Sergio Palma da Justa Medeiros

Coordination aspects in a spatial group decision support collaborative system

SPeCS a Spatial Group Decision Collaborative Support System intends to integrate Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS), and Workflow concepts in a framework based on Coordination premises. The coordination features should aid design team members to cope with their activities supporting the aspects of multi-criteria spatial analysis within a distributed GIS. Coordination aspects of SPeCS, which can vary from workflow facilities to integrated decision support tools can, intensively enhance the resolutions achieved that should represent the consensus in a decision-making process. This work presents a prototype, which explores the coordination in a spatial collaborative environment that supports the georeferencing of the argumentation just as they are being produced by the discussion involving the members of the design team. The main task of these groups is to produce a proposal for environmental preservations or changes considering social economics, climate and soil aspects.

Spatial data integration in a collaborative design framework

Building an extended architecture to eliminate boundaries to accessing and sharing data.

LaSca: A large scale group decision support system

Decision-making involves choosing between one ore more alternatives, to achieve one or more goals. To support this process, there are decision support systems that employ different approaches, supporting groups or not. Generally, however, these systems do not have great flexibility; their users have to follow pre- established decision methods. This paper, after exposing some decision-making processes, describes a system, LaSca (from Large Scale), to support decisions in large-scale groups. This system, besides allowing effective achievement of the benefits of deciding in large groups through the proper structuring of the group, also allows its users to define themselves how this structuring will happen, based or not in the existing theories on the subject. So, in addition to facilitate the decision-making process, LaSca also allows its users to decide how to decide.

Large Scale Decision Making in Participatory Environmental Design

Decision-making involves choosing between one ore more alternatives, to achieve one ore more goals. This process is composed of a series of steps, ranging from the identification of the problem itself, going trough the definition of criteria that characterize possible solutions to the problem, to the decision-making itself, in which a possible solution to the exposed problem is finally adopted. These steps can be performed by a single person or by a group of people. In group decisions, the solution choice at the end of the process must be effectively made by the group. To support this process, there are decision support systems that employ different approaches, supporting groups or not. This paper defines the decision-making process, presenting benefits of group decision and describes a system to support decisions in large scale groups. Participatory design in the BamPetro environment preservation project seeks to bring a large number of end users into the design process to take into account different perspectives, and help the group cope with multi-objective decisions. These decisions demand synergy among users of the environment preservation project, even though they represent different areas, competencies, political agendas and social interests.

SPeCS - a spatial decision support collaborative system for environment design

The integration of geographic information systems (GIS), electronic meeting systems (EMS), and workflow concepts, introduces a new approach called SPeCS. Our system intends to support the aspects of multi-criteria spatial analysis within a distributed GIS with tools that can help a group to cope with their activities in this kind of project. It should aid design team members with coordination features that can vary from workflow facilities to tools that can help them achieve resoulutions which shall represent the consensus in a decision-marking process. This work presents a prototype that explores coordination in a spatial collaborative system and supports the geo-referencing of the arguments produced by the discussion involving the members of the design team. The main task of these groups is to produce a proposal for environmental preservations or changes taking into account socio-economic, climate and soil aspects.

Collaboration engineering, philosophy, and Democracy with LaSca

Now-a-days, with the wide availability of Internet access, a great diffusion of the decision-making in large groups concepts and practices is happening, with many softwares to support it and many people eager to participate and actually collaborating arising. However, these ideas are not exactly new. In the middle of the 5th-4th century BC, some Greek city-states, like Athens, already had a political system in which the citizens of these states made the governmental decisions. And, besides being the birthplace of Democracy, Greece, with its high-developed philosophy ideas, also laid the foundations to Argumentation Theory, which will help in analyzing and validating the todays concepts of decision-making in large groups used in the LaSca (from Large Scale) Decision Support System. This paper, after presenting this discussion, and also illustrating some concepts of Collaboration Engineering with the developed system, will give an example of how LaSca could be extremely useful in an actual electoral system.

How the crowd can change collaborative work in patient care

The medical paradigm is leaving the traditional doctor-patient relationship, i.e., the physician-centred model and evolving towards a new de-centralized model where patients are given more responsibility for their health. This article seeks to understand what is changing in this relationship and what role the Web and the interconnected crowds of people play in this state of affairs. Our work discusses the evolution of the Web, how it is changing Medicine and the way patients are reaching to health information, and presents a new approach for Medicine 3.0 and its prospective scenarios. This transition has been changing the interaction between doctors and patients. Patients have become more social and responsible for their own health, adopting new communication channels and interacting with other patients and stakeholders distributed all over the world. In this new health care context, the premise whereby many people are eager to contribute by sharing health information, anytime and anywhere, should be included in the design of new technologies to support collaborative work in healthcare. To assist in this, our paper discusses how the new crowdware systems is supporting a multitude of Web-based collaborators interested in Medical Care, showing some examples of its application, taking into account all the stakeholders: doctors, patients, laboratories, hospitals, and apomediators.

Conceptual crowdsourcing models for e-learning

Crowdsourcing tools have improved e-learning over the last few years. However, these tools vary in many aspects. This work discusses and analyzes the basic e-learning processes based on these tools, defining ways to classify them through these processes. Finally, we define conceptual models tailored to each type of process, using a standard notation for software development. These conceptual models may be used to build new e-learning crowdsourcing tools.

Locale similarity semantic search in large groups decision: MUTIRÕ project for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games

The city of Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Olympic and Paralympics Games. Several improvements are being planned for the city in order to prepare it for the so called Rio 2016 event. This sequence of developments will be decided by a Local Committee and many people enthusiastic to participate should contribute by sending ideas and actually collaborate in the planning process. To assist this huge task force, our paper intends to use decision support systems techniques and cognitive means through different approaches in order to aid large groups in their discussions, their alternatives generation and all group choosing process. This work presents a semantic search method in the LaSca system for the MUTIRÕ project, which explores the coordination in a Large Scale decision support system. The importance of a locale semantic search comparing to a classical search method is that most contributors are not formal and well behaved in language structure, using lots of slang and alternative means of communication. As Brazil is a continental country it created several local ways of communications that vary from place to place creating additional difficulties for a search tool. A smart thesaurus must be constructed through semi-automatic means and a search engine should be crated to allow feasible searches by the users. The main task of this project is to help groups interested in the Rio 2016 success taking into account socioeconomic and geographical aspects.

X-Arc spatial data integration in the SPeCS collaborative design framework

X-Arc is a Web-based architecture for the integration and sharing of spatial data sources in an XML (Extensible Markup Language) format that applies meta data and mediation concepts. It is an important component of SPeCS (Spatial Decision Collaborative Support System), an architecture which intends to support the aspects of multi-criteria spatial analysis within a distributed GIS with tools that can help a group cope with all activities in this kind of project. In the X-Arc framework, the availability and computing capabilities of data sources, as well as the heterogeneity of its data (structure, format, type and meta data) are explored by the data mediation and publishing services. Through SPeCS users can cooperate, collaborate and coordinate their integration activities during their spatial analysis. The work presents a framework that supports the georeferencing of argumentations and allows transparent access to heterogeneous data sources involving the members of the design team in a spatial collaborative context.