Abstract
Cultural heritage documents are often subject to digitization processes resulting in image material, even for textual contents. It is therefore common, in collections of valuable documents, to have descriptive information generated by the institutions, along with digitized images, transcriptions created by scholars, translations and even miscellaneous annotations. To offer a faceted access to the collection it is necessary to explore these diverse materials, integrate them according to a model that accounts for both metadata and the content and provide a comprehensive retrieval environment. In this work we have applied the MetaMedia multimedia database framework to a collection of ancient documents, processed the documents in their descriptive, textual, and image content and produced a browsing and searching system. The main challenges are the integrated management of metadata and content, the indexing of the image content, and the design of the browsing and searching interface where various views on the data are kept together. Copyright (C) 2009 Catalin Calistru et al.

Abstract
This paper describes the participation of FEUP, from the University of Porto, in the TREC 2009 Blog Track. FEUP participated in the faceted blog distillation task with work focused on the use of temporal features available in the new TREC Blogs08 collection. The approach presented in this paper uses the temporal information available in most individual posts to amplify (or reduce) each post's score. Blog scores, and subsequent ranks, are obtained by combining individual posts' scores. While preparing the runs, no endeavors were made to identify a priori any temporal differences between the three distinct facets.

Abstract
The paper proposes a mixed annotation approach that exploits the advantages of both automatic and manual annotation techniques. Annotated multimedia material is regarded as a source of low- to high-level feature mappings supporting the propagation of annotations to new multimedia material. Video analysis tools do not currently produce effective annotations for retrieval, while manual annotation is expensive. The proposed approach uses low-level feature similarity to guide the retrieval of keyword annotations and aims to preserve the high quality of manual annotations while reducing the time and cost per annotated video unit. The annotation tool assists users, suggesting keywords for an item that come from similar items according to low-level descriptors. The effectiveness of current descriptors has been evaluated in an experimental environment using 5 video collections and a set of MPEG-7 descriptors. The similarity results have been compared to manually evaluated similarity.

Abstract
The integration of computer systems into clinical practice is a consequence of the growing sophistication of medical machinery. The fact that patient management in large institutions is handled by complex information systems brings about the need for integration between applications on both sides. The paper describes a prototype for automatic data collection from intensive care devices developed at Pedro Hispano Hospital in Portugal. The system acts as an application gateway between the network of patient monitoring devices and the general-purpose hospital network. The conformance to medical standards is one of the main concerns. The international standard Health Level 7 (HL7) has been adopted to import vital signs, as well as to prepare data for visualization in departmental applications and to organize archives. The design has followed the administrative and clinical processes in the hospital closely, leading to a successful interaction with the health professionals. Automatic acquisition eliminates transcription errors, improves the quality of records and allows the assembly of large electronic archives of vital sign data. The concern with data archiving in standard formats opens many possibilities for further analysis of the collected data sets. The possibility of communicating via the HL7 standard makes the whole system easily interoperable with applications in related domains.

Abstract
The University of Porto has a well-established set of specialized libraries serving the research and student population of its 14 schools. Thematic digital libraries can be valuable for organizing specific collections and for supporting emergent communities. This work focuses on two case studies, one in the area of the Fine Arts and the other in the area of Food and Nutrition. For building both digital libraries we propose to use the existing university repository infrastructure and to establish a metadata workflow that makes use of available descriptions in the library catalogues and in the university information system. We expect that such an approach, which takes into account the institutional context and resources, can be used in other collections at our university and inspire similar initiatives elsewhere.

Abstract