Rodrigo Bonacin

Accessibility and interoperability in e-government systems: outlining an inclusive development process

The multidisciplinary nature of e-government demands a research agenda that includes issues related to social inclusion, universal accessibility, interoperability, privacy, security, and citizen participation, to name a few. Understanding the underlying cultural context, the involvement of citizens in the proposal and evaluation of services, and the promotion of quality in use are aspects that need special consideration in the development of systems to support government. This paper provides an outline for a process model for promoting the identification and specification of accessible e-government services with the participation of the interested parties. A socially shared perspective is adopted toward the comprehension of the involved problems and the elaboration of potential solutions. The proposed model is a result of practice in the domain, using organizational semiotics artifacts to stimulate participation and discussion.

An Agile Process Model for Inclusive Software Development

The Internet represents a new dimension for software development. It can be understood as an opportunity to develop systems to promote social inclusion and citizenship. These systems impose a singular way for developing software, where accessibility and usability are key requirements. This paper proposes a process model for agile software development, which takes into account these requirements. This method brings together multidisciplinary practices coming from Participatory Design, and Organizational Semiotics with concepts of agile models. The paper presents the instantiation of the process model during the development of a social network system, which aims to promote the social and digital inclusion. The results and the adjustments of the proposed development process model are also discussed.

Ontology models of the impacts of agriculture and climate changes on water resources

Agriculture is both highly dependent on water resources, and impacting on these resources. Regardless of advances in the area, the impacts of water scarcity and climatic changes on agriculture, as well as the impacts of agriculture on water resources, remain uncertain. Potentially, collaborative systems can support the management and information sharing of multifaceted and large scale data sources, providing valuable and indispensable information for research. However, these solutions rely on semantic interoperability, the construction of complex knowledge representation models, as well as information recovery. This work describes interoperability issues in the engineering process of the OntoAgroHidro, an ontology that represents knowledge about impacts of agricultural activities and climatic changes on water resources. The paper presents representative scenarios and questions, and discusses the reuse and integration of concepts using knowledge visualization techniques. Experiments on the information recovery scenario point out the potential and limitations of the OntoAgroHidro. Describes interoperability issues in an ontology engineering process.Presents the design of a cross domain large ontology.Presents experiences of using the ontology in an information recovery scenario.Presents challenges and resources needed to work with domain specialists.

Towards the formalization of guidelines care actions using patterns and semantic web technologies

Computer Interpretable Guidelines (CIG) have largely contributed to the simplification and dissemination of clinical guidelines. However, the formalization of CIG contents, especially care actions, is still an open issue. Actually, this information, which is the heart of the guideline, is still expressed as free text and therefore prevents the development of intelligent tools for assisting physicians defining treatments. In this paper, we introduce a framework for formalizing care actions using natural language processing techniques, Semantic Web technologies and medical standards.

Pragmatic Aspects of Collaborative Problem Solving: Towards a Framework for Conceptualizing Dynamic Knowledge

Knowledge production in the Social Web can be understood as a dynamic socio-cultural process. Mechanisms that support users to explore this knowledge in an effective and efficient way may bring various benefits. However, the construction of these interaction mechanisms depends on further research on multidisciplinary fields. The interpretation of the content by users is influenced by meanings and intentions, as well as by the understanding of the evolution of these aspects over time. This paper analyses the evolution of meaning and intentions in collaborative problem solving. The analysis is informed by Semiotics and Speech Act theories. From this analysis, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for multidisciplinary research in three interconnected perspectives: interactive, conceptual and technical.

A semiotic-based framework for the development of tailorable web applications

In face of the diversified individual and collective requirements of Web applications, we argue that the Web interfaces should be flexible enough to adapt or to be adapted to each usage context. We draw on the idea of Tailoring to design for flexibility. However, due to the additional effort to provide flexibility, usually the construction of a tailorable application results on higher costs and complex solutions. The objective of this work is to provide developers and designers with a framework to support the development of tailorable Web applications. This framework is based on a normative approach to describe the volatile requirements including social and pragmatics aspects of the system usage. In the paper we discuss the theoretical basis, describe the framework, and provide short examples of how to use it.

Ontology for Malware Behavior: A Core Model Proposal

The ubiquity of Internet-connected devices motivates attackers to create malicious programs (malware) to exploit users and their systems. Malware detection requires a deep understanding of their possible behaviors, one that is detailed enough to tell apart suspicious programs from benign, legitimate ones. A step to effectively address the malware problem leans toward the development of an ontology. Current efforts are based on an obsolete hierarchy of malware classes that defines a malware family by one single prevalent behavior (e.g., viruses infect other files, worms spread and exploit remote systems autonomously, Trojan horses disguise themselves as benign programs, and so on). In order to address the detection of modern, complex malware families whose infections involve sets of multiple exploit methods, we need an ontology broader enough to deal with these suspicious activities performed on the victims system. In this paper, we propose a core model for a novel malware ontology that is based on their exhibited behavior, filling a gap in the field.

Architecture and services for formalising and evaluating care actions from computer-interpretable guidelines

Computer-interpretable guidelines (CIGs) can be understood as an alternative to deal with the various limitations of paper-based clinical guidelines and to put forward new possibilities for healthcare improvements. The effort spent in evaluating and adapting recommendations described in CIGs can be reduced if formalisation and modularisation of domain knowledge are employed. The approach presented in this paper considers that the content of CIGs and the adaptation rules are two distinct elements that need to be associated at run-time. In a first step, we propose to formalise the recommendations that are presented to healthcare professionals, named here ‘care actions’, in order to produce the set of elements that need to be adapted. In a second step, we exploit the medical background, defining and applying adaptation rules to generate a personalised treatment plan for the patient. The approach was applied to 21 CIGs to identify the potential and limitations of the implemented prototypes.

An ontology of suspicious software behavior

–Malicious programs have been the main actors in complex, sophisticated attacks against nations, governments, diplomatic agencies, private institutions and people. Knowledge about malicious program behavior forms the basis for constructing more secure information systems. In this article, we introduce MBO, a Malicious Behavior Ontology that represents complex behaviors of suspicious executions, and through inference rules calculates their associated threat level for analytical proposals. We evaluate MBO using over two thousand unique known malware and 385 unique known benign software. Results highlight the representativeness of the MBO for expressing typical malicious activities. Security ontologyMalware behaviorThreat analysis

An Interaction Design Method to Support the Expression of User Intentions in Collaborative Systems

The communication and interpretation of users’ intentions play a key role in collaborative web discussions. However, existing mechanisms fail to support the users’ expression of their intentions during collaborations. In this article, we propose an original interaction design method based on semiotics to guide the construction of interactive mechanisms, which allow users to explicitly express and share intentions. We apply the method in a case study in the context of collaborative forums for software developers. The obtained results reveal preliminary evidences regarding the effectiveness of the method for the definition of interface components, enabling more meaningful and successful communications.