A decade of Portuguese research in e-government: Evolution, current standing, and ways forward

In this paper, we present an investigation of the Portuguese research on e-government. Bibliometric techniques are used to explore all the documents published by researchers affiliated to Portuguese institutions from 2005 to 2014 and listed in the Scopus® database. Research production, impact, source types, language used, subject areas, topics, scopes, methods, authors, institutions, networks, and international cooperation are analysed and discussed. We conclude that so that Portuguese research on e-government can evolve, more researchers should be involved, international cooperation should be developed, and more attention should be given to the study of the reasons behind the very good results of the country in the provision of e-government services, as measured by the international rankings. By establishing the evolution and current standing of e-government research in Portugal and exploring the ways forward, our conclusions may prove useful to e-government researchers, research managers, and research policy makers. © Copyright 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd

Cognitive Computing supported Medical Decision Support System for Patient’s Driving Assessment

To smartly utilize a huge and constantly growing volume of data, improve productivity and increase competitiveness in various fields of life; human requires decision making support systems that efficiently process and analyze the data, and, as a result, significantly speed up the process. Similarly to all other areas of human life, healthcare domain also is lacking Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solution. A number of supervised and unsupervised Machine Learning and Data Mining techniques exist to help us to deal with structured data. However, in a real life, we pretty much deal with unstructured data that hides useful knowledge and valuable information inside human-readable plain texts, images, audio and video. Therefore, such IT giants as IBM, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, etc., as well as variety of SMEs are actively elaborating different Cognitive Computing services and tools to get a value from unstructured data. Thus, the paper presents feasibility study of IBM Watson cognitive computing services and tools to address the issue of automated health records processing to support doctor’s decision for patient’s driving assessment

Integration of Web APIs and Linked Data Using SPARQL Micro-Services - Application to Biodiversity Use Cases

International audienceIn recent years, Web APIs have become a de facto standard for exchanging machine-readable data on the Web. Despite this success, however, they often fail in making resource descriptions interoperable due to the fact that they rely on proprietary vocabularies that lack formal semantics.The Linked Data principles similarly seek the massive publication of data on the Web, yet with the specific goal of ensuring semantic interoperability.Given their complementary goals, it is commonly admitted that cross-fertilization could stem from the automatic combination of Linked Data and Web APIs. Towards this goal, in this paper we leverage the micro-service architectural principles to define a SPARQL Micro-Service architecture, aimed at querying Web APIs using SPARQL. A SPARQL micro-service is a lightweight SPARQL endpoint that provides access to a small, resource-centric, virtual graph. In this context, we argue that full SPARQL Query expressiveness can be supported efficiently without jeopardizing servers availability.Furthermore, we demonstrate how this architecture can be used to dynamically assign dereferenceable URIs to Web API resources that do not have URIs beforehand, thus literally “bringing” Web APIs into the Web of Data. We believe that the emergence of an ecosystem of SPARQL micro-services published by independent providers would enable Linked Data-based applications to easily glean pieces of data from a wealth of distributed, scalable, and reliable services. We describe a working prototype implementation and we finally illustrate the use of SPARQL micro-services in the context of two real-life use cases related to the biodiversity domain, developed in collaboration with the French National Museum of Natural History

Open BOK on Software Engineering Educational Context: A Systematic Literature Review

In this review, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on Open Body of Knowledge (BOK) is presented. Moreover, the theoretical base to build a model for knowledge description was created, and it was found that there is a lack of guidelines to describe knowledge description because of the dramatically increasing number of requirements to produce an Open BOK, the difficulty of comparing related BOK contents, and the fact that reusing knowledge description is a very laborious task. In this sense, this review can be considered as a first step in building a model that can be used for describing knowledge description in Open BOK. Finally, in order to improve the educational context, a comparison among BOK, structure, and evolution is conducted.This work is supported partially by RTI2018-096846-B-C21 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) and ADIAN grant IT980-16 (BasqueGovernment)

Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for June to December 2015

The 33rd edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2015 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from January 2016 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

A framework for modeling and improving agile requirements engineering.

Context. Companies adopt hybrid development models consisting of an integration of agile methodologies and Human-Centered Design (HCD) with the aim to increase value delivery as well as to reduce time to market. This has an impact on how Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in an agile environment. To this end, people apply different kind of agile techniques like artifacts, meetings, methods, and roles. In this context, companies often struggle with improving their value chain in a systematic manner, since guidelines for choosing an appropriate set of agile techniques are missing. Objective. The vision of this PhD thesis is to build a framework for modeling agile RE. Organizations benefit from implementing this framework by increasing their value delivery (organization external) and improving the collaboration (organizational intern). Method. We followed an inductive research approach, where we used the learnings from several studies to create the framework. In the beginning, we carried out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to analyze the state of the art of agile RE with focus on user and stakeholder involvement. Subsequent, we created the agile RE metamodel, which evolved iteratively along the consecutively studies. Based on the metamodel, we defined an profile that can be used to create domain specific models according to the organizational environment. Moreover, we conducted a Delphi study in order to identify the most important problems industry has to face today in terms of agile RE. The results were used as input for a systematic pattern mining process, which was utilized in order to create agile RE patterns. Results. The framework for modeling agile RE consists of three main components: i) agile RE metamodel, which can be used to analyze the organizational environment in terms of value delivery ii) catalogue of agile RE problems, which allows to detect recurring problems in terms of agile RE iii) catalogue of agile RE patterns, which allows to solve the detected problems. The agile RE metamodel comes with a profile, which can be used to deviate domain specific models. In addition, we created tool support for the framework by means of a web application (agileRE.org), which allows us to share the knowledge and best practices for agile RE. Furthermore, we proved how the framework can be applied in industry by means of case studies in Germany and in Spain. Conclusion. The framework for modeling agile RE empowers companies to improve their organizational environments in terms of value delivery and collaboration. Companies can use the framework for improving their value chain in a systematic manner. In particular, it gives guidance for choosing appropriate agile techniques, which fit to the changing needs of the organizational environment. In addition, we can state that the framework is applicable on an international level.Contexto. Con el objetivo de incrementar la potencialidad de sus desarrollos y de reducir el tiempo de puesta en el mercado, las empresas adoptan modelos de desarrollo híbridos que integran metodologías ágiles y diseño centrado en el usuario (DCU). El tratamiento de los requisitos de software en entornos ágiles es algo que impacta de manera directa en la consecución de estos objetivos. Por ello, los equipos aplican diferentes técnicas de tratamiento de requisitos como los artefactos, reuniones, métodos de trabajos grupales o el tratamiento efectivo de roles. Sin embargo, las empresas a menudo se encuentran con dificultades para elegir las mejores técnicas a aplicar en su contexto y hay una carencia de guías de soporte. Objetivo. La visión de esta tesis doctoral es construir un framework para trabajar de manera efectiva con requisitos ágiles. La idea esencial es que las organizaciones y empresas puedan usar el framework para mejorar tanto su cadena de valor (visión externa) como para mejorar sus procesos de desarrollo (visión interna). Método. Para el desarrollo del trabajo se ha usado una metodología de investigación inductiva, usando diferentes métodos de trabajo. Inicialmente, se ha llevado a cabo un estudio sistemático de la literatura (SLR) que nos permite evaluar el estado del arte en el tratamiento de requisitos ágiles pero centrado en cómo se trabaja con la involucración de los diferentes stakeholders en el proceso. Hemos continuado aplicando la ingeniería guiada por modelos desarrollando un metamodelo para trabajar con los requisitos ágiles y un profile que permite definir un lenguaje específico de dominio para el uso del metamodelo en entornos concretos. Este trabajo se ha enriquecido con la aplicación de un estudio usando Delphi para identificar los problemas más importantes que la industria se encuentra a la hora de trabajar con ingeniería de requisitos en entornos agiles. Finalmente, con los resultados hemos conseguido desarrollar un conjunto de patrones para la creación de requisitos ágiles. Resultados. El framework para modelar requisitos ágiles tiene tres componentes principales: i) Metamodelo para trabajar con requisitos ágiles que servirá para analizar el entorno de la organización. ii) un catálogo de posibles problemas que se encuentran en entornos agiles y iii) un catálogo de patrones de requisitos ágiles que resuelven los problemas detectados. El metamodelo para el trabajo con requisitos ágiles viene acompañado de un lenguaje específico de dominio, basado en un perfil. Y, además, se ha creado una aplicación web (agileRE.org) que ayuda a poner en común el conocimiento. Por último, el framework ha sido aplicado con éxito en entornos empresariales españoles y alemanes. Conclusión. El framework para modelar requisitos ágiles ayuda a las compañías a mejorar sus entornos organizaciones in términos de costes de desarrollo y aspectos colaborativos. Las empresas pueden usar el framework para mejorar su cadena de valor de una manera sistemática. En particular, da una guía para elegir técnicas apropiadas en el tratamiento de requisitos ágiles, pudiendo adaptarse al a realidad del entorno concreto de trabajo

Assisted Interaction for Improving Web Accessibility: An Approach Driven and Tested by Userswith Disabilities

148 p.Un porcentaje cada vez mayor de la población mundial depende de la Web para trabajar, socializar, opara informarse entre otras muchas actividades. Los beneficios de la Web son todavía más cruciales paralas personas con discapacidades ya que les permite realizar un sinfín de tareas que en el mundo físico lesestán restringidas debido distintas barreras de accesibilidad. A pesar de sus ventajas, la mayoría depáginas web suelen ignoran las necesidades especiales de las personas con discapacidad, e incluyen undiseño único para todos los usuarios. Existen diversos métodos para combatir este problema, como porejemplo los sistemas de ¿transcoding¿, que transforman automáticamente páginas web inaccesibles enaccesibles. Para mejorar la accesibilidad web a grupos específicos de personas, estos métodos requiereninformación sobre las técnicas de adaptación más adecuadas que deben aplicarse.En esta tesis se han realizado una serie de estudios sobre la idoneidad de diversas técnicas de adaptaciónpara mejorar la navegación web para dos grupos diferentes de personas con discapacidad: personas conmovilidad reducida en miembros superiores y personas con baja visión. Basado en revisionesbibliográficas y estudios observacionales, se han desarrollado diferentes adaptaciones de interfaces web ytécnicas alternativas de interacción, que posteriormente han sido evaluadas a lo largo de varios estudioscon usuarios con necesidades especiales. Mediante análisis cualitativos y cuantitativos del rendimiento yla satisfacción de los participantes, se han evaluado diversas adaptaciones de interfaz y métodosalternativos de interacción. Los resultados han demostrado que las técnicas probadas mejoran el acceso ala Web y que los beneficios varían según la tecnología asistiva usada para acceder al ordenador