Contribuições para a Geomorfologia e Dinâmicas Litorais em Portugal

Lagos bay is located in the south coast of Portugal. At present this body corresponds to a sandy regular coast. Several features of the Holocene coas tal evolution are preserved. Among others, the evolution undergone by the cliffed coast until the sea reached its present stand and the processes of coastal regularisation are recorded. The present human occupation of the coast and the rising sea levei (1. 5/2mm per year) are responsible for the exposure of deposits in the eastem part of the beach (Alvor-Torralta). These deposits were dated by 14C and related to the "Small Ice Age", almost unknown in Portugal.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Invasion and MMP expression profile in desmoid tumours

Desmoid tumours are locally invasive soft tissue tumours in which beta-catenin mediated TCF-dependent transcription is activated. The role of soluble factors secreted by the myofibroblastic desmoid tumour, which could stimulate tumour invasiveness, was investigated. Using collagen gel invasion assays, the presence of factors stimulating invasion in desmoid conditioned media (CM) could be established. Since matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) have been implicated in the process of tumoral invasion, the expression levels of the MMP family members were evaluated. Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR was used to determine the expression levels of MMP1, MMP2, MMP3, MMP7, MMP11, MMP12, MMP13, MMP14 and the inhibitors TIMP1, TIMP2 and TIMP3. Besides overexpression of MMP7, a known TCF-dependent target gene, a striking upregulation of the expression levels of MMP1, MMP3, MMP11, MMP12 and MMP13 in desmoid tumours, compared to unaffected fibroblasts from the same patients, was found. Treating the CM of desmoids with a synthetic and a physiologic MMP inhibitor reduced the invasion-stimulating capacity of the desmoid CM by approximately 50%. These results suggest the involvement of soluble factors, released by the desmoid cells, in stimulating invasion and implicate the MMPs as facilitators of invasion

A study on the state-of-the-art in automated map generalisation implemented in commercial out-of-the-box software

This paper describes the set up and the progress of the EuroSDR project that studies the state-of-the-art in automated map generalisation implemented in commercial out-of-thebox software. The project started in October 2006 with a project team consisting of National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) and research institutes. From October 2006 till May 2007 four test cases of four different NMAs were selected, consisting of a large scale source data set, requirements for the smaller scale output map as well as symbolisation information. Much effort has been put in specifying and harmonising requirements for the output maps. These requirements have been defined as a set of constraints to be respected in the output maps. From June 2007 the project team tested the four test cases with four commercial out-of-the-box software systems: ArcGIS, Genesys, Change/Push/Typify and Clarity. The vendors of these systems performed parallel tests on the four test cases in which they were allowed to customise their systems. An evaluation methodology has been designed and partly implemented. Results are expected by the end of 2008

Polygenic (tsunami and storm) deposits? A case study from Ushant Island, western France

Ushant Island is the westernmost island offshore western France. It is exposed to severe storms. The western peninsulas of the island are partly covered with boulder fields, the origin of which is an open question. On March 10, 2008 a very severe storm (973 hPa) was able to move some of these blocks and to raft them over several tens of meters. The heaviest block weighs about 62 tons. Some blocks were located in the intertidal zone, others were above the spring tide limit and were detached from the cliff during the storm. Most of the blocks had already existed before; thus, the event which actually caused their detachment was not the March 2008 storm. When applied to this case, the hydro-dynamical equations by NOTT would suggest a storm with wave heights of 12 to 50 meters. New equations by the authors reduce these values to about 8 to 32 meters. Anyhow, these heights have never been recorded in Ushant. These results thus lead to the hypothesis that the blocks were not created by a storm but by a tsunami, possibly the one of 1755 (Lisbon Tsunami). The important point is that these blocks have a polygenetic origin: they were detached from their initial location by an event which cannot have been a storm, but subsequently they were moved by each severe storm. Boulder fields on Ushant Island, therefore, seem to be polygenetic coastal high energy event features

Web service approaches for providing enriched data structures to generalisation operators

Web service technologies can be used to establish an interoperable framework between different generalisation systems. In a previous article three categories of generalisation web services were identified, including support services, operator services and processing services. This paper focuses on the category of support services. In a service-based generalisation system, the purpose of support services is to assist the generalisation process by providing auxiliary measures, procedures and data structures that allow the representation of structural cartographic knowledge. The structural knowledge of the spatial and semantic context and the modelling of structural and spatial relationships is critical for the understanding of the role of cartographic features and thus for automated generalisation. Support services should extract and model this knowledge from the raw data and make it available to other generalisation operators. On the one hand the structural knowledge can be expressed by enriching map features with additional geometries or attributes. On the other hand, there exist various hierarchical and nonhierarchical relationships between map features, many of which can be represented by graph data structures. After a brief introduction to the interoperable web service framework, this paper proposes a taxonomy of generalisation support services and discusses its elements. It is then shown how the complex output of such services can be represented for use with web services and stored in a reusable fashion. Finally, the utilisation of support services is illustrated on four implementation examples of support services that also highlight the interactions with the generalisation operators that use these auxiliary services