Affective Processes: Processes regulating emotional states and elicitation of emotional reactions. Cognitive Processes: Thinking processes involved in the acquisition, organization and use of information. Motivation: Activation to action. Level of motivation is reflected in choice of courses of action, and in the intensity and persistence of effort. Perceived Self-Efficacy: People's beliefs abo...

In this report we study the problem of building recognition. Given a database of building images, we are interested in classifying a novel view of a building by finding the closest match from the database. We examine the efficacy of local scale-invariant features and their associated descriptors as representations of building appearance and use a simple voting scheme in the recognition phase.

This article examines the extent and manner to which evaluations of flood-related precautions are affected by an individual's motivation and perception of context. It argues that the relationship between risk perception and flood risk preparedness can be fruitfully specified in terms of vulnerability and efficacy if these concepts are put into the perspective of prevention-focused motivation. T...

Mountain landscapes have changed drastically during the 20th century. The knowledge of changing patterns and processes is currently considered a key element for conservation and management. This integrative study combines different data sources, methodologies and representations that contribute to the history of common property land in Leomil highlands (Beira Alta, Portugal). The evaluated mate...

The definition of ontologies within the multimedia domain still remains a challenging task, due to the complexity of multimedia data and the related knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel framework (MOWIS) aiming at realizing a system for building Multimedia Ontologies from Web Information Sources that has been realized within the PRIN 2007-2009 project Cooperare and presented in previous...

For agents to act on behalf of users, they will have to query the vast amounts of textual data on the internet. However, much of this text cannot be queried because it is neither grammatical nor formally structured enough to support traditional information extraction approaches to annotation. Examples of such text, called “posts,” include item descriptions on Ebay or internet classifieds like C...

BACKGROUND We built the Drug Ontology (DrOn) because we required correct and consistent drug information in a format for use in semantic web applications, and no existing resource met this requirement or could be altered to meet it. One of the obstacles we faced when creating DrOn was the difficulty in reusing drug information from existing sources. The primary external source we have used at t...

Recycling process is one of the most important processes in the trend of sustainable development,a logical reaction against the problems that results from industrial age. Building materials can play an important rolein the process of a building formation or destruction, in fact, materials forms the building nature. Thus, the role ofmaterial and the impact of its recycling in sustainable develop...

Mashups are situational applications that join multiple sources to better meet the information needs of Web users. Web sources can be huge databases behind query interfaces, which triggers the need of ranking mashup results based on some user preferences. We present MashRank, a mashup authoring and processing system building on concepts from rank-aware processing, probabilistic databases, and i...