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Scientific research has always been done and is done in a collaborative manner. Today we have available the internet that facilitates this process through communication tools, data sharing, management tasks, among others. However, qualitative research has taken timid steps towards a truly collaborative work. This paper presents the 4C collaborative work model as well as the collaboration features available in the current version (2.0) of the qualitative analysis software webQDA. The paper is based on a questionnaire sought to understand the views of a random sample of users in Brazil, Spain and Portugal about these features. The results achieved demonstrate that the communications capabilities, cooperation and coordination are not yet fully explored by researchers. We hope that the development of version 3.0 of webQDA, can be benefited by the identification of the features most exploited by researchers and point to desired new features to be made available.

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This paper proposes an ontology-based approach to visualizing urban mobility data. Our approach, which is in ongoing development, is centered in a visualization-oriented urban mobility ontology that is used to semantically characterize data and visualization techniques. We present a practical application to a public transportation network of the city of Porto, Portugal. We address how semantics can empower and facilitate tasks like automatic recommendation of visualization techniques, and definition of a data filter based on passengers' journey patterns.

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Portable digital devices equipped with GPS antennas are ubiquitous sources of continuous information for location-based Expert and Intelligent Systems. The availability of these traces on the human mobility patterns is growing explosively. To mine this data is a fascinating challenge which can produce a big impact on both travelers and transit agencies. This paper proposes a novel incremental framework to maintain statistics on the urban mobility dynamics over a time-evolving origin-destination (O-D) matrix. The main motivation behind such task is to be able to learn from the location-based samples which are continuously being produced, independently on their source, dimensionality or (high) communicational rate. By doing so, the authors aimed to obtain a generalist framework capable of summarizing relevant context-aware information which is able to follow, as close as possible, the stochastic dynamics on the human mobility behavior. Its potential impact ranges Expert Systems for decision support across multiple industries, from demand estimation for public transportation planning till travel time prediction for intelligent routing systems, among others. The proposed methodology settles on three steps: (i) Half-Space trees are used to divide the city area into dense subregions of equal mass. The uncovered regions form an O-D matrix which can be updated by transforming the trees'leaves into conditional nodes (and vice-versa). The (ii) Partioning Incremental Algorithm is then employed to discretize the target variable's historical values on each matrix cell. Finally, a (iii) dimensional hierarchy is defined to discretize the domains of the independent variables depending on the cell's samples. A Taxi Network running on a mid-sized city in Portugal was selected as a case study. The Travel Time Estimation (TTE) problem was regarded as a real-world application. Experiments using one million data samples were conducted to validate the methodology. The results obtained highlight the straightforward contribution of this method: it is capable of resisting to the drift while still approximating context-aware solutions through a multidimensional discretization of the feature space. It is a step ahead in estimating the real-time mobility dynamics, regardless of its application field.

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