Abstract
The TIMEMESH game, developed in the scope of the European Project SELEAG, is an educational game for learning history, culture and social relations. It is supported by an extensible, online, multi-language, multi-player, collaborative and social platform for sharing and acquiring knowledge of the history of European regions. The game has been already used, with remarkable success, in different European countries like Portugal, Spain, England, Slovenia, Estonia and Belgium. © 2012 IEEE.

Abstract
A UML Protocol State Machine (PSM) is a behavioral diagram for the specification of the external behavior of a class, interface or component. PSMs have been used in the software development process for different purposes, such as requirements analysis and testing. However, like other UML diagrams, they are often difficult to validate and verify, specially when combined with other artifacts, such as Object Constraint Language (OCL) specifications. This drawback can be overcome by application of an off-the-shelf formal method, namely one supporting automatic validation and verification. Among those, we have the increasingly popular Alloy, based on a simple relational flavor of first-order logic. This paper presents a model transformation from PSMs, optionally complemented with OCL specifications, to Alloy. Not only it enables automatic verification and validation of PSMs, but also a smooth integration of Alloy in current software development practices. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
Language resources that include semantic equivalences at word level are common, and its usefulness is well established in text processing applications, as in the case of search. Named entities also play an important role for text based applications, but are not usually covered by the previously mentioned resources. The present work describes the WES base, Wikipedia Entity Synonym base, a freely available resource based on the Wikipedia. The WES base was built for the Portuguese Language, with the same format of another freely available thesaurus for the same language, the TeP base, which allows integration of equivalences both at word level and entity level. The resource has been built in a language independent way, so that it can be extended to different languages. The WES base was used in a Question Answering system, enhancing significantly its performance.

Abstract
A mixed corpus of Portuguese is one in which texts of different origins produce different spelling variants for the same word. A new norm, which will bring together the written texts produced both in Portugal and Brazil, giving then a more uniform orthography, has been effective since 2009, but what happens in the perspective of search, to corpora created before the norm came into practice, or within the transition period? Is the information they contain outdated and worthless? Do they need to be converted to the new norm? In the present work we analyse these questions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
The study of long-term trends in tide gauge data is important for understanding the present and future risk of changes in sea-level variability for coastal zones, particularly with respect to the ongoing debate on climate change impacts. Traditionally, most corresponding analyses have exclusively focused on trends in mean sea-level. However, such studies are not able to provide sufficient information about changes in the full probability distribution (especially in the more extreme quantiles). As an alternative, in this paper we apply quantile regression (QR) for studying changes in arbitrary quantiles of sea-level variability. For this purpose, we chose two different QR approaches and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different settings. In particular, traditional linear QR poses very restrictive assumptions that are often not met in reality. For monthly data from 47 tide gauges from along the Baltic Sea coast, the spatial patterns of quantile trends obtained in linear and nonparametric (spline-based) frameworks display marked differences, which need to be understood in order to fully assess the impact of future changes in sea-level variability on coastal areas. In general, QR demonstrates that the general variability of Baltic sea-level has increased over the last decades. Linear quantile trends estimated for sliding windows in time reveal a wide-spread acceleration of trends in the median, but only localised changes in the rates of changes in the lower and upper quantiles.

Abstract
The quantification of the long-term variability of relative sea-level is a fundamental problem in geodesy. In the present study, quantile regression is applied for characterising the long-term variability in relative sea-level at the Gedser and Hornbaek tide gauges, in the North Sea-Baltic Sea transition zone. Quantile regression allows to quantify not only the rate of change in mean sea-level but also in extreme heights, providing a more complete description of long-term variability. At Gedser the lowest relative heights are increasing at a rate approximately 40% higher than the mean rate, while at Hornbaek the relative sea-level slopes are stable across most of the quantiles. A 30-year running window analysis shows that the linear trends display considerable decadal variability over the twentieth century for both stations.