Orlando Belo

University of Minho · Departamento de Informática (DI)

Developing analytical systems imposes several challenges related not only to the amount and heterogeneity of the involved data but also to the constant need to readapt and evolve to overcome new business challenges. Data is a determinant factor in the success of analytical and decision-making applications, being its nature, availability, and qualit...

Retention is one of the final steps of Case-Based Reasoning approach. Defining the criteria for case retention and maintaining the case base is a complex process. New studies have emerged in the area of nutrition and physical activity recommendation systems following the case-based reasoning cycle. However, the retention phase has only been superfi...

Adaptation is one of the most important phases in the Case-based Reasoning cycle since it reuses solutions that have already proven to be successful in the past to new situations. The main challenge of the present work is to adapt these successful solutions to the individual characteristics of each person, in order to take into account all his/her...

The development of analytical systems imposes several challenges related not only to the amount and heterogeneity of the involved data but also to the constant need to readapt and evolve to overcome new business challenges. The data modelling layer represents the mapping between the domain and technical knowledge, however, to organize raw data into...

Lifestyle habits have a direct influence on people’s health. Regular physical activity, combined with good nutrition, helps to prevent the early onset of diseases such as cardiovascular disease. In fact, a significant number of patients diagnosed with cardiovascular disease is associated with a poor diet and a sedentary routine. However, in today’s...

Considering extract-transform-load (ETL) as a complex and evolutionary process, development teams must conscientiously and rigorously create log strategies for retrieving the most value of the information that can be gathered from the events that occur through the ETL workflow. Efficient logging strategies must be structured so that metrics, logs,...

Sometimes, to improve the comprehension of a text, it is necessary to highlight some of its parts, labelling groups of words and sentences, or adding comments along its pages. These are just two of the many text annotation techniques that are commonly used to simplify reading and understanding facts, ideas and thoughts expressed on texts. In the la...

Despite the increasing awareness about its severity and the importance of adopting preventive habits, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Most people already recognize that a healthy lifestyle, which includes a balanced diet and the practice of physical activity, is essential to prevent this disease. However, since...

Cardiovascular disease is responsible for an alarming number of deaths worldwide. Nowadays more people die of cardiovascular disease than any other type of disease. A considerable number of these deaths is caused by preventable risk factors. Thus, it is necessary to invest in cardiovascular disease prevention and take urgent action to reverse this...

Evaluating the utility of Human-Machine Systems’ User Interfaces is not trivial. Several evaluation methods can be used to investigate if the behaviour of the user interface complies with best practices of Human-Machine Interface Design. Even when is possible to agree on which methods to use to conduct the evaluation, defining the utility requires...

The "Book of Properties" or "Tombo da Mitra" is an impressive manuscript, containing a large inventory of properties, which was carried out in Portugal in 17th century. It records with great detail and precision the different land types, buildings, and other geographical references essentially of the Portuguese regions of Minho and Trás-os-Montes o...

The massive amount of information currently available on the Internetmakes it difficult for teachers to curate quality educationalcontent or to select material for self-regulated study by students.Aiming to facilitate these steps in the teaching and/or learningprocess this article presents an approach to assist the discovery ofeducational content f...

The creation of smart cities aims to improve the quality of life of people and the environment that surrounds them, ensuring a better response of the services they interact with in urban environments. The inhabitants of the cities tend to make concrete opinions about their own city. The possibility of collecting and reconciling these opinions is ve...

While interactive systems have the potential to increase human work performance, those systems are predisposed to usability problems. Different factors might contribute to these problems during the interaction process and as result, the decision-making process might be compromised. This work uses decision support system methods and tools to assist...

Living in a knowledge-based society, one of the most important tasks of decision makers is to know how to deal with information and knowledge that add value to their activities. Decision makers need to retrieve high-quality sets of information in order to gain competitive advantages in their business world. Otherwise, companies may struggle with se...

In this paper, we expose a hybridization methodology for helping to overcome the pitfalls of conventional What-If analysis process design and development by discovering the best recommendations for What-If analysis scenarios’ parameters using OLAP preferences. The hybridization process aims at assisting users during the decision-making processes by...

From major companies and organizations to smaller ones around the world, databases are now one of the leading technologies for supporting most of organizational information assets. Their evolution allows us to store almost anything often without determining if it is in fact relevant to be saved or not. Hence, it is predictable that most information...

The possibility to simulate hypothetical scenarios without harming the business using What-If analysis tools and to retrieve highly refined information is an interesting way of achieving such advantages. In a previous work, it was introduced a hybrid model that combines What-If analysis and OLAP usage preferences, which helps filtering the informat...

Owning the right and high quality set of information is a crucial factor for developing business activities and consequently gaining competitive advantages. However, retrieving information is not enough. The possibility to simulate hypothetical scenarios without harming the business using What-If analysis tools and to retrieve highly refined inform...

Ontologies occupy a central position in any conceptual model of the Semantic Web, aiming fundamentally to add explicit semantics to the contents available in the Web. In the domain of Brazilian higher education, especially with regard to the National System for the Evaluation of Higher Education (SINAES), still lacks a reference ontology that can p...

Today’s companies face great challenges when attempting to quest business markets with their demands on product quality and price. However, when a company maintains high efficiency levels on its productive processes usually it has this challenge quite simplified. The great availability of data we have currently on industry plants provides a very in...

Today’s system users demand fast answers when querying their own databases. Their impatience still high when waiting for the results of a query when they take more than one or two seconds to appear on the screen. However, having fast querying answers it is not the only aspect that determines the quality of a database system we are using, but also t...

There are many tools for designing and modelling extract-transformload (ETL) systems, covering its entire development life cycle. However, the vast majority of them use proprietary methodologies, notations and tasks, which undermine their understanding and application. In this paper, we present a translation tool for conceptual models, with the abi...

From time to time, on a regular basis, companies often plan and implement internal measurement processes of quality of service and information of their computer systems. These processes are very important for ensuring user confidence in the operation of their systems and consequently on the information they extracted and used from them. In all acti...

The development of software projects is often based on the composition of components for creating new products and components through the promotion of reusable techniques. These pre-configured components are sometimes based on well-known and validated design-patterns describing abstract solutions for solving recurring problems. The data warehouse E...

É muito provável que grande parte dos sistemas de informação tenha problemas de gestão de informação. Isto obriga à criação de novos tipos de técnicas de gestão de dados mais eficientes e específicas para cada caso, com capacidade para governar e assegurar o cumprimento das medidas de gestão definidas para os sistemas, e garantir o desempenho e a q...

Qualquer sistema de ETL (Extração, Transformação e Carregamento) que lide com um conjunto de dados significativo tem sempre a necessidade de contornar eventuais fenómenos de omissão e de inconsistência de dados que, frequentemente, resultam de uma ineficaz implementação dos sistemas operacionais associados. Caso se atue de forma contrária, o sistem...

Nowadays, enterprise managers involved with decision-making processes struggle with numerous problems related to market position or business reputation of their companies. Owning the right and high quality set of information is a crucial factor for developing business activities and gaining competitive advantages on business arenas. However, today...

ETL tasks are quite complex often leading to a very complex network of working processes. Many difficulties of their development come from the number of sources of information we need to work, the heterogeneity and dispersion of data, and from the complexity of the tasks to implement, in order to populate appropriately a data warehouse. Thus, it is...

In this work we evaluate the performance of two data mining algorithms geared especially for the establishment of positive and negative association rules. For this we used a fairly comprehensive set of data from a retailer about the sales of products of a given period. The results achieved in this analysis and comparison work revealed a great poten...

The development of ETL systems has been the target of many research efforts to support its development and implementation. In the last few years, we presented a pattern-oriented approach to develop these systems. Basically, patterns are comprised by a set of abstract components that can be configured to enable its instantiation for specific scenari...

The implementation of a queuing management system is a critical task in every single store attendance service. This is very difficult to accomplish because we have to deal with customers, and in particular with its impatience. The goal must be always to have short queues and a very fast attendance service. However, rarely this is achieved. For many...

Electronic transactions have revolutionized the way that consumers shop, making the small and local retailers, which were being affected by the worldwide crisis, accessible to the entire world. As e-commerce market expands, the number of commercial transactions supported by credit cards—Card or Customer Not Present also increases. This growing rela...

Today dashboards are a clear factor of differentiation for decision-makers, providing critical business indicators in useful time. They are very important data visualization mechanisms, simple to interpret, easy to deal, and fast on showing pertinent data. Dashboards provide means for reducing time of information analysis, disposing business indica...

In this paper, we present and discuss a student profiling system conceived to be integrated in an artificial tutor especially designed and developed for helping teaching the Portuguese language to children aged 4 to 5 years. Our basic goal was to provide a set of mechanisms that dispose to an artificial tutor the ability to adapt automatically to t...

All data warehousing systems architects know that is quite difficult to build a “perfect” ETL system without having primarily a model well founded on real operational requisites. Thus ETL modeling is crucial to the success of populating a data warehouse, independently from their natural complexity. Modeling will also reduce implementation costs onc...

During the last few years, many research efforts have been done to improve the design of extract, transform, and load (ETL) models systems. Still, ETL systems are considered very time-consuming, error-prone, and complex involving several participants from different knowledge domains. The ETL processes are one of the most important components of a d...

Modeling Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes of a Data Warehousing System has always been a challenge. The heterogeneity of the sources, the quality of the data obtained and the conciliation process are some of the issues that must be addressed in the design phase of this critical component. Commercial ETL tools often provide proprietary diagram...

ETL conceptual modeling is a very important activity in any data warehousing system project implementation. Owning a high-level system representation allowing for a clear identification of the main parts of a data warehousing system is clearly a great advantage, especially in early stages of design and development. However, the effort to model conc...

Today recovering urban waste requires effective management services, which usually imply sophisticated monitoring and analysis mechanisms. This is essential for the smooth running of the entire recycling process as well as for planning and control urban waste recovering. In this paper we present a business intelligence system especially designed an...

During the last few years many research efforts have been done to improve the design of ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) systems. ETL systems are considered very time-consuming, error-prone and complex involving several participants from different knowledge domains. ETL processes are one of the most important components of a data warehousing system tha...

Today it is easy to find a lot of tools to define data migration schemas among different types of information systems. Data migration processes use to be implemented on a very diverse range of applications, ranging from conventional operational systems to data warehousing platforms. The implementation of a data migration process often involves a se...

Developing and implementing data-oriented workflows for data migration processes are complex tasks involving several problems related to the integration of data coming from different schemas. Usually, they involve very specific requirements - every process is almost unique. Having a way to abstract their representation will help us to better unders...

Usually, data warehousing populating processes are data-oriented workflows composed by dozens of granular tasks that are responsible for the integration of data coming from different data sources. Specific subset of these tasks can be grouped on a collection together with their relationships in order to form higher- level constructs. Increasing tas...

Nowadays, the vulgarization of information and communication technologies has reached to a level that the majority of people spend a lot of time using software to do regular tasks, ranging from games and ordinary time and weather utilities to some more sophisticated ones, like retail or banking applications. This new way of life is supported by the...

Over the past few years we have been witnessing to an unprecedented integration of software applications in various domains. From simple applications in retail systems to highly sophisticated products installed on personal devices, we recognize the usefulness of these products in the daily lives of people, giving them support into their most mundan...

This extended abstract briefly describes the techniques and tools developed in the context of GreenSSCM project to analyze energy consumption in software for space control missions. This project is being developed at VisionSpace in collaboration with Universidade do Minho. 1 Motivation Since the very beginning of the space exploration, energy consu...

One of the best ways to make an effective selection of data cube views is based on monitoring multidimensional queries during a relevant number of OLAP sessions. This allows to understand how and when a data cube is explored, collecting and analysing the views that decision agents use to consult. This is very important, because it deals directly wi...

During the last few years, we have been witnessing a significant increase in research about the development and production of hardware and software components with low levels of energy consumption. Today, energy consumption is one of the most critical issues in the area of information technologies and communication. One of the fractions in which th...

Today E-Government institutions face a lot of challenges related to the quality and effectiveness of the services they provide. In most cases, their users are more demanding, imposing new ways of acting and dealing with their needs, requesting often expeditious and effective attendance. Independently for their nature, we believe that such pertinent...

From small local businesses to large multinationals, we can find a lot of initiatives in order to put their business online. E-Commerce is rapidly expanding worldwide with the emergence of new web shops, business to business services, or payment services, just to name a few. E-Commerce companies have been continuously improving their business incom...

The design and development of a data warehousing system (DWS) tends to be an exceptional resource consuming project which in turn makes it a high risk/reward project. In order to minimize the risk, some design methodologies and tools are used along the several phases of the project. The Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) component is normally one of the...

From simple entertainment gadgets to real world based applications, a little bit of everything is in a mobile platform. Thus, it's not a surprise that enterprise managers, decision makers or business analytics use it also to support their most regular daily business activities. Following the same fast adoption path of other applications, their anal...

Due to their complexity and importance on data warehousing systems development, ETL systems are being a strong research subject approaching several issues especially related to reduce implementation costs, and enhance decision-making processes abilities. Since ETL systems are intrinsically connected to business processes, they are strongly influenc...

Today, analytical dashboards assume a very important role in the daily life of any company. For some, they could be seeing as simple “cosmetic” software artefacts presenting analytical data in a more pleasant way. However, for others, they are very important analysis instruments, quite indispensable for current decision-making tasks. Decision-maker...

The implementation of data warehouse populating processes (ETL) is considered a complex task, not only in terms of the amount of data processed but also in the complexity of the tasks involved. The implementation and maintenance of such processes faces various design drawbacks, such as the change of business requirements, which consequently leads t...

Data Warehouses store integrated and consistent data in a subject-oriented data repository dedicated especially to support business intelligence processes. However, keeping these repositories updated usually involves complex and time-consuming processes, commonly denominated as Extract-Transform-Load tasks. These data intensive tasks normally ex...

It is not new that on-line analytical processing systems arose to companies to stay. They have the ability to change the most common application scenarios that decision- makers use on their everyday tasks. The large flexibility in data exploration and high performance response levels to queries these systems have make them very useful tools for exp...

Modelling and implementing Data Warehouse populating processes (mainly known as ETL) involves in complex and challenge tasks that have been highlighted by numerous researchers in the field. Several workflow modelling languages, mainly used for supporting Business Processes modelling, such as BPMN, BPEL or UML AD, have been adapted and (sometimes) u...

Usually, a data warehouse is refreshed periodically with data gathered from disparate source systems. Nevertheless this data might not be fully accurate, probably containing serious data quality problems, such as uniqueness, misrepresentations, null values, multi-purpose fields, or inconsistent values, for one or more attributes. This is a major co...

e-Learning systems are today one of the most used tools in student’s life. Every time a student uses an e-Learning system he initiates a pre-defined, and often implicit, set of clicks, which somewhat characterizes his interests. The navigation habits of students can be revealed easily through a conventional usage profiling process. In most cases, t...

The formalization of software patterns has proven to be very useful in software developing, improving systems communication, data interchange across platforms, and simplifying the integration of processes and data flows. Populating a data warehouse (ETL) is often a very complex task demanding significant computational resources, involving not only...

Usually data warehouses store a large volume of data, keeping in their structures all information decision-makers need on their daily activities. Usually, a significant amount of this information is processed and materialized in data cubes to be explored latter using the most flexible ways that on-line analytical processing platforms dispose to do...

In software development, patterns and standards are two important things that contribute strongly to the success of any system implementation. Characteristics like these ones improve a lot systems communication and data interchange across different computational platforms, integrating processes and data flows in an easy way. In ETL systems, the cha...

This paper presents a tool, named QuerySheet, to query spreadsheets. We defined a language to write the queries, which resembles SQL, the language to query databases. This allows to write queries which are more related to the spreadsheet content than with current approaches.

Data warehousing systems have reached their maturity for a long time ago in the area of decision support systems. From dimensional modelling to query optimization there are a lot of topics in the field that were already systematically studied and explored. However, ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) stills suffer from a lack of a simple and rigorous appr...

Wastewater treatment plants are essential infrastructures to maintain the environmental balance of the regions where they were installed. The dynamic and complex wastewater treatment procedure must be handled efficiently to ensure good quality effluents. This paper presents a research and development work implemented to predict the performance of a...

Independently from the nature of a project, process management variables like cost, quality, schedule, and scope are critical decision factors for a good and successful execution of a project. In software engineering, project planning and execution are highly influenced by the creative nature of all the individuals involved with the project. Thus,...