The term “Federated Databases” refers to the data integration of distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous databases. However, a federation can also include information systems, not only databases. When integrating data, several issues must be addressed. Here, we focus on the problem…

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available…

Applying design patterns is considered a helpful technique for designing software systems.
Patterns description, however, results not sufficiently precise providing a weak understanding and making it difficult to be certain when a pattern is being used correctly. We have formally…

Numerical Taxonomy aims to group in clusters, using so-called structure analysis of operational taxonomic units (OTUs or taxons or taxa) through numerical methods. Clusters that consitute families was the purpose of this series of last projects.
Structural analysis, based on…

Hybrid dynamic spatial approximation trees are recently proposed data structures for searching in metric spaces, based on combining the concepts of spatial approximation and pivot based algorithms. These data structures are hybrid schemes, with the full features of dynamic spatial…

Knowledge-intensive processes are widely used to recover from errors, handle exceptional cases and complaints, and to improve or adapt a process itself. In this context, evolved Business-Process Reengineering (BPR) techniques are changing to give some answers to this reality. In…

When stakeholders are geographically distributed communication presents new challenges for software engineering community. In order to improve communication between stakeholders, we have previously proposed to apply learning style models to characterise the way people interact. In this work we enhance…

This document describes a research and development project - Semantic Web and Cooperative Problem Solving for Online Communities of Practice. The aim of the project is to build a system supporting Cooperative Problem Solving within the framework of online Communities…

The concept of “approximate” searching has applications in a vast number of fields. Some examples are non-traditional databases (e. g. storing images, fingerprints or audio clips, where the concept of exact search is of no use and we search instead…

Data integration is the process of unifying data sharing some common semantics but are originated from unrelated sources. In our work we consider these sources are autonomous, heterogeneous and they are physically distributed. These three characteristics make the integration task…