Real-time extensive livestock monitoring using lpwan smart wearable and infrastructure

Extensive unsupervised livestock farming is a habitual technique in many places around the globe. Animal release can be done for months, in large areas and with different species packing and behaving very differently. Nevertheless, the farmer’s needs are similar: where livestock is (and where has been) and how healthy they are. The geographical areas involved usually have difficult access with harsh orography and lack of communications infrastructure. This paper presents the design of a solution for extensive livestock monitoring in these areas. Our proposal is based in a wearable equipped with inertial sensors, global positioning system and wireless communications; and a Low-Power Wide Area Network infrastructure that can run with and without internet connection. Using adaptive analysis and data compression, we provide real-time monitoring and logging of cattle’s position and activities. Hardware and firmware design achieve very low energy consumption allowing months of battery life. We have thoroughly tested the devices in different laboratory setups and evaluated the system performance in real scenarios in the mountains and in the forest

Approaches for the clustering of geographic metadata and the automatic detection of quasi-spatial dataset series

The discrete representation of resources in geospatial catalogues affects their information retrieval performance. The performance could be improved by using automatically generated clusters of related resources, which we name quasi-spatial dataset series. This work evaluates whether a clustering process can create quasi-spatial dataset series using only textual information from metadata elements. We assess the combination of different kinds of text cleaning approaches, word and sentence-embeddings representations (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText, ELMo, Sentence BERT, and Universal Sentence Encoder), and clustering techniques (K-Means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, and agglomerative clustering) for the task. The results demonstrate that combining word-embeddings representations with an agglomerative-based clustering creates better quasi-spatial dataset series than the other approaches. In addition, we have found that the ELMo representation with agglomerative clustering produces good results without any preprocessing step for text cleaning

A hierarchical one-to-one mapping solution for semantic interoperability

The importance of interoperability among computer systems has been progressively increasing over the last years. The tendency of current cataloguing systems is to interchange metadata in XML according to the specific standard required by each user on demand. According to the research literature, it seems that there exist two main approaches in order to tackle this problem: solutions that are based on the use of ontologies and solutions that are based on the creation of specific crosswalks for one-to-one mapping. This paper proposes a hierarchical one-to-one mapping solution for improving semantic interoperability

First steps toward voice user interfaces for web-based navigation of geographic information: A Spanish terms study

This work presents the first steps toward developing specific technology for voice user interfaces for geographic information systems. Despite having many general elements, such as voice recognition libraries, the current technology still lacks the ability to fully understand and process the semantics that real users apply to command geographic information systems. This paper presents the results of three connected experiments, following a mixed-methods approach. The first experiment focused on identifying the most common words used when working with maps in a web browser. The second experiment developed an understanding of the chain of commands used for map management for a specific objective. Finally, the third experiment involved the development of a prototype to validate this understanding. Using data and fieldwork, we created a minimum corpus of terms in Spanish. In addition, we identified the particularities of use and user profiles to consider in a voice user interface for geographic information systems, involving the user’s proprioception concerning the world and technology. These user profiles can be considered in future designs of human–technology interaction products. All the data collected and the source code of the prototype are provided as additional material, free to use and modify

Parámetros de calidad de la canal y la carne de cabritos lechales de raza payoya en sistema de explotación convencional

En el trabajo se han elegido 24 cabritos pertenecientes a la raza Payoya, 12 machos y 12 hembras con el objeto de comparar los parámetros de la calidad de la canal y de la carne. Los resultados nos muestran que aunque existen algunas diferencias en algunas medidas de calidad de la carne (pH, CRA, L*, a*, b*, C y Hº), el resto de los parámetros estudiados no presentaron diferencias significativas entre los dos sexos

Spatial Data Infrastructures for environmental e-government services: The case of water abstractions authorisations

Environment-related authorisations are a relevant issue for environmental management. They require a considerable effort by the authorities, and this might result in substantial delays for the citizens. Implementing those authorisation processes by means of e-government services would improve efficiency and, consequently, citizen satisfaction. Environment-related authorisations usually require a variety of geospatial information, and have to deal with administrative areas which do not match physical and ecological ones. They also have to integrate heterogeneous information in different formats, data models and languages, and provided by distinct organisations, even from different countries. This paper discusses how Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) can deal with these problems in the environmental domain, while improving the level of service provision in terms of e-government applications. This is even more relevant within the European Union where there is a legal mandate to establish an SDI to support environmental policies and activities with an impact on the environment. As a proof-of-concept, an application to request and manage water abstraction authorisations, based on an SDI, is demonstrated. This application is part of SDIGER, a cross-border inter-administration SDI to support the water framework directive information access for the Adour–Garonne and Ebro River basins, that was a pilot project for the EU INSPIRE Directive. The introduction of this transactional e-government service modifies the administrative process of granting authorisations: it allows to re-use the effort in data capture made by the applicants in their requests, facilitates the submission of more feasible applications and reduces the workload of the office staff

Improving the geospatial consistency of digital libraries metadata

Consistency is an essential aspect of the quality of metadata. Inconsistent metadata records are harmful: given a themed query, the set of retrieved metadata records would contain descriptions of unrelated or irrelevant resources, and may even not contain some resources considered obvious. This is even worse when the description of the location is inconsistent. Inconsistent spatial descriptions may yield invisible or hidden geographical resources that cannot be retrieved by means of spatially themed queries. Therefore, ensuring spatial consistency should be a primary goal when reusing, sharing and developing georeferenced digital collections. We present a methodology able to detect geospatial inconsistencies in metadata collections based on the combination of spatial ranking, reverse geocoding, geographic knowledge organization systems and information-retrieval techniques. This methodology has been applied to a collection of metadata records describing maps and atlases belonging to the Library of Congress. The proposed approach was able to automatically identify inconsistent metadata records (870 out of 10,575) and propose fixes to most of them (91.5%) These results support the ability of the proposed methodology to assess the impact of spatial inconsistency in the retrievability and visibility of metadata records and improve their spatial consistency

Value Conflict, Lack of Rewards, and Sense of Community as Psychosocial Risk Factors of Burnout in Communication Professionals (Press, Radio, and Television)

Journalists are at particular risk of work-related stress and burnout. The objective of this study is to describe and analyze the principal factors involved in the appearance of burnout in communication professionals, as well as the possible interactions between them and with self-reported health, and to observe whether the variables involved are the same in different types of environments. To achieve this objective, 292 participants answered the following measurement instruments: Demographic and labor datasheet; Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI General survey); Areas of Worklife Scale (AWS); and General Health Questionnaire (GHQ -12). The results were the following: Emotional Exhaustion (EE) shows direct correlation and statistical significance with the other two burnout dimensions, Depersonalization (DP) and Personal Accomplishment (PA), also with health perception variables and inverse and statistical significance with the workload, control, rewards, community, fairness, and values. A multiple linear regression model shows workload and values as inverse EE predictors, which confirms a burnout process in which EE contributes as the main dimension in DP and is shown to be a precursor of PA, itself. When comparing different types of media, journalists who work in institutional press offices presented significantly lower scores in PA and higher in control, rewards, community, justice, and values. Therefore, further research should be carried out in order to analyze the protective role of these variables regarding PA and burnout

Aspectos docentes de la asignatura de Proyectos de Software del plan de estudios de Ingeniería Informática de la Universidad de Zaragoza

En este trabajo se presentan los aspectos docentes de la asignatura de Proyectos. La asignatura está planteada desde una perspectiva práctica en la que el trabajo del alumno se centra en el desarrollo de un proyecto completo de software. En el trabajo a realizar en el proyecto prevalecen aspectos de proceso, gestión y documentación y estándares sobre aspectos más técnicos del desarrollo como técnicas de análisis, diseño y aspectos de programación