Metadados vêm sendo utilizados amplamente para descrever objetos de aprendizagem na Web. Contudo, mesmo que a adoção de um único padrão de metadados pudesse assegurar a reusabilidade de recursos e interoperabilidade entre aplicações, ainda não existe um esquema de metadados que seja apropriado para preencher todos os requisitos de cada aplicação. Com isso, a criação de novos padrões de metadados e perfis de aplicação torna-se constante com o passar dos anos. Atualmente, a Web está sendo estendida pela Web Semântica de forma sistemática. A integração dos seus dados vem sendo obtida em grande parte pela adoção de ontologias. A presente dissertação propõe uma abordagem de representação de conhecimento em três camadas baseada em ontologias para metadados educacionais. Esta abordagem é composta de ontologias modulares com intuito de aumentar o reuso e otimizar o processamento de inferências dos metadados. Além disto, é proposto um método de interoperabilidade entre metadados descritos em XML e OWL para a proposta de ontologias modulares. Os resultados apresentaram ganhos quanto ao uso de ontologias modulares e verificações de cardinalidades em mundo fechado. As ontologias propostas apresentam uma representação de conhecimento de forma unificada e são compatíveis com as tecnologias atuais da Web Semântica. / Metadata has been broadly employed to describe learning objects on the Web. However, even with the adoption of a unique metadata standard could secure reusability of resources and interoperability among applications, there is no metadata schema that would be enough to comply with all requirements of each application yet. Therewith, the creation of new metadata standards and profile applications are regularly over the years. Nowadays, the Semantic Web is extending the Web systematically. The integration of data has been activated mostly by the adoption of ontologies. This dissertation proposes an approach to knowledge representation in three layers based on ontologies for educational metadata. This approach is composed of modular ontologies that aim improve reuse and optimize the inference processing of metadata. Beyond that, an interoperability method is proposed to metadata described in XML and OWL to the modularized ontologies. The results show some optimization in using modular ontologies and cardinality verification in a closed world. The proposed ontologies unify the knowledge representation and they are compatible with the current Semantic Web technologies.

The capacity for memory is one of the most profound features of the mammalian brain, and the proper encoding and retrieval of information are the processes that form the basis of learning. The goal of this thesis is to further our understanding of the network-level mechanisms supporting learning and memory in the mammalian brain. The hippocampus has been long recognized to play a central role in learning and memory. Although being one of the most extensively studied structures in the brain, the precise circuit mechanisms underlying its function remain elusive. Principal cells in the hippocampus form complex representations of an animal's environment, but in stark contrast to the interneuron population -- and despite the apparent need for functional segregation -- these cells are largely considered a homogeneous population of coding units. Much work, however, has indicated that principal cells throughout the hippocampus, from the input node of the dentate gyrus to the output node of area CA1, differ developmentally, genetically, anatomically, and functionally. By employing in vivo two-photon calcium imaging in awake, behaving mice, we attempted to characterize the role of dened subpopulations of neurons in memory-related behaviors. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on the dentate gyrus input node of the hippocampus. Chapter 2 compares the functional properties of adult-born and mature granule cells. Chapter 3 expands on this work by comparing granule cells with mossy cells, another glutamatergic but relatively understudied cell type. The second part of this thesis focuses on the hippocampal output node, area CA1. In chapter 4, we characterize an inhibitory microcircuit that differentially targets the sublayers of area CA1. And in chapter 5, we directly compare the contributions of these sublayers to episodic and semantic memory.

A crise mundial de 2008 impulsionou o avanço das políticas de governança do sistema financeiro global. Parte dessas políticas envolve a reformulação de processos de gerenciamento de informações, e neste cenário de reestruturação tecnológica, várias iniciativas se propõem a solucionar alguns dos problemas já conhecidos. Para viabilizar a adoção de um sistema financeiro global integrado e robusto, grandes empresas de tecnologia e instituições financeiras somam esforços para atender melhor às necessidades do setor. A arquitetura da World Wide Web é uma constante nessas iniciativas, e parte delas buscam os benefícios previstos pelas tecnologias semânticas, tais como sua alta capacidade de integração de dados heterogêneos e utilização de algoritmos de inferência para a dedução de informações. O objetivo deste estudo é utilizar ontologias e tecnologias semânticas, tais como OWL, na gestão de riscos do sistema financeiro, particularmente para verificar a sua aplicabilidade nas políticas de gestão de riscos específicas do sistema financeiro brasileiro, estabelecidas pelas normas publicadas pelo Banco Central (BACEN). / The 2008 global crisis boosted the advancement of governance policies for the global financial system. Some of these policies involve reformulating information management processes; in this restructuring scenario, several initiatives are intended to address some of the well-known issues. To enable the adoption of an integrated and robust global financial system, large technology companies and financial institutions joined efforts to meet industry needs in a better way. The architecture of the World Wide Web is a constant in these initiatives, and some of these seek the benefits provided by semantic technologies, such as its high capacity for integration of heterogeneous databases and the use of inference algorithms for acquiring new information. The goal of this work is to use ontologies and semantic technologies such as OWL in the financial system risk management, particularly verifying the applicability of these techniques to the Brazilian financial system risk management policies, as published by the Brazil Central Bank (BACEN).

Patient medical records are a valuable resource that can be used for many purposes including managing and planning for future health needs as well as clinical research. Health databases such as the clinical practice research datalink (CPRD) and many other similar initiatives can provide researchers with a useful data source on which they can test their medical hypotheses. However, this can only be the case when researchers have a good set of hypotheses to test on the data. Conversely, the data may have other equally important areas that remain unexplored. There is a chance that some important signals in the data could be missed. Therefore, further analysis is required to make such hidden areas become more obvious and attainable for future exploration and investigation. Data mining techniques can be effective tools in discovering patterns and signals in large-scale patient data sets. These techniques have been widely applied to different areas in medical domain. Therefore, analysing patient data using such techniques has the potential to explore the data and to provide a better understanding of the information in patient records. However, the heterogeneity and complexity of medical data can be an obstacle in applying data mining techniques. Much of the potential value of this data therefore goes untapped. This thesis describes a novel methodology that reduces the dimensionality of primary care data, to make it more amenable to visualisation, mining and clustering. The methodology involves employing a combination of ontology-based semantic similarity and principal component analysis (PCA) to map the data into an appropriate and informative low dimensional space. The aim of this thesis is to develop a novel methodology that provides a visualisation of patient records. This visualisation provides a systematic method that allows the formulation of new and testable hypotheses which can be fed to researchers to carry out the subsequent phases of research. In a small-scale study based on Salford Integrated Record (SIR) data, I have demonstrated that this mapping provides informative views of patient phenotypes across a population and allows the construction of clusters of patients sharing common diagnosis and treatments. The next phase of the research was to develop this methodology and explore its application using larger patient cohorts. This data contains more precise relationships between features than small-scale data. It also leads to the understanding of distinct population patterns and extracting common features. For such reasons, I applied the mapping methodology to patient records from the CPRD database. The study data set consisted of anonymised patient records for a population of 2.7 million patients. The work done in this analysis shows that methodology scales as O(n) in ways that did not require large computing resources. The low dimensional visualisation of high dimensional patient data allowed the identification of different subpopulations of patients across the study data set, where each subpopulation consisted of patients sharing similar characteristics such as age, gender and certain types of diseases. A key finding of this research is the wealth of data that can be produced. In the first use case of looking at the stratification of patients with falls, the methodology gave important hypotheses; however, this work has barely scratched the surface of how this mapping could be used. It opens up the possibility of applying a wide range of data mining strategies that have not yet been explored. What the thesis has shown is one strategy that works, but there could be many more. Furthermore, there is no aspect of the implementation of this methodology that restricts it to medical data. The same methodology could equally be applied to the analysis and visualisation of many other sources of data that are described using terms from taxonomies or ontologies.

Learners often have difficulty finding and retrieving relevant learning materials to support their learning goals because of two main challenges. The vocabulary learners use to describe their goals is different from that used by domain experts in teaching materials. This challenge causes a semantic gap. Learners lack sufficient knowledge about the domain they are trying to learn about, so are unable to assemble effective keywords that identify what they wish to learn. This problem presents an intent gap. The work presented in this thesis focuses on addressing the semantic and intent gaps that learners face during an e-Learning recommendation task. The semantic gap is addressed by introducing a method that automatically creates background knowledge in the form of a set of rich learning-focused concepts related to the selected learning domain. The knowledge of teaching experts contained in e-Books is used as a guide to identify important domain concepts. The concepts represent important topics that learners should be interested in. An approach is developed which leverages the concept vocabulary for representing learning materials and this influences retrieval during the recommendation of new learning materials. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on a dataset of Machine Learning and Data Mining papers, and our approach outperforms benchmark methods. The results confirm that incorporating background knowledge into the representation of learning materials provides a shared vocabulary for experts and learners, and this enables the recommendation of relevant materials. We address the intent gap by developing an approach which leverages the background knowledge to identify important learning concepts that are employed for refining learners' queries. This approach enables us to automatically identify concepts that are similar to queries, and take advantage of distinctive concept terms for refining learners' queries. Using the refined query allows the search to focus on documents that contain topics which are relevant to the learner. An e-Learning recommender system is developed to evaluate the success of our approach using a collection of learner queries and a dataset of Machine Learning and Data Mining learning materials. Users with different levels of expertise are employed for the evaluation. Results from experts, competent users and beginners all showed that using our method produced documents that were consistently more relevant to learners than when the standard method was used. The results show the benefits in using our knowledge driven approaches to help learners find relevant learning materials.

Orientador: Edberto Ferneda / Banca: Raimundo Nonato dos Santos / Banca: Silvana Aparecida Borsetti Gregório Vidotti / Resumo: A Sociologia da Ciência ou os Estudos Sociais da Ciência têm procurado analisar a estrutura das disciplinas científicas em relação às suas práticas sociais, procurando oferecer novas perspectivas sobre a construção do saber e o desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico. Um conceito importante para o desenvolvimento deste trabalho é o de comunidade científica caracterizada pela prática de uma especialidade, por uma formação teórica comum, pela circulação abundante de informação no interior do grupo. Este estudo tem por objetivo caracterizar a pesquisa brasileira em Web Semântica, considerado um tema na fronteira de pesquisa de duas matrizes disciplinares: a Ciência da Computação e a Ciência da Informação. Optou-se por um estudo cienciométrico, tendo como fonte para coleta dos dados o Curriculum Lattes de pesquisadores doutores e nas dissertações e teses defendidas sobre Web Semântica e suas tecnologias. A integração entre comunidades científicas formadas em matrizes disciplinares diferentes encontra um ambiente favorável nos espaços de fronteira que demarcam as matrizes disciplinares. Comprova-se isso ao observar-se a comunidade pesquisadora sobre Web Semântica no Brasil, composta por pesquisadores de diversas matrizes como a Lingüística, a Ciência da Informação e a Ciência da Computação. / Abstract: Science is a critical and dynamic social activity whose objective is the knowledge production on different aspects of the nature. An important concept for the development of this work is of scholarly community characterized by the practical one of a specialty, for a common theoretical formation, the abundant circulation of information in the interior of the group. This study it has for objective to characterize the Brazilian research in Semantic Web, considered a subject in the border of research of two matrices discipline matrices the Computer Science and the Information Science. It was opted to a scientometrics study, having as source of the data the Curriculum Lattes of doctors. The integration between scholarly communities formed in matrices of different disciplines finds a favorable environment in the scientific boundaries that demarcate the discipline matrices Observing that researching community on Semantic Web in Brazil, composed for researchers of diverse matrices as Linguistics, Information Science and Computer Science. / Mestre

Orientador: João Batista Ernesto de Moraes / Banca: Helen de Castro Silva / Banca: Maria Cristiane Barbosa Galvão / Resumo: A pesquisa tem como tema "O percurso gerativo de sentido aplicado à análise documental de textos narrativos de ficção: perspectivas de utilização em bibliotecas universitárias", com o foco no estudo da análise textual buscando a concretização de sentido no encadeamento das figuras e no encadeamento dos temas presentes nos contos para a recuperação da informação. O pressuposto é que não existem ferramentas de análise de assunto adequadas para a análise de obras de ficção devido à ausência de procedimentos metodológicos que contribuam efetivamente para o tratamento desse tipo de documento para o estabelecimento do tema. Dessa forma, propõem-se a busca subsídios teórico-metodológicos no percurso gerativo de sentido, componente da Semântica Discursiva, para compreensão e extração do tema em obras de ficção. Os objetivos da pesquisa são: a análise, identificação e aplicação metodológica do percurso, buscando identificar os textos figurativos e temáticos, bem como a concretização do sentido do texto; o estudo dos atores que permeiam o encadeamento das figuras e dos temas, determinando as relações existentes nesse tipo de superestrutura narrativa; identificar e analisar o nível de experiência na atuação profissional dos bibliotecários na atividade de indexação de obras ficcionais; identificar e analisar as atitudes dos profissionais bibliotecários em relação à atividade de indexação com vistas a oferecer embasamento teórico para futuros estudos que efetivem uma proposta metodológica para a identificação do tema de obras ficcionais. O método escolhido para a realização da investigação é a pesquisa descritiva por permitir a observação, o registro, a análise e a correlação dos fatos. A entrevista estruturada e focalizada será utilizada como técnica de coleta de dados que permitirá a comparação e reflexão das respostas... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The works of fiction have no tools for appropriate subject analysis due to the absence of methodological procedures that contribute effectively to the treatment of this kind of document to the establishment of the theme. Thus, it is proposed to search for subsidies in the gerativo theoretical and methodological journey in a sense, part of Discursive Semantic for understanding and extracting the theme in works of fiction. The objectives of the research are the analysis, identification and methodological application of the route, seeking to identify those figurative and thematic texts as well as the implementation of the meaning of the text, the study of the actors that permeate the sequence of figures and topics, determining the relationship in that kind of superstructure narrative, identify and analyze the level of experience in the professional performance of librarians in the activity Index of works of fiction, identifying and analyzing the attitudes of professional librarians in relation to the activity of indexing and the offering theoretical basis studies for future studies that put into effect that a methodological proposal for identifying the subject of fictional works. The chosen method to carry out the research is the descriptive search that allows the observation, the registration, examination and the correlation of facts. The structured and focused interview will be used as a technique for collecting data that will allow comparison and reflection of the answers. The thematic and figurative journey will be applied and analysed in short stories for the establishment of the theme (Phase 1). The collection of data was held in three libraries of UNESP Libraries Network in order to extract the techniques used by librarians to identify the topic of fictional documents (Stage 2). The final phase includes the transcription and analysis of results and reflection enabling guidelines for the analysis of documentary works fictional. / Mestre

Aim of this diploma thesis is to map semantic features of CMS Drupal version 7. The goal of the first part of this work is to theoretically describe semantic web problematic and CMS Drupal. The second -- practical part of this work maps in details all the features of semantic web, which are supported by described CMS Drupal. These semantic features are mapped in two different points of views -- implementation and functional. Main contribution of this work is the method used to map these features. It's based on Drupal plugins code modification and revision in order to draw or demonstrate these features, which are not necessarily completely documented or functional. Furthermore all of these features are demonstrated on examples created as a part of this thesis. Finally the last part of this work compares these mapped features to similar CMS systems.

Esta pesquisa traz a análise de fenômenos linguísticos extraídos de entrevistas realizadas com seis sujeitos afásicos com diferentes graus de dificuldade de acesso lexical. Observamos a habilidade desses sujeitos em produzir e compreender nomes de animais utilizados em contexto não-literal. Desenvolvemos uma entrevista para determinar se os sujeitos em questão apresentavam dificuldade para acessar os nomes de animais escolhidos. Numa primeira etapa, os sujeitos tiveram de nomeá-los e descrevê-los e, posteriormente, utilizá-los dentro de um contexto provido pela entrevistadora. A hipótese é que possa haver diferença entre a habilidade do sujeito para produzir e compreender nomes de animais dependendo do contexto apresentado. Duas perspectivas de análise diferentes são apresentadas aqui: primeiro, temos as teorias baseadas em correlatos biológicos da linguagem e, em segundo, a teoria linguística de Roman Jakobson sobre o processamento da linguagem e a sua divisão em dois eixos principais, a metáfora e a metonímia (habilidades de abstração baseadas na similaridade e na contiguidade, respectivamente). Alguns sujeitos apresentam dificuldade para produzir formas de palavras no seu sentido literal, mas o mesmo não acontece quando as mesmas palavras são produzidas no seu sentido não-literal, sugerindo que nesses sujeitos o sistema semântico-lexical pode estar mais preservado do que se imagina, sendo que o tipo de entrada ou saída dessas formas lexicais pode ser o elemento prejudicado. A análise das entrevistas realizadas revela que a compreensão dessas mesmas metáforas foi uma tarefa mais laboriosa para os sujeitos, o que reforça nossa hipótese, uma vez que durante a tarefa de compreensão das metáforas os sujeitos não foram providos do contexto dado na tarefa de produção. / This research proposes the analysis of language phenomena taken from interviews made with six aphasic subjects presenting different degrees of lexical access deficits. The focus of this paper is the observation of the ability of these subjects to produce and comprehend names of animals used in a metaphorical context. We developed an interview in order to determine whether the subjects presented problems to access the chosen names of animals. In the first part of the interview, the subjects were asked to name and describe the animal pictures presented and, aftermost, they had to produce and comprehend those names in the context provided by the interviewer. Two distinct perspectives are presented in this paper: first, we have theories based on biological correlates of language, and in second, the linguistic theory by Roman Jakobson about the processing of language and its division in two main axis: metaphor and metonymy (modes of relation based on similarity and contiguity, respectively). Some subjects present distress to produce word forms in their literal meaning, whereas the same does not occur when those words are used in their nonliteral meaning. This suggests that these subjects present a better preservation of the semantic-lexical system than expected, and the only affected element can be the type of input or output of the lexical form. We can see in the interviews presented here that the comprehension of the mentioned metaphors was a more laborious task for the subjects, which reinforces our hypothesis, once during the comprehension part of the interview, the subjects were not provided with the context given previously, in the production task.

O objetivo desta dissertação é avaliar se as tecnologias de Web Semântica podem contribuir para o desenvolvimento do protocolo Internet Registry Information Service Protocol (IRIS). IRIS é um novo protocolo para o serviço de informação sobre registros da Internet. Ele ainda encontra-se em fase de desenvolvimento por um grupo de trabalho do Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). O objetivo do grupo de trabalho é desenvolver e padronizar um novo protocolo para substituir o protocolo Whois. Whois é o protocolo padrão utilizado atualmente para serviços de informação sobre registros da Internet, por exemplo nomes de domínios, endereços Internet Protocol (IP), sistemas autônomos, dentre outros. A principal motivação para o desenvolvimento do novo protocolo foi a crescente preocupação com a segurança dos dados armazenados na base de dados Whois pois o protocolo Whois não provê nenhum mecanismo de segurança. Outro motivo foi a ausência de suporte a base de dados distribuída porque o protocolo Whois foi desenvolvido para uma base de dados centralizada e, consequentemente, não atende aos requisitos padrões para protocolos da Internet. Até agora, o grupo de trabalho abordou e solucionou dois dos principais problemas do protocolo Whois: (1) segurança e (2) suporte à base de dados distribuída. Entretanto, o desenvolvimento de um novo padrão envolve um grande investimento da comunidade, em particular com respeito a políticas baseadas em consenso. Além disso, existe uma grande barreira a ser vencida para a adoção do novo protocolo: a adoção pelos usuários. O novo protocolo deve ter longevidade sem necessidade de atualização ou substituição por outro protocolo. Para atingir esse objetivo, é preciso não apenas satisfazer necessidades imediatas, como segurança, mas prever necessidades futuras. Este estudo envolveu as seguintes atividades de pesquisa: (1) análise comparativa dos atuais protocolos de busca de informação sobre registros da Internet, (2) o estudo aprofundado do protocolo IRIS e (3) a avaliação de novas tecnologias que pudessem ser incorporadas ao novo protocolo, em particular tecnologias de Web Semântica. Os resultados deste estudo demonstraram que as tecnologias de Web Semântica garantiriam a flexibilidade e extensibilidade necessárias para que o protocolo possa se adaptar às necessidades atuais e futuras. Para validar os resultados teóricos do estudo foi implementado um protótipo baseado na especificação do protocolo IRIS utilizando tecnologias de Web semântica. Dois tipos de experimentos foram conduzidos: (1) experimentos comparando os desempenhos do protótipo e do cliente Whois e (2) avaliação de desempenho do protótipo baseada em testes de carga. Finalmente, a implementação do protótipo e subsequentes experimentos serviram como prova de conceito de que as tecnologias de Web Semântica podem contribuir para o sucesso do protocolo IRIS. / The aim of this thesis is to evaluate whether Semantic Web technologies can contribute to Internet Registry Information Service Protocol (IRIS) protocol development. IRIS is a new protocol for providing an information service for Internet resources. It is currently still under development by an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group. The objective of the working group is to develop and standardize a new protocol to replace the Whois protocol. Whois is the standard protocol used today by information services for Internet resources, i.e. domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, autonomous systems, amongst others. The motivation to develop a new protocol was based on increasing concerns regarding the security of data stored in the Whois database as the Whois protocol does not provide any security mechanism. Another motivation was the absence of support for distributed databases as the Whois protocol was developed for a centralized database, hence it no longer meets the standard requirements for Internet protocols. So far, the working group has tackled and solved two main issues concerning the Whois protocol: (1) security and (2) support for distributed databases. However, the development of a new standard demands a great investment from the community, in particular with respect to consensus-based policies. Additionally, there is one major barrier against adopting the new protocol: the users adoption. The new protocol must have longevity without being updated or replaced by another protocol. To reach this goal, it is necessary to meet not only the current requirements, such as security issues, but to cater also for future requirements. This thesis is concerned with the following research activities: (1) comparative analysis of the current protocols used to provide information services on Internet resources, (2) the IRIS protocol analysis and (3) the evaluation of new technologies that could be incorporated in the new protocol, in particular Semantic technologies. The results demonstrate that Semantic Web technologies could provide the necessary flexibility and extensibility to meet the current and future requirements of IRIS. To validate the theoretical results a prototype based on the IRIS specification was implemented using Semantic Web technologies. Two types of experiments were conducted: (1) experiments comparing the Whois and the prototype performance and (2) performance evaluation of the prototype based on load tests. Finally, the prototype implementation and subsequent experiment results serve as a proof-of-concept that Semantic Web technologies could contribute towards the IRIS protocol success.