Abstract
Analytic usability analysis methods have been proposed as an alternative to user testing in early phases of development due to the cost of the latter approach. By working with models of the systems, analytic models are not capable of identifying implementation related problems that might have an impact on usability. Model-based testing enables the testing of an implemented software artefact against a model of what it should be (the oracle). In the case of model-based user interface testing, the models should be expressed at an adequate level of abstraction, adequately modelling the interaction process. This paper describes an effort to develop tool support enabling the use of task models as oracles for model-based testing of user interfaces.

Abstract
IdSay is an open domain Question Answering system for Portuguese that was developed from scratch. Its current version can be considered a baseline version, using mainly techniques from the area of Information Retrieval. The only external information that it uses besides the text collections is lexical information for Portuguese. It was submitted to the monolingual Portuguese task of the Question Answering track of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum 2008 (QA@CLEF) for the first time, in which it answered correctly to 65 of the 200 questions in the first answer, and to 85 answers considering the three answers that could be returned per question. Generally, the types of questions that are answered better by IdSay system are measure factoids, count factoids and definitions, but there is still work to be done in these areas, as well as in the treatment of time. List questions, location and people/organization factoids are the types of question with more room for evolution.

Abstract
This paper evaluates and compares different network generators to generate project scheduling problem instances based on indicators measuring the topological network structure. We review six topological network indicators in order to describe the detailed structure of a project network. These indicators were originally developed by [L.V. Tavares, J.A. Ferreira and J.S. Coelho, The risk of delay of a project in terms of the morphology of its network, European Journal of Operational Research 119 (1999), 510-537] and have been modified, or sometimes completely replaced, by alternative indicators to describe the network topology. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we generate a large amount of different networks with four project network generators. Our general conclusions are that none of the network generators are able to capture the complete feasible domain of all networks. Additionally, each network generator covers its own network-specific domain and, consequently, contributes to the generation of data sets. Secondly, we perform computational results on the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem to prove that our indicators are reliable and have significant, predictive power to serve as complexity indicators.

Abstract
The characterisation and quantification of long-term sea-level variability is of considerable interest in a climate change context. Long time series from coastal tide gauges are particularly appropriate for this purpose. Long-term variability in tide gauge records is usually expressed through the linear slope resulting from the fit of a linear model to the time series, thus assuming that the generating process is deterministic with a short memory component. However, this assumption needs to be tested, since trend features can also be due to non-deterministic processes such as random walk or long range dependent processes, or even be driven by a combination of deterministic and stochastic processes. Specific methodology is therefore required to distinguish between a deterministic trend and stochastically-driven trend-like features in a time series. In this chapter, long-term sea-level variability is characterised through the application of (i) parametric statistical tests for stationarity, (ii) wavelet analysis for assessing scaling features, and (iii) generalised least squares for estimating deterministic trends. The results presented here for long tide gauge records in the North Atlantic show, despite some local coherency, profound differences in terms of the low frequency structure of these sea-level time series. These differences suggest that the long-term variations are reflecting mainly local/regional phenomena. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Abstract
Sea level is a key variable in the context of global climate change. Climate-induced variability is expected to affect not only the mean sea level but also the amplitude and phase of its seasonal cycle. This study addresses the changes in the amplitude and phase of the annual cycle of coastal sea level in the extra-tropical North Atlantic. The physical causes of these variations are explored by analysing the association between fluctuations in the annual amplitude of sea level and in ancillary parameters [atmospheric pressure, sea-surface temperature and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) winter index]. The annual cycle is extracted through autoregressive decomposition, in order to be able to separate variations in seasonality from long-term interannual variations in the mean. The changes detected in the annual sea level cycle are regionally coherent, and related to changes in the analysed forcing parameters. At the northern sites, fluctuations in the annual amplitude of sea level are associated with concurrent changes in temperature, while atmospheric pressure is the dominant influence for most of the sites on the western boundary. The state of the NAO influences the annual variability in the Southern Bight, possibly through NAO-related changes in wind stress and ocean circulation.

Abstract
Quantile regression is applied for characterizing long-term sea-level variability in the Baltic Sea from long tide gauge records. The approach allows to quantify not only variability in the mean but also in extreme heights and thus provides a more complete description of regional sea-level variability. In the Baltic, slopes in minima are similar to the classical mean-based ordinary least squares slope, but maxima exhibit larger trends, particularly at the northernmost stations, in the Gulf of Bothnia, likely associated with changes in north Atlantic atmospheric circulation and particularly regional wind patterns. Citation: Barbosa, S. M. ( 2008), Quantile trends in Baltic sea level, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L22704, doi: 10.1029/2008GL035182.