Yu Sheung Fan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-99). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background: Context-Aware Applications --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- Definitions of Context --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- Existing Applications --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1.3 --- Review --- p.6 / Chapter 1.2 --- Research Motivation --- p.6 / Chapter 1.3 --- Research Contributions --- p.8 / Chapter 1.4 --- Thesis Outline --- p.8 / Chapter 2. --- Location-sensing Technologies --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Global Positioning System (GPS) --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Existing indoor Location-sensing Systems --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Active Badge --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- The Bat System --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- RADAR --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- PinPoint 3D-iD --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2.5 --- Easy Living --- p.15 / Chapter 2.3 --- System Properties and Risks --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Accuracy --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Cost --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- User Privacy --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3.4 --- Location Representation --- p.19 / Chapter 2.3.5 --- Other Limitations --- p.20 / Chapter 2.4 --- Design Goals --- p.20 / Chapter 2.4.1 --- Operate Inside Buildings --- p.21 / Chapter 2.4.2 --- Preserve User Privacy --- p.21 / Chapter 2.4.3 --- Low Cost --- p.22 / Chapter 2.4.4 --- Fast Response --- p.22 / Chapter 2.4.5 --- Spatial Recognition --- p.23 / Chapter 2.4.6 --- Easy Administration and Deployment --- p.23 / Chapter 2.5 --- Summary --- p.23 / Chapter 3. --- System Design --- p.25 / Chapter 3.1 --- System Architecture --- p.25 / Chapter 3.2 --- Position-sensing Platform --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Platform Architecture --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Transmission Format --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Distance Measurement --- p.31 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Position Estimation --- p.32 / Chapter 3.2.5 --- Noise Cancellation --- p.35 / Chapter 3.2.6 --- Location Inference --- p.36 / Chapter 3.3 --- Summary --- p.38 / Chapter 4. --- System Implementation --- p.39 / Chapter 4.1 --- Communication Technologies --- p.39 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Ultrasound --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Infrared Data Association (IrDA) --- p.41 / Chapter 4.1.4 --- Bluetooth --- p.42 / Chapter 4.2 --- Technologies Overview --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Positioning --- p.44 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Networking --- p.44 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Communication Protocol --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Range --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.5 --- Angle Dependency --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.6 --- Hardware supports --- p.46 / Chapter 4.3 --- Hardware --- p.46 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Mobile Receiver --- p.46 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Transmitter --- p.47 / Chapter 4.4 --- Software --- p.47 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Communication Protocol --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Programming Environment --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Signal Generation Routine --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Position Estimation Routine --- p.50 / Chapter 4.5 --- Summary --- p.53 / Chapter 5. --- Evaluation --- p.55 / Chapter 5.1 --- Platform Calibration --- p.55 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Outliers Elimination --- p.56 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Delay Determination --- p.58 / Chapter 5.1.3 --- Window Size Determination --- p.61 / Chapter 5.1.4 --- Revised Position Estimation Algorithm --- p.63 / Chapter 5.2 --- Platform Evaluation - IrDA Figure 5.9: Experimental setup for distance performance evaluation --- p.64 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Distance Measurement Figure 5.10: IrDA horizontal distance measurement experiment results --- p.66 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Position Estimation - Static --- p.66 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Position Estimation - Mobile --- p.68 / Chapter 5.3 --- Platform Evaluation - Bluetooth --- p.69 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Distance Measurement --- p.69 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Position Estimation - Static --- p.70 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Position Estimation ´ؤ Mobile --- p.71 / Chapter 5.4 --- Summary --- p.73 / Chapter 6. --- Applications --- p.74 / Chapter 6.1 --- Potential Applications --- p.74 / Chapter 6.1.1 --- Resource Tracking Systems --- p.75 / Chapter 6.1.2 --- Shopping Assistance System --- p.76 / Chapter 6.1.3 --- Doctor Tracking System --- p.77 / Chapter 6.1.4 --- Tourist Guide Application --- p.78 / Chapter 6.1.5 --- Other Applications --- p.79 / Chapter 6.2 --- System Limitations --- p.79 / Chapter 6.3 --- Summary --- p.79 / Chapter 7. --- Conclusion --- p.80 / Chapter 7.1 --- Summary --- p.80 / Chapter 7.2 --- Future Work --- p.81 / Chapter Appendix A: --- IrDA --- p.86 / Chapter A.1 --- IrDA Physical Layer --- p.86 / Chapter A.2 --- Physical Aspects of IrDA Physical Layer --- p.87 / Chapter A.3 --- Discovering Other IrDA Devices --- p.88 / Chapter A.4 --- Connection of IrDA Devices --- p.89 / Chapter Appendix B: --- Bluetooth --- p.91 / Chapter B.1 --- Bluetooth Stack --- p.91 / Chapter B.2 --- Radio --- p.92 / Chapter B.3 --- Frequency Hopping --- p.92 / Chapter B.4 --- Package Structure --- p.92 / Chapter B.5 --- The Link Controller --- p.93 / Chapter B.6 --- The Link Manager --- p.93 / Chapter B.7 --- Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol --- p.94 / Chapter B.8 --- The Service Discovery Protocol --- p.94 / Chapter B.9 --- Encryption and Security --- p.95 / Bibliography --- p.96

by Fung Tze Wa. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-96). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract in English --- p.i / Abstract in Chinese --- p.ii / Acknowledgements --- p.iii / Table of Contents --- p.iv-vi / List of Figures --- p.vii-ix / List of Tables --- p.x / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Motivation --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Purposes of this Research --- p.6 / Chapter 1.4 --- Contribution of this Research --- p.7 / Chapter 1.5 --- Outline of the Thesis --- p.9 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Literature Review And Research Issues / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- Spatial Access Methods --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- R-Tree --- p.15 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- R*-Tree --- p.19 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- R+-Tree --- p.21 / Chapter 2.3 --- Spatial Network Analysis --- p.22 / Chapter 2.4 --- Nearest Neighbor Queries --- p.23 / Chapter 2.5 --- Summary --- p.25 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Data Preparation / Chapter 3.1 --- "Introduction (XML, GML), XML indexing" --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Spatial data from Lands Department --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3 --- Graph representation for Road Network data --- p.32 / Chapter 3.4 --- Summary --- p.35 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- XML Indexing for Spatial Data / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.36 / Chapter 4.2 --- STR Packed R-Tree --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Implementation --- p.39 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Experimental Result --- p.41 / Chapter 4.3 --- Summary --- p.48 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Spatial Network / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.50 / Chapter 5.2 --- CCAM: Connectivity-Clustered Access Method --- p.53 / Chapter 5.3 --- Shortest Path in Spatial Network --- p.56 / Chapter 5.4 --- A New Algorithm Specially for Partitioning /Clustering Network --- p.63 / Chapter 5.5 --- A New Simple heuristic for Shortest Path Problem for Spatial Network --- p.70 / Chapter 5.6 --- Summary --- p.74 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Nearest Neighbor Queries / Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.76 / Chapter 6.2 --- Modified Algorithm for Nearest Neighbor Queries --- p.78 / Chapter 6.3 --- Summary --- p.83 / Chapter Chapter 7 --- Conclusion and Future Work / Chapter 7.1 --- Conclusion --- p.84 / Chapter 7.2 --- Future Work --- p.85 / Appendix Space Driven Algorithm / Chapter A.1 --- Introduction --- p.87 / Chapter A.2 --- Fixed Grid --- p.88 / Chapter A.3 --- Z-curve --- p.89 / Chapter A.4 --- Hilbert curve --- p.90 / Chapter A.5 --- Conclusion --- p.91 / Bibliography --- p.92

The diploma thesis focuses on geographic information systems (GIS). The first part of this thesis introduces GIS, it shows their specifics and emphasizes the significance of standardization in the GIS industry. The second part describes the current situation on the GIS market. The GIS software is divided into different categories depending on the provided functionality and at the same time it is divided into an open source and a commercial part. Based on the categories, individual software products are introduced. The next part individually deals with GIS products offered by the Oracle corporation. The last part provides various possibilities, suggestions and recommendations for designing a GIS architecture using ESRI products.

Avaliou-se a correlação entre alteração ambiental e ocorrência de focos de raiva em herbívoros na região do vale do rio Paraíba do Sul paulista e alto Tiete no período de 1996 a 2006, por meio da aplicação de técnica de sensoriamento remoto e sistemas de informação geográfica. Foram utilizadas imagens do satélite Landsat-5, sensor TM, órbitas 218 e 219, ponto 76, bandas 3 e 4 na obtenção do índice de vegetação com diferença normalizada (NDVI). Foi feita a subtração de NDVI para obtenção da alteração de cobertura vegetal ou vigor de biomassa em intervalos de um ano, e dados de ocorrência de focos de raiva agregados por município corrigidos pelo efetivo herbívoro no respectivo ano. Diferenças significativas foram obtidas na comparação das médias de alteração de NDVI para ganho, perda e alteração geral em todo período pelo teste de Wilcoxon, exceto de 1996 a 1997 e seqüência de somatória de rankings negativos de 1998 a 2002. A análise de correlação entre diminuição de NDVI e focos de raiva corrigidos foi significativa em 2002 e 2003. Para ganho de NDVI, foi significativo em 1998 e 2003. Para alteração geral foi significativa em 2002. Houve correlação significativa de aumento de NDVI e focos de raiva corrigidos em 2000, 2002 e 2004, com r > 0 em todo período, exceto 2002 e observadas correlações entre alteração, geral e de perda, e tamanho de rebanho significativas em 2000, 2002, 2004 e 2006. A correlação positiva entre alteração de NDVI e rebanho herbívoro sugere a alteração do tamanho do rebanho como um fator de alteração da cobertura vegetal e conseqüente aumento da ocorrência de raiva pela alteração do habitat do morcego hematófago, principal hospedeiro do vírus rábico na América do Sul. A implantação da Coordenadoria de Defesa Agropecuária (CDA) da Secretaria de Agricultura e Abastecimento de São Paulo, em 1999 e a obrigatoriedade da vacinação contra a raiva, a partir de 2002, podem ter encoberto a correlação positiva encontrada no período anterior, de 1996 a 1999. Após o controle da raiva ter se consolidado, a alteração de NDVI voltou a apresentar correlação positiva, devendo ser considerada de fato fator de risco para a ocorrência de raiva nos herbívoros. A metodologia proposta no estudo pode ser uma alternativa no estudo de alteração ambiental como fator de risco na epidemiologia de doenças infecciosas, porém refinamento da técnica pode ser considerado a fim de controlar influências de condições atmosféricas e época do ano nas imagens utilizadas / The present work evaluated the correlation between environmental changes and herbivore rabies in eastern São Paulo State, from 1996 to 2006, using remote sensing and geographic information systems techniques. Images from Landsat-5 satellite, sensor TM, orbits 281 and 219, point 76, bands 3 and 4 were used to obtain the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). For each year, the subtraction of NDVI was calculated in order to evaluate the changes in vegetation coverage or biomass robustness. Also, the occurrence of rabies was obtained, for each local administrative division, called municipality, later corrected by the number of herbivores. Significative differences were obtained when comparing mean NDVI changes, being gain, loss or both using Wilcoxon test, except between 1996 and 1997. Differences were also obtained in negative rank sums from 1998 and 2002. The correlation analysis between NDVI loss and rabies occurrence was significative in 2002 and 2003. The correlation between NDVI gain and rabies occurrence was significative in 1998 and 2003. For both gain and loss of NDVI, there was significant correlation with rabies occurrence only in 2002. For corrected rabies outbreaks, there was significative correlation in 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006. Positive correlation between NDVI changes and herbivores herds suggests that rise in number of herds impacts vegetation coverage, consequently the increase of rabies occurrence, caused by changes in vampire bat habitats. The implantation of an animal health service in São Paulo, in 1999, imposing vaccination against rabies in cattle in 2002, may have covered positive correlation from 1996 to 1999. After the consolidation of control measures, NDVI changes turned to be correlated, allowing its classification as risk factor for rabies occurrence. The proposed method can be an alternative to study environmental changes as risk factor of infectious diseases epidemiology. The improvement of the method is necessary to control atmospheric conditions and the period of images acquirement

O Brasil é um dos principais países agrícolas do mundo e um dos únicos com possibilidade de expansão expressiva de sua área em produção e da produtividade. Entretanto, a contínua necessidade de incrementos da produção leva à ocupação de áreas menos aptas para a agricultura, com potencial aumento da degradação do solo pela erosão. Neste contexto, a conservação do solo é uma variável importante e está, em parte, relacionada ao conceito de aptidão agrícola. Modelos de predição da erosão são ferramentas importantes no planejamento agrícola, entretanto, em muitas situações carecem valores de referência de tolerância. Como alternativa aos valores de referência o objetivo deste trabalho foi desenvolver espacialmente o conceito de tempo de vida da agricultura (TVA) para o território brasileiro, além de aplicá-lo em situações possíveis para o planejamento do uso da terra. A metodologia partiu da adequação de base de dados de acesso aberto dos parâmetros da equação de TVA. Para tanto, foram executadas regressões, equações de pedotransferência e cálculos com a Equação Universal de Perda de Solo (USLE). A aplicação do conceito TVA para i) bacias hidrográficas, por meio da mediana dos valores TVA; ii) biomas, o Brasil é signatário do acordo com o Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica da Organização das Nações Unidas (CDB), considerando a conservação do solo uma variável na localização de novas Unidades de Conservação (UC), buscou-se identificar as áreas de menor tempo de vida potencial da agricultura (pTVA) como alvos prioritários para a criação de novas UC; iii) expansão da agricultura, buscou identificar as características das áreas de fronteira agrícola e de não fronteira em relação ao seu pTVA. Os principais resultados foram: i) é possível estimar parâmetros do solo por meio de regressões, captando entre 36% (argila) a 60% (matéria orgânica) da variância total; ii) a combinação de uso agrícola intenso e solos pouco profundos resultam em tempo de vida da agricultura menores, notadamente nos estados de Santa Catarina, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná e Minas Gerais e no bioma Mata Atlântica.; iii) o bioma Amazônia e os estados do Mato Grosso do Sul e Bahia mostraram-se as regiões de maior tempo de vida; iv) na análise por subbacias, a que se encontra em melhor condição é a bacia Amazônica; v) a determinação de áreas prioritárias para a conservação foi possível e resultou em seis mapas com áreas mais sensíveis, geralmente associações de relevo ondulado e solos rasos; vi) a análise da relação com a agricultura mostrou que em áreas consolidadas não houve diferença entre os valores totais e aquele das áreas ocupadas com agricultura. Já em áreas de expansão houve tendência de escolha de áreas com tempo de vida da agricultura potencial mais alto, ou seja, com menor risco de erosão. Este fenômeno é esperado pela teoria de ajuste territorial da agricultura (agricultural adjustment). / Brazil is one of the main agricultural countries in the world and one of the only ones with the significant possibility expansion its agricultural area and productivity. The continuing need for the production increments leads to the occupation of less suitable areas for agriculture, with potentially increased soil degradation by erosion. In this context, soil conservation is an important variable and is partly related to the concept of land suitability. Erosion prediction models are important tools in agricultural planning, however, in many situations require reference tolerance values. As an alternative to reference values the aim of this study was to develop spatially the concept of Agricultural Lifetime (TVA) for the Brazilian territory, and apply it to situations possible for planning land use. The methodology was based on the adaptation of the public databases of the parameters of the TVA equation. Thus, we executed regressions, pedotransfer equations and calculations with Equation Universal Soil Loss (USLE). Applying the TVA concept to i) watershed analysis, through the median TVA values, ii) biomes analysis, Brazil is a signatory of the Convention on Biological Diversity of the United Nations (CDB) agreement, the given to conservation of soil a variable in locating new Conservation Units (UC), we sought to identify areas of lower potential agricultural lifetime (pTVA) as priority targets for creating new UC´s iii) expansion of agriculture analysis, was to identify the characteristics of agricultural frontier areas and not frontier in relation of pTVA. The main results were: i) it is possible to estimate soil parameters through regression, capturing between 36% (clay) and 60% (organic matter) of the total variance; ii) the combination of intense agricultural land use and shallow deep soils result in TVA lower, especially in the states of Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina, Rio de Janeiro e Paraná and in the Mata Atlântica biome; iii) the Amazon region and Bahia and Mato Grosso do Sul states showed up places with longer life; iv) the analysis by subbasins, which are in the best conditions are the basins of the eastern Atlantic and Amazon; v) the determination of priority areas for conservation was possible and resulted in six maps with more sensitive areas, generally associations wavy relief and shallow soils deep; vi) the analysis of the relation with agriculture in consolidated areas showed that there was no difference between the totals and that the areas occupied by agriculture, already in frontier areas tended to choose pTVA areas higher, with less risk of erosion. This phenomenon is expected by the theory of agricultural adjustment.

Background. In the area of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a shared discipline between informatics and geography, the term geo-parsing is used to describe the process of identifying names in text, which in computational linguistics is known as named entity recognition and classification (NERC). The term geo-coding is used for the task of mapping from implicitly geo-referenced datasets (such as structured address records) to explicitly geo-referenced representations (e.g., using latitude and longitude). However, present-day GIS systems provide no automatic geo-coding functionality for unstructured text. In Information Extraction (IE), processing of named entities in text has traditionally been seen as a two-step process comprising a flat text span recognition sub-task and an atomic classification sub-task; relating the text span to a model of the world has been ignored by evaluations such as MUC or ACE (Chinchor (1998); U.S. NIST (2003)). However, spatial and temporal expressions refer to events in space-time, and the grounding of events is a precondition for accurate reasoning. Thus, automatic grounding can improve many applications such as automatic map drawing (e.g. for choosing a focus) and question answering (e.g. for questions like How far is London from Edinburgh?, given a story in which both occur and can be resolved). Whereas temporal grounding has received considerable attention in the recent past (Mani and Wilson (2000); Setzer (2001)), robust spatial grounding has long been neglected. Concentrating on geographic names for populated places, I define the task of automatic Toponym Resolution (TR) as computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to a representation of the extensional semantics of the location referred to (its referent), such as a geographic latitude/longitude footprint. The task of mapping from names to locations is hard due to insufficient and noisy databases, and a large degree of ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty other Londons on earth). In addition, names of places and the boundaries referred to change over time, and databases are incomplete. Objective. I investigate how referentially ambiguous spatial named entities can be grounded, or resolved, with respect to an extensional coordinate model robustly on open-domain news text. I begin by comparing the few algorithms proposed in the literature, and, comparing semiformal, reconstructed descriptions of them, I factor out a shared repertoire of linguistic heuristics (e.g. rules, patterns) and extra-linguistic knowledge sources (e.g. population sizes). I then investigate how to combine these sources of evidence to obtain a superior method. I also investigate the noise effect introduced by the named entity tagging step that toponym resolution relies on in a sequential system pipeline architecture. Scope. In this thesis, I investigate a present-day snapshot of terrestrial geography as represented in the gazetteer defined and, accordingly, a collection of present-day news text. I limit the investigation to populated places; geo-coding of artifact names (e.g. airports or bridges), compositional geographic descriptions (e.g. 40 miles SW of London, near Berlin), for instance, is not attempted. Historic change is a major factor affecting gazetteer construction and ultimately toponym resolution. However, this is beyond the scope of this thesis. Method. While a small number of previous attempts have been made to solve the toponym resolution problem, these were either not evaluated, or evaluation was done by manual inspection of system output instead of curating a reusable reference corpus. Since the relevant literature is scattered across several disciplines (GIS, digital libraries, information retrieval, natural language processing) and descriptions of algorithms are mostly given in informal prose, I attempt to systematically describe them and aim at a reconstruction in a uniform, semi-formal pseudo-code notation for easier re-implementation. A systematic comparison leads to an inventory of heuristics and other sources of evidence. In order to carry out a comparative evaluation procedure, an evaluation resource is required. Unfortunately, to date no gold standard has been curated in the research community. To this end, a reference gazetteer and an associated novel reference corpus with human-labeled referent annotation are created. These are subsequently used to benchmark a selection of the reconstructed algorithms and a novel re-combination of the heuristics catalogued in the inventory. I then compare the performance of the same TR algorithms under three different conditions, namely applying it to the (i) output of human named entity annotation, (ii) automatic annotation using an existing Maximum Entropy sequence tagging model, and (iii) a na¨ıve toponym lookup procedure in a gazetteer. Evaluation. The algorithms implemented in this thesis are evaluated in an intrinsic or component evaluation. To this end, we define a task-specific matching criterion to be used with traditional Precision (P) and Recall (R) evaluation metrics. This matching criterion is lenient with respect to numerical gazetteer imprecision in situations where one toponym instance is marked up with different gazetteer entries in the gold standard and the test set, respectively, but where these refer to the same candidate referent, caused by multiple near-duplicate entries in the reference gazetteer. Main Contributions. The major contributions of this thesis are as follows: • A new reference corpus in which instances of location named entities have been manually annotated with spatial grounding information for populated places, and an associated reference gazetteer, from which the assigned candidate referents are chosen. This reference gazetteer provides numerical latitude/longitude coordinates (such as 51320 North, 0 50 West) as well as hierarchical path descriptions (such as London > UK) with respect to a world wide-coverage, geographic taxonomy constructed by combining several large, but noisy gazetteers. This corpus contains news stories and comprises two sub-corpora, a subset of the REUTERS RCV1 news corpus used for the CoNLL shared task (Tjong Kim Sang and De Meulder (2003)), and a subset of the Fourth Message Understanding Contest (MUC-4; Chinchor (1995)), both available pre-annotated with gold-standard. This corpus will be made available as a reference evaluation resource; • a new method and implemented system to resolve toponyms that is capable of robustly processing unseen text (open-domain online newswire text) and grounding toponym instances in an extensional model using longitude and latitude coordinates and hierarchical path descriptions, using internal (textual) and external (gazetteer) evidence; • an empirical analysis of the relative utility of various heuristic biases and other sources of evidence with respect to the toponym resolution task when analysing free news genre text; • a comparison between a replicated method as described in the literature, which functions as a baseline, and a novel algorithm based on minimality heuristics; and • several exemplary prototypical applications to show how the resulting toponym resolution methods can be used to create visual surrogates for news stories, a geographic exploration tool for news browsing, geographically-aware document retrieval and to answer spatial questions (How far...?) in an open-domain question answering system. These applications only have demonstrative character, as a thorough quantitative, task-based (extrinsic) evaluation of the utility of automatic toponym resolution is beyond the scope of this thesis and left for future work.

The fluctuations in the demand for construction work have often resulted in skills shortages. This has led to the need for effective construction labour market planning strategies, which enable the construction industry to meet its skills requirements, particularly in periods of peak demand. Existing approaches to construction labour market planning have several limitations. They do not shed light on the socio-economic and spatially influenced issues within which the industry's skills shortages are rooted. There is, therefore, a need for more appropriate decision-support mechanisms that can take account of spatial problems in terms of skills demand and supply influences. Through industry involvement, this research has explored how GIS can enhance the labour market planning process in construction. The research briefly reviews the nature of labour market planning in construction, introduces geographic information systems, and highlights the opportunities they offer for overcoming the limitations of existing approaches. The implementation of the GIS-based system and its application to a specific labour market planning initiative is then presented. The evaluation of the system by prospective end-users reveals the enablers, barriers and benefits of the system implementation. Organisational issues that had a bearing on the implementation are also examined and recommendations made for further research.

O comprometimento da saúde da criança, em decorrência de sua exposição aos poluentes do ar, em especial ao advindo do tráfego veicular, tem sido investigado sob diversos aspectos, entre eles, o baixo peso ao nascer e o nascimento pré-termo, os quais são importantes determinantes dos óbitos perinatais. Este estudo busca analisar a associação entre poluição do ar e mortalidade perinatal a partir da exposição das gestantes e dos recémnascidos aos poluentes atmosféricos na Região Sul do Município de São Paulo, estimados indiretamente a partir do tráfego de veículos próximos à residência materna. Um estudo caso-controle sobre a mortalidade perinatal na Região Sul do Município de São Paulo foi realizado entre os anos de 2000 e 2001. Utilizou -se fontes de dados primários e secundários para obtenção de diversas variáveis relacionadas ao recém-nascido, à mãe, à gestação e ao parto. As residências maternas (endereço) foram localizadas numa base cartográfica digital e foi delimitado um raio de cerca de 200 m ao redor das mesmas. Todas as vias contidas nesse raio foram selecionadas e as distâncias residência-via foram calculadas mediante técnicas avançadas de geoprocessamento. A partir desse procedimento, e utilizando a contagem média do fluxo de veículos nessas vias, gerou-se um indicador da exposição ao tráfego veicular, a densidade do tráfego ponderada pela distância (DTPD), que se baseia na curva de distribuição normal para caracterizar a dispersão dos poluentes a partir do centro das ruas. Análises descritivas e regressão logística (univariada e multivariada) foram realizadas. Observa-se que há um aumento no risco de ocorrência de óbito neonatal precoce entre aquelas mães expostas aos maiores valores de DTPD (OR= 2,34; IC 95% 0,89 6,18), embora esse resultado não tenha alcançado os níveis tradicionais de significância estatística. Os resultados sugerem que o componente neonatal precoce dos óbitos perinatais pode estar associado a maior exposição materna à poluição do ar, relacionado ao tráfego veicular próximo as suas residências. Quanto ao componente fetal dos óbitos perinatais, há ainda menos evidências dessa associação / The compromising of the health of children due to their exposure to air pollution, especially that originating from vehicle traffic, has been investigated from several aspects, such as low birth weight and premature birth, which are important determiners of perinatal deaths. This study seeks to analyze the association between air pollution and perinatal mortality from the exposure of pregnant women and of newborn children to the atmospheric pollutants in the Southern Region of the Municipality of São Paulo, estimated indirectly from the traffic of vehicles near their residences. A case-control study concerning perinatal mortality in the Southern Region of the Municipality of São Paulo was carried out during 2000 and 2001. Primary and secondary data sources were utilized for the obtainment of several variables related to the newborn child, to the mother, to the pregnancy, and to the childbirth. The mothers´ residences (addresses) were located on a digital cartographic base and were limited to within a radius of about 200 meters around those residences. All the streets contained in this radius were selected and the residence-to-street distances were calculated through advanced geoprocessing techniques. From this procedure, and utilizing the average flow-count of vehicles on those routes, an indicator was generated for the exposure to vehicle traffic, the distance-weighted traffic density (DWTD), which is based on the normal distribution curve to characterize the dispersion of pollutants from the centers of the streets. Descriptive analyses and logistic (univariate and multivariate) regression were performed. It was observed that there is an increase in the risk of early neonatal mortality among those mothers exposed to the highest values of DWTD (OR= 2.34; IC 95% 0.89 6.18), even though this result has not reached the traditional levels of statistical significance. The results suggest that the early neonatal component of the perinatal deaths may be associated to a higher maternal exposure to the air pollution related to the vehicle traffic near their residences. Concerning the fetal component of the perinatal deaths, there is even less evidence of this association

Orientador: Silvio Jorge Coelho Simões / Co-orientadora: Isabel Cristina de B. Trannin / Banca: José Balistieri Perrella / Banca: Humberto Gallo / Resumo : A crescente demanda de energia orientada para fontes sustentáveis estimula a implantação e desenvolvimento de micro centrais hidroelétricas. Devido à carência de informações hidrológicas, os projetos de implantação ou ampliação, geralmente carregam incertezas sobre a viabilidade técnica, econômica e ambiental dos projetos, trazendo duvidas sobre o verdadeiro potencial hidroenergético remanescente. A falta de dados observacionais dificulta a tomada de decisões ao analista. Recentemente, avanços em sistemas de informação geográfica - SIG têm criado muitas oportunidades para o melhoramento de modelos hidrológicos capazes de simular essas variáveis em sistemas de bacias hidrográficas. A capacidade de executar análises espaciais para o desenvolvimento de parâmetros hidrológicos concentrados e distribuídos não apenas economiza tempo e esforço, como também melhora a precisão em relação a métodos tradicionais. Neste sentido, o objetivo deste trabalho é a aplicação de um modelo hidrológico associado à análise geoespacial na bacia hidrográfica da micro central hidroelétrica Ilha Anchieta, para avaliação do potencial hidroenergético. Foram utilizados cartas topográficas e dados provenientes de postos pluviométricos para a interpolação, e estimativa de números em locais desprovidos de informação dentro de ambiente SIG. Apesar da deficiência de postos de monitoramento pluviométricos, a interpolação dos dados existentes viabilizou a caracterização do regime de precipitação em locais desprovidos de informação. A utilização do HEC-GeoHMS possibilitou a determinação dos parâmetros físicos da bacia, extraídos das cartas topográficas vetorizadas, para serem utilizados no modelo hidrológico HEC-HMS. Na aplicação do modelo hidrológico de chuva-vazão HEC-HMS, a geração da série sintética de ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The increasing demand for energy oriented for sustainable resources, stimulates the implementation and development of micro hydropower plants. Because the lack of hydrological information, the implementation or expansion projects, usually carry uncertainties about the technical, economic and environmental feasibility of the project, bringing doubts about the true remaining hydropower potential. The lack of observational data complicates the decision making by the analyst. Recently, advances in geographic information systems - GIS have created many opportunities for improving hydrological models capable of simulating these variables on watershed systems. The ability to perform spatial analyzes for the development of concentrated and distributed hydrological parameters not only saves time and effort, but also improves the accuracy over traditional methods. In this sense, the objective of this work is the application of a hydrological model associated with geospatial analysis in the basin of micro hydropower plant Anchieta Island, for evaluation of hydropower potential. Topographic maps and data from the rain gauge stations were used for interpolation, and estimated numbers in places devoid of information within a GIS environment were used. Although the rainfall monitoring stations disability, interpolation of existing data enabled the characterization the precipitation regime in places devoid of information. The use of HEC- GeoHMS allowed determination of the physical parameters of the basin topographic extracted from the vectorized to be used in the water model HEC- HMS. In the application of hydrological rainfall-runoff model HEC - HMS, the generation of synthetic series of flow allowed to know the highest and lowest flow, and characterize the seasonality, supporting the management and planning of actions in the micro hydropower plant / Mestre

A forma como a mancha urbana de São Paulo se adensou e expandiu durante o século XX demonstra que, em vários momentos, interesses econômicos para ocupação indevida das planícies fluviais foram mais fortes do que alternativas técnicas que reservavam espaços nessas áreas para o amortecimento de grandes cheias. O padrão de projetos passou a ser o de retificar os corpos dágua e ocupar suas margens com arruamentos e edificações. Paralelamente, o setor privado passa a edificar cada vez mais seus lotes, aumentando o escoamento superficial de águas pluviais em eventos extremos. O aumento da impermeabilização, somado a uma geomorfologia antropogênica que concentra grandes fluxos de água, e canais obstruídos com lixo e sedimentos, são um componente inequívoco da formação de manchas de alagamento. A bacia de drenagem deve passar a ser tratada de fato sob novos paradigmas, mais conservacionistas, de renaturalização de seus leitos, de interconectividade de áreas permeáveis e impermeáveis, de atenção às formas do relevo que podem contribuir negativamente para concentração de fluxo ou produção de sedimentos, por exemplo. Neste sentido, a Geografia tem importantes contribuições em estudos mais detalhados de bacias urbanas, tanto nas metodologias de estudos de solos e geomorfologia, quanto na integração de conhecimentos interdisciplinares em um Sistema de Informações Geográficas, permitindo uma análise mais sistêmica das temáticas que envolvem a questão dos eventos extremos. Por este motivo, a perspectiva da interdisciplinaridade é crucial para que a qualidade das avaliações englobem contribuições de áreas como climatologia, meteorologia, engenharia hidráulica, geomorfologia, cartografia, pedologia, economia e sociologia, para citar os mais relevantes neste estudo. Apesar de prático e econômico, a aplicação de modelos importados e simplificados (SCS) para o dimensionamento de obras de drenagem pode estar impedindo que as bacias urbanas sejam entendidas dentro de suas hidrodinâmicas e complexidades particulares, onde soluções menos convencionais podem contribuir com resultados mais eficazes no combate às manchas de alagamento. / The way Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region thickened and expanded during the twentieth century demonstrates that in many instances, economic interests to improper occupation of the river plains were stronger than alternative techniques that reserved spaces in these areas for the dampening of major flooding . The default project is now to rectify the water channels and occupy its banks with streets and buildings. In parallel, the private sector fill their lots with buildings, increasing the stormwater runoff in extreme events. Increased the soil sealing, added to an anthropogenic geomorphology which concentrates large flows of water, and channels clogged with garbage and sediments, are a clear component in flooding spots formation. The drainage basin should now be treated under new paradigms in fact, more conservationist, renaturation of their streams, the interconnectedness of permeable and impermeable areas, attention to the forms of relief that may contribute negatively to the concentration of flow and sediment production , for example. In this sense, geography has important contributions to further studies of urban basins, in the methodologies of soils and geomorphology studies, the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge in a Geographic Information System, allowing a more systemic analysis of issues involving the extreme events theme. For this reason, the interdisciplinarity perspective is crucial to the quality of assessments, that should cover fields such as climatology, meteorology, hydraulic engineering, geomorphology, cartography, pedology, economics and sociology, to name the most relevant in this study. Although practical and economic, the application of imported and simplified models (SCS) for design of drainage works may be avoiding urban basis to be understood within their particular complexities and hydrodynamic, were unconventional solutions can contribute to more effective results in the fight against flooding spots.