an appropriate choice for designing such systems. According to SOA best practices and methodologies, the design of a reference business process must be performed prior to the architecture definition. The purpose is to understand the complexities of the process (business process in this context refers to the ecological niche modelling problem) and to design an architecture able to offer a comprehensive solution, called a reference architecture, that can be further detailed when implementing specific systems. This paper presents a reference business process for ecological niche modelling, as part of a major work focused on the definition of a reference architecture based on SOA concepts that will be used to evolve the openModeller software package for species modelling. The basic steps that are performed while developing a model are described, highlighting important aspects, based on the knowledge of modelling experts. In order to illustrate the steps defined for the process, an experiment was developed, modelling the distribution of Ouratea spectabilis (Mart.) Engl. (Ochnaceae) using openModeller. As a consequence of the knowledge gained with this work, many desirable improvements on the modelling software packages have been identified and are presented. Also, a discussion on the potential for large-scale experimentation in ecological niche modelling is provided, highlighting opportunities for research. The results obtained are very important for those involved in the development of modelling tools and systems, for requirement analysis and to provide insight on new features and trends for this category of systems. They can also be very helpful for beginners in modelling research, who can use the process and the experiment example as a guide to this complex activity.

MR-Radix: a multi-relational data mining algorithm

BackgroundOnce multi-relational approach has emerged as an alternative for analyzing structured data such as relational databases, since they allow applying data mining in multiple tables directly, thus avoiding expensive joining operations and semantic losses, this work proposes an algorithm with multi-relational approach.MethodsAiming to compare traditional approach performance and multi-relational for mining association rules, this paper discusses an empirical study between PatriciaMine - an traditional algorithm - and its corresponding multi-relational proposed, MR-Radix.ResultsThis work showed advantages of the multi-relational approach in performance over several tables, which avoids the high cost for joining operations from multiple tables and semantic losses. The performance provided by the algorithm MR-Radix shows faster than PatriciaMine, despite handling complex multi-relational patterns. The utilized memory indicates a more conservative growth curve for MR-Radix than PatriciaMine, which shows the increase in demand of frequent items in MR-Radix does not result in a significant growth of utilized memory like in PatriciaMine.ConclusionThe comparative study between PatriciaMine and MR-Radix confirmed efficacy of the multi-relational approach in data mining process both in terms of execution time and in relation to memory usage. Besides that, the multi-relational proposed algorithm, unlike other algorithms of this approach, is efficient for use in large relational databases.

Transparency portals versus open government data: an assessment of openness in Brazilian municipalities

Since the launch of the Open Government Partnership, several countries have acceded to this multilateral agreement to develop and to implement ambitious reforms to make their governments more open. Brazil, as one of the eight founding countries, has implemented a series of actions to open its government. One of these key actions is its Access to Information Law. The Brazilian law established a legal framework of guidelines for opening data from all levels of government in the country, in addition to considering internet and transparency portals key elements for the consolidation of open government. In this scenario, local governments built websites dedicated to transparency without observing the law requirements and, consequently, Open Government Data (OGD) principles. This paper shows a comprehensive assessment of transparency websites through a survey with 20 municipalities. The Brazilian law requirements are used as evaluation criteria because they somehow cover OGD principles. Our results show a gap between local transparency portals and the effective implementation of the OGD principles. This gap leads to a misconception that transparency portals are dissociated from the open government initiative, which is not true.

Transparency and open government data: A wide national assessment of data openness in Brazilian local governments

This paper aims to identify and to understand how current data portals comply with open government data (OGD) principles in the context of Brazilian local government.,In this paper, we assessed a sample of 561 municipalities from a universe of interest of 3,052 ones expected to disclose information using the internet. As part of our methodology, the authors analyzed the required items for active disclosure and the technical requirements, all enforced by Brazilian law and close to OGD principles which are the focus of analysis of the authors.,The findings generally show the vast majority of assessed data portals did not comply with the basic requirements stated by national law, consequently not complying with OGD principles, and prevent society from benefiting from government data openness. The authors also found arguments that the national law should explicitly reproduce OGD principles, as they demonstrate clearer understanding about the global context of open data.,The contributions of this work can be used to plan public data openness actions over the internet and envision effective accountability and public participation with clearer legislation and with the effective implementation of OGD principles in data portals.

A fuzzy rule-based system to assess e-government technical interoperability maturity level

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to present a system called NEBULOSUS, which is a fuzzy rule-based expert system for assessing the maturity level of an agency regarding technical interoperability. Design/methodology/approach – The study introduces the use of artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to deal with the imprecision and uncertainty present in the assessment process. To validate the system proposed and demonstrate its operation, the study takes into account the Brazilian technical interoperability maturity model, based on the Brazilian Government Interoperability Framework (GIF). Findings – With the system proposed and its methodology, it could be possible to increase the assessment process to management level and to provide decision-making support without worrying about technical details that make it complex and time-consuming. Moreover, NEBULOSUS is a standalone system that offers an easy-to-use, open and flexible structuring database that can be adapted by governments throughout the worl...

Requirements analysis for a traceability system for management wood supply chain on Amazon Forest

The wood production is an activity of fundamental importance for Brazilian economy. Studies show that the illegality in wood production is around 80% of the total production. This illegal wood becomes legalized in its supply chain due to the failures in controlling and monitoring systems. This paper analyzes some computational problems existing in managing and monitoring the production process in Amazon Forest and identifies new requirements to create a traceability system more efficient and appropriate to the regions characteristics.

Really Opened Government Data: A Collaborative Transparency at Sight

Transparency initiatives are increasingly present at all levels of government, making volume and variety of data grow as governmental institutions wish to make their administration more open. In this context, transparency portals appear as large silos of documents with heterogeneous and often unstructured data, in which the information provided is mainly through PDF, HTML, Excel spreadsheets or other print-like format. Although they allow comfortable reading to humans, these documents fail to provide a deep, integrated and multidimensional data analysis, which would allow citizens the effective use of transparency. We hence present a work in progress to structure this information and to allocate them into repositories that comply with Open Government Data principles to provide citizens with the power of machine analysis, indiscriminate and independent technology data access. We describe a collaborative framework that engages users in capturing and transforming unstructured information into machine-readable datasets.

System architecture for data acquisition, extraction and analysis for experiments with weblabs

The concern about understanding the effects of climate change on the environment, such as the decline of pollinators found in nature, the need to support researchers to run experiments efficiently and to share those results, makes it necessary to study and develop virtual laboratories through the web, in order to gain greater insight on the behavior of bees, which is the main pollinator of plants. The hardware structure and software architecture for the implementation of virtual labs, also known as weblabs are presented. In addition to the information technology involved, sensor networks were used for data acquisition, and tools for extraction and analysis of data collected transforming them into information that can be easily used by researchers.

Adaptive Approach for a Maximum Entropy Algorithm in Ecological Niche Modeling

This paper presents an Adaptive Maximum Entropy (AME) approach for modeling biological species. The Maximum Entropy algorithm (MaxEnt) is one of the most used methods in modeling biological species geographical distribution. The approach presented here is an alternative to the classical algorithm. Instead of using the same set features in the training, the AME approach tries to insert or to remove a single feature at each iteration. The aim is to reach the convergence faster without affect the performance of the generated models. The preliminary experiments were well performed. They showed an increasing on performance both in accuracy and in execution time. Comparisons with other algorithms are beyond the scope of this paper. Some important researches are proposed as future works.

A Data Mining Framework for Primary Biodiversity Data Analysis

Analysis based on primary biodiversity data is essential to understand the climate changes impact on biodiversity. Two challenges are involved in the use of such data. The first challenge is the identification of essential aspect of occurrences, such as, localization, institution responsible, which is important to measure the suitability of such data to the analysis which will be carried on using such data. In this sense, we propose a framework to perform data mining analysis in order to obtain such information without previous knowledge about the database, which can be integrated with different data portals using web services. We performed an evaluation with a subset of primary data available at GBIF Data Portal, which showed trends in information about occurrence location and the institution which is responsible for the occurrence.