S. M. F. S. Massruhá

A fuzzy logic-based tool to assess beef cattle ranching sustainability in complex environmental systems

One of the most relevant issues in discussion worldwide nowadays is the concept of sustainability. However, sustainability assessment is a difficult task due to the complexity of factors involved in the natural world added to the human interference. In order to assess the sustainability of beef ranching in complex and uncertain tropical environment systems this paper describes a decision support system based on fuzzy rule-approach, the Sustainable Pantanal Ranch (SPR). This tool was built by a set of measurements and indicators integrated by fuzzy logic to evaluate the attributes of the three dimensions of sustainability. Indicators and decision rules, as well as scenario evaluations, were obtained from workshops involving multi-disciplinary team of experts. A Fuzzy Rule-Based System (FRBS) was developed to each attribute, dimension and general index. The essential parts of the FRBS are the knowledge database, rules and the inference engine. The FuzzyGen and WebFuzzy tools were developed to support the FRBS and both showed efficiency and low cost for digital applications. The results of each attribute, dimension and index were presented as radar graphs, showing the individual value (0-10) of each indicator. In the validation process using the WebFuzzy, different combinations of indicators were made for each attribute index to show the corresponding output, and which confirm the feasibility and usability of the tool.

DiagText: a text mining tool for agriculture

In this paper a tool called Diagtext is presented. This tool aims to help the process of extraction of information from textual documents by identifying groups of similar documents in such a way that an expert can decide which category a document would better fit in. There are two main approaches to extract information from textual data. The first uses the semantic analysis that is based on the functionality of words in the corpora and the second uses statistical analysis based on frequency of terms. These approaches can be used together to analyze data in what is called a hybrid approach. In the scope of this work was adopted the statistical approach. DiagText allows the extraction of information from unstructured data in plain text format(.txt) or in PDF format. From the text, groups were generated and the trees were compared with the trees generated by experts in the field. Although the initial validation is on agriculture, DiagText can be used in several domains, since it was developed to be language and subject independent. Finally, future work using an approach that incorporates fuzzy clustering techniques is also discussed in this paper.