Abstract
Due to its general usage in modern buildings, WiFi has been studied as a promising good low-cost solution to build localization services, but many other approaches are possible. Both industry and academy are putting considerable efforts in studying affordable and accurate alternatives, and no de facto standard exists yet. While technological diversity can be good in terms of flexibility, allowing distinct solutions to be used in distinct contexts according to accuracy needs or cost constraints, it is also a big obstacle to the goal of building a global positioning system. So one important requirement that has yet to be addressed is this diversity, allowing for multiple localization systems to be easily plugged into a standard and global localization service. In this paper, a solution to build a global localization service able to integrate various heterogeneous localization systems is presented and discussed. A prototype implementation built on top of DNS is proposed. The DNS subtree structure, as well as the Resource Records able to store the localization information, are presented and justified. The results obtained from prototype testing have proven that DNS is a valid and good candidate to support a global Localization Service.

Abstract
This project has been motivated by the need to standardize, preserve, and share the data sets of the Laboratory of Vibrations and Structural Monitoring (ViBest, www.fe.up.pt/vibest) of FEUP, produced by several long term projects individually managed. The solution presented is meant to support the process of Structural Health Monitoring, offering features to catalogue the projects, their goals and components, to store and visualize their acquired and processed data through time, and to preserve the data in a standardized form for all the research unit and extensible to future applications. The result is a digital archive with automatic ingestion of new data files and a Web interface with access control and tools for information management. There is a batch export functionality to deal with large data transfers. It is being used on monitoring data related with different kinds of structural health monitoring applications. The standardization and preservation of all data sets acquired in multiple applications will be certainly a solid basis for further research, either at a local basis or in the context of international joint cooperation.

Abstract
Research datasets in the so-called "long-tail of science" are easily lost after their primary use. Support for preservation, if available, is hard to fit in the research agenda. Our previous work has provided evidence that dataset creators are motivated to spend time on data description, especially if this also facilitates data exchange within a group or a project. This activity should take place early in the data generation process, when it can be regarded as an actual part of data creation. We present the first prototype of the Dendro platform, designed to help researchers use concepts from domain-specific ontologies to collaboratively describe and share datasets within their groups. Unlike existing solutions, ontologies are used at the core of the data storage and querying layer, enabling users to establish meaningful domain-specific links between data, for any domain. The platform is currently being tested with research groups from the University of Porto.

Abstract
Most current research data management solutions rely on a fixed set of descriptors (e.g. Dublin Core Terms) for the description of the resources that they manage. These are easy to understand and use, but their semantics are limited to general concepts, leaving out domain-specific metadata. The textual values for descriptors are easily indexed through free-text indexes, but faceted search and dataset interlinking becomes limited. From the point of view of the relational database schema modeler, designing a more flexible metadata model represents a non-trivial challenge because it means representing entities with attributes unknown at the time of modeling and that can change in time. Those traits, combined with the presence of hierarchies among the entities, can make the relational schema quite complex. This work demonstrates the approaches followed by current opensource platforms and proposes a graph-based model for achieving modular, ontology-based metadata for interlinked data assets in the Semantic Web. The proposed model was implemented in a collaborative research data management platform currently under development at the University of Porto. © 2014 ACM.

Abstract

Abstract
The Wind Scanner e-Science platform architecture and the underlying premises are discussed. It is a collaborative platform that will provide a repository for experimental data and metadata. Additional data processing capabilities will be incorporated thus enabling in-situ data processing. Every resource in the platform is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), enabling an unequivocally identification of the field(s) campaign(s) data sets and metadata associated with the data set or experience. This feature will allow the validation of field experiment results and conclusions as all managed resources will be linked. A centralised node (Hub) will aggregate the contributions of 6 to 8 local nodes from EC countries and will manage the access of 3 types of users: data-curator, data provider and researcher. This architecture was designed to ensure consistent and efficient research data access and preservation, and exploitation of new research opportunities provided by having this "Collaborative Data Infrastructure". The prototype platform-WindS@UP-enables the usage of the platform by humans via a Web interface or by machines using an internal API (Application Programming Interface). Future work will improve the vocabulary ("application profile") used to describe the resources managed by the platform.