Abstract
In this paper we propose a model for assessing the quality of educational collaborative virtual environments. The objective is to establish a theoretical model that highlights a number of relevant sets of requirements in relation to the quality in educational collaborative virtual environments. It is intended to apply the model during the lifecycle of product development and in the selection of the environment in order to support the learning/teaching process.

Abstract
The collaborative virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of 3D collaborative virtual environments for learning has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The design of the educational collaborative virtual environments goal is to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a design model for development of 3D Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model is composed by five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments (ECVE). It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro (Escudeiro, 2007) and allow us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence.

Abstract
As the World's population gets older, diseases directly related to aging are increasingly becoming the focus of technological effort and research. Dementia, in general, and Alzheimer's disease (AD), in particular, is one of the most common afflictions among elderly people, with studies predicting an even bigger incidence in the next decades. Due to mobility constraints, patients are being inadequately followed by their medical staff, hindering an effective delay of the disease's progression through preventive therapeutics. As such, new ways of diagnosing, tracking and rehabilitating AD patients are needed. This paper presents STAlz, a mobile device based system developed to provide caregivers and medical professionals a way to be in contact and share important information, and to provide patients with a tool that could potentiate the exercise of their cognitive functions. This system was tested with Alzheimer's disease caregivers and the initial results proved promising. © 2013 IEEE.

Abstract
SDIs allow the gathering of technical and organizational elements needed to enable the usage of territorial based information in an interoperable way. However, the cost of managing an SDI is high and the expertise level required is too specialized which, combined, hamper its maintenance and operation. This work, still in progress, presents a proposal for a manager for a regional level SDI, free software based, following the European INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) directive principles and complying with OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards. This CMS (Content Management System) for the SDI will shield the user from the inherent complexity and ease the creation of innovative services and the integration of cross-sectorial applications for a given region, using the geographic information generated by each municipality, as well as provide data for sibling SDIs (inter regional) and parent SDIs (supra regional).

Abstract

Abstract
Virtual Environments (VE) systems may provide a new way to deliver information and services in many areas, for example in tourism, urban planning and education. In urban VE there is a close link between the virtual environment and the urban environment that are intended to represent. These VE can be an intuitive way to access a set of services with a direct association to the real object or entity to which they are related. In this article, we describe a case study that aimed at exploring the possibility of using new interfaces to exploit and use services in urban VE with a greater sense of immersiveness. The results indicate that the VE interfaces are a natural and intuitive access to digital services. While users have felt a greater difficulty in performing some of the tasks in immersive scenario, the majority considered that this scenario provided a greater sense of immersion and realism.