Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2009

Tese de Mestrado. Mestrado em Multimédia. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2011

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informátca e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2008

Tese de mestrado. Gestão de Informação. 2006. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto

Estágio realizado na Critical Software / Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informátca e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2008

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2007

Num título que se denomina por Plataformas de Comunicação Web 2.0 na Casa da Música procuro perceber de que forma as redes sociais se estão a repercutir no seio das empresas/instituições e que benefícios daí surgem. Quais as suas características e de que fOlma estas se podem ancorar a um plano de comunicação e marketing. Assistimos hoje ao surgimento de sinais de transfOlmação em diferentes áreas da sociedade que não se limitam a mudanças pontuais, mas cujo impacto é significativo ao ponto de representarem transformações substanciais, exercendo influência sobre o todo do tecido social. Que sociedade é esta que se vem impondo e qual a lógica por detrás destas mudanças? Neste sentido, as empresas/instituições culturais devem perceber estas mudanças, visto que, tal como no Marketing tradicional, também o Marketing Cultural deve procurar adaptar-se às novas exigências e desafios tecnológicos nomeadamente à Internet e às consequências inerentes a este fenómeno. Assim sendo, e considerando que os desafios são enormes na área do E-Marketing, nomeadamente, com o desenvolvimento das novas platafornlas de comunicação em ambientes Web 2.0, a Casa da Música deve integrá-los e percebe-los na sua estratégia comunicacional.

The purpose of this project was to develop an easy-to-maintain web site for the Gamma Lambda Chapter of Phi Beta Delta International Honor Society here at California State University, San Bernardino, which will manage complete and up-to-date information about the mission, members, officers and all the activities of the honor society.

To date, hypertext and hypermedia research has principally studied the influence of separate features of hypermedia texts on information retrieval. By contrast, this thesis explores the meanings of hypermedia texts and the effects of these meanings on free website exploration. In particular, the study focuses on those meanings which can reveal how information is organised in websites and on the construal of such meanings through the interplay of hyperlinks, visual, verbal, audio and kinetic resources in generically hybrid hypermedia texts. This focus is motivated by research showing that understanding how information is organised in hypermedia texts is crucial for users' successful orientation within them. To achieve its aim, this research studies six websites for children and the navigation paths of fourteen children through one of them, and draws on interviews with the websites' producers and the children. The thesis connects the professional field of hypermedia design with systemic functional theory and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF MDA). As a result, it offers two tools for hypermedia discourse analysis, which are based on and illustrated through the analyses of five of the websites. The first is the system of HYPERTEXTUAL DISTANCE. Designed to analyse the potential of hyperlinks to reveal, obscure or transcend the textual organisation of a website, this system is built by reconceptualising from a SF MDA perspective a central principle for organising information in websites - website hierarchy. The second tool is the framework for analysing logicosemantic relations in hypermedia. Its categories describe the ideational relations that hold together information presented on the same webpage or on different webpages, which may or may not be hyperlinked with each other. Through the analyses of the sixth website and the navigation paths through it, the thesis exemplifies how both tools, independently and together, can be employed to explore the interdependence of website design and navigation. The discussion of selected results from these analyses, supported by the views of the research participants, identifies ways in which the tools proposed in this thesis can be applied in hypermedia design, evaluation and literacy education and complemented with other tools for hypermedia discourse analysis.

Ontologies are widely used as data representations for knowledge bases and marking up data on the emerging Semantic Web. Hence, techniques for managing ontol- ogy come to the centre of any practical and general solution of knowledge-based systems. Challenges arise when we look a step further in order to achieve flexibility and scalability of the ontology management. Previous works in ontology management, primarily for ontology mapping, ontology integration and ontology evolution, have exploited only one form or another of ontology management in restrictive settings. However, a distributed and heterogeneous environment makes it necessary for re- searchers in this field to consider ontology interoperability in order to achieve the vision of the Semantic Web. Several challenges arise when we set our goal to achieve ontology interoperability on the Web. The first one is to decide which soft- ware engineering paradigm to employ. The issue of such a paradigm is the core of ontology management when dynamic property is involved. It should make it easy to model complex systems and significantly improve current practice in software engineering. Moreover, it allows the extension of the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. The second challenge is to exploit frameworks based on the pro- posed paradigm. Such a framework should make possible flexibility, interactivity, reusability and reliability for systems which are built on it. The third challenge is to investigate suitable mechanisms to cope with ontology mapping, integration and evolution based on the framework. It is known that predefined rules or hypotheses may not apply given that the environment hosting an ontology is changing over time. Fortunately, agents are being advocated as a next generation model for en- gineering complex and distributed systems. Also some researchers in this field have given a qualitative analysis to provide a justification for precisely why the agent-based approach is well suited to engineer complex software systems. From a multi-agent perspective, agent technology fits well in developing applications in uncontrolled and distributed environments which require substantial support for change. Agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) are autonomous and can engage in interactions which are essential for any ongoing agents� actions. A MAS approach is thus regarded as an intuitive and suitable way of modelling dynamic systems. Following the above discussion, an agent-based framework for managing ontology in a dynamic environment is developed. The framework has several key characteris- tics such as flexibility and extensibility that differentiate this research from others. Three important issues of the ontology management are also investigated. It is be- lieved that inter-ontology processes like ontology mapping with logical semantics are foundations of ontology-based applications. Hence, firstly, ontology mapping is discussed. Several types of semantic relations are proposed. Following these, the mapping mechanisms are developed. Secondly, based on the previous mapping results, ontology integration is developed to provide abstract views for participating organisations in the presence of a variety of ontologies. Thirdly, as an ontology is subject to evolution in its life cycle, there must be some kind of mechanisms to reflect their changes in corresponding interrelated ontologies. Ontology refinement is investigated to take ontology evolution into consideration. Process algebra is employed to catch and model information exchanges between ontologies. Agent negotiation strategy is applied to guide corresponding ontologies to react properly. A prototype is built to demonstrate the above design and functionalities. It is applied to ontologies dealing with the subject of beer (type). This prototype con- sists of four major types of agents, ranging from user agent, interface agent, ontology agent, and functionary agent. Evaluations such as query, consistency checking are conducted on the prototype. This shows that the framework is not only flexible but also completely workable. All agents derived from the framework exhibit their behaviours appropriately as expected.