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
Monitor, control and process data on top of distributed networks has been a trending topic in the past few years, with ubiquity being adjective to computing and, gradually, the Internet of Things becoming a reality in home and factory automation or Ambient Assisted Living (aal). Still, there is a general lack of knowledge and best practices on how to build systems that integrate devices and services from third-parties which connect dynamically with each other. Recurring problems such as security, clustering, message passing, deployment and other orchestration details also lack a standardized solution. The authors describe a platform that simplifies the bootstrap and maintenance of such complex systems, presenting its application in an aal scenario. Such platform could orchestrate most distributed systems, possibly setting a pattern for distributed ubiquitous computing. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

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.

Abstract
Image quality assessment as perceived by humans is of crucial importance in numerous fields of image processing. Transmission and storage of digital media require efficient methods to reduce the large number of bits to store an image, while maintaining sufficiently high quality compared to the original image. Since subjective evaluations cannot be performed in various scenarios, it is necessary to have objective metrics that predict image quality consistent with human perception. However, objective metrics that considers high levels of the human visual system are still limited. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of automatically predict, based on saliency maps, the minimum image quality threshold from which humans can perceive the elements on a compressed image. We conducted a series of experimental subjective tests where human observers have been exposed to compressed images with decreasing compression rates. To measure the difference between the saliency maps of the compressed and the original image it was used the normalized absolute error metric. Our results indicate that the elements on the image are only perceived by most of the human subjects not at a specific compressed image quality level, but depending on a saliency map difference threshold.

Abstract