Search results

This paper aims to propose a method based on Linked Data and Semantic Web principles for composing microservices through data integration. Two frameworks that provide support for the proposed composition method are also described in this paper: Linkedator, which is responsible for connecting entities managed by microservices, and Alignator, which aligns semantic concepts defined by heterogeneous ontologies.

The proposed method is based on entity linking principles and uses individual matching techniques considering a formal notion of identity. This method imposes two major constraints that must be taken into account by its implementation: architectural constraints and resource design constraints.

Experiments were performed in a real-world scenario, using public government data. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed method and that, it leverages the independence of development and composability of microservices. Thereby, the data provided by microservices that adopt heterogeneous ontologies can now be linked together.

This work only considers microservices designed as data providers. Microservices designed to execute functionalities in a given application domain are out of the scope of this work.

The proposed composition method exploits the potential data intersection observed in resource-oriented microservice descriptions, providing a navigable view of data provided by a set of interrelated microservices. Furthermore, this study explores the applicability of ontology alignments for composing microservices.

This paper describes a software architecture that automatically adds semantic capabilities to data services. The proposed architecture, called OntoGenesis, is able to semantically enrich data services, so that they can dynamically provide both semantic descriptions and data representations.

The enrichment approach is designed to intercept the requests from data services. Therefore, a domain ontology is constructed and evolved in accordance with the syntactic representations provided by such services in order to define the data concepts. In addition, a property matching mechanism is proposed to exploit the potential data intersection observed in data service representations and external data sources so as to enhance the domain ontology with new equivalences triples. Finally, the enrichment approach is capable of deriving on demand a semantic description and data representations that link to the domain ontology concepts.

Experiments were performed using real-world datasets, such as DBpedia, GeoNames as well as open government data. The obtained results show the applicability of the proposed architecture and that it can boost the development of semantic data services. Moreover, the matching approach achieved better performance when compared with other existing approaches found in the literature.

This work only considers services designed as data providers, i.e., services that provide an interface for accessing data sources. In addition, our approach assumes that both data services and external sources – used to enhance the domain ontology – have some potential of data intersection. Such assumption only requires that services and external sources share particular property values.

Unlike most of the approaches found in the literature, the architecture proposed in this paper is meant to semantically enrich data services in such way that human intervention is minimal. Furthermore, an automata-based index is also presented as a novel method that significantly improves the performance of the property matching mechanism.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

This study aims to address the hybrid open shop problem (HOSP) with respect to the minimization of the overall finishing time or makespan. In the HOSP, we have to process n jobs in stages without preemption. Each job must be processed once in every stage, there is a set of m_k identical machines in stage k and the production flow is immaterial.

Computational experiments carried out on a set of randomly generated instances showed that the minimal idleness heuristic (MIH) priority rule outperforms the longest processing time (LPT) rule proposed in the literature and the other proposed constructive methods on most instances.

The proposed mathematical model outperformed the existing model in the literature with respect to computing time, for small-sized instances, and solution quality within a time limit, for medium- and large-sized instances. The authors’ hybrid iterated local search (ILS) improved the solutions of the MIH rule, drastically outperforming the models on large-sized instances with respect to solution quality.

The authors formalize the HOSP, as well as argue its NP-hardness, and propose a mixed integer linear programming model to solve it. The authors propose several priority rules – constructive heuristics based on priority measures – for finding feasible solutions for the problem, consisting of adaptations of classical priority rules for scheduling problems. The authors also propose a hybrid ILS for improving the priority rules solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the conceptual framework related to the Lean and Green practices, paradigms, future prospects and problems, indicating points of convergence and divergence between them.

Based on this premise, through vast literature systematization, the authors sought to categorize studies in order to consolidate constructs, reinforcing aspects regarding the positive and negative approaches and pointing out the gaps in the current state of the art. Broad literature systematization was carried out; the authors found 107 articles published between 2014 and 2018, separated into 10 categories.

The main constructs confirmed are the positive approximation of the Lean and Green union, evidenced by studies premised on the independent variable category demonstrating that their union influences other environmental performance variables.

The present research is a systematization of the literature, so its results have to be confirmed by other studies.

The study supports the Lean and Green theme, confirming converging issues between the two areas and launching new topics for future research.

The study contributed to the environmental theme by confirming synergies of the Lean and Green union and presenting new research themes.

To assert that Lean and Green systems union is sustainable, with regard to the tripod of sustainability, more studies on the social category are necessary.

The Sertão, located in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is the most populous semi-arid region in the world. The region also faces the highest rates of poverty, food insecurity and climate risks in this country. Basic economic activities, such as extensive livestock and dairy farming, tend to be mainly affected by the increasing temperatures and recurrent droughts taking place in the past decades. This paper aims to analyze farmers’ responses to climatic variability in the Sertão.

Analyses are based on farm-level data of the Agricultural Census 2006 and on historical climate data gathered by meteorological stations. The climate impacts and the effectiveness of adaptive strategies are compared between three groups of farms, which discriminate different levels of social and environmental vulnerability. Four production functions are modeled (milk, cattle, goat and sheep) accounting for sample selectivity bias.

In response to increasing temperatures, farmers tend to shift their activities mainly to cattle and dairy farming. But the overall productivity tends to reduce with the recurrence of droughts. Decreasing precipitation affects mainly the production of milk of smallholder family farmers and the cattle herd of non-family farmers.

Analyses do not account for short- and medium-run productive impacts of extreme droughts, which usually have devastating socioeconomic effects in the region.

Smallholder family farmers are the most vulnerable group who deserve more social and technical intervention, as they lack basic social and technological resources that can greatly improve their productivities and overcome the impacts of decreasing precipitation.

The purpose of this paper is to address the potential impacts of Industry 4.0 on human resource management (HRM) – with a particular focus on employment, job profile and qualification and skill requirements in the workforce – which can have implications for supply chain management (SCM). Consequently, exploratory relationships among Industry 4.0, HRM and SCM are presented based on a systematic review.

To explore Industry 4.0 literature and its impact on employment, the authors used a systematic literature review to identify, classify and analyze current knowledge, flagging trends and proposing recommendations for future research in this area. Using the Web of Science database, the authors utilized co-citation software to visualize the networks which emerged from recurrent terms and which were then used to develop the categories of analysis.

The authors can affirm that the literature in this field is in a transition process, from the early studies of German academics to the current development of new impacts worldwide. Industry 4.0 is the central theme of the literature analyzed and is accomplished through the development of employment, qualifications, skills and learning frameworks. The results reveal that most papers are conceptual, with quantitative studies still lacking. Developed countries have a leading role in terms of research production, while Latin America and Asia are far behind. Clustering reveals four dominant themes (educational changes, employment scenario, work infrastructure resources and work meaning and proposal). The first refers to labor changes around working conditions, the work environment and new skills which are required. The second main theme concerns the potentially unstable shift in the labor market has toward a high-level context. The third is about the technical interface of humans and machines, and finally, the fourth understands the German industry as a starting point for global industrial improvements and work proposal changes. Furthermore, socio-technical systems cover the implications of HRM for SCM in three different dimensions: qualification and education (human competences), collaboration and integration of SCM (organizational competences) and data and information management (technical competences).

An original research agenda for further development of the topic. Additionally, the implications of the findings for SCM practitioners are presented.

SCM managers can benefit from the results of this paper by developing adjusted polices for organizational and human aspects. Specially about training programs to improve technology skills and education programs for cyber-human new plataforms.

So far, Industry 4.0, HRM-related topics and implications for SCM have generally been considered separately. This paper elucidates the few important studies on the impacts of Industry 4.0 on human-related topics, such as the labor market, building a research framework using the main contributions highlighted in the literature. An original research agenda is presented, as well as potential implications for SCM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of sexual appeal in print media on consumers’ brand recall. More specifically, the differences between the fixation time on the “image” and “logo” elements in advertisements, with and without sexual appeal, were verified.

The correct research is experimental in nature, and divided into three stages: choosing the print advertisements to be viewed by the participants with eye tracking, capturing participants’ eye movements using a special eye tracking equipment and completing the questionnaire for calculating the number of brands recalled by the participants.

The authors have identified that there are no statistically relevant differences between the number of brands recalled, whether the advertisement does or does not have any sexual appeal.

The use of sexual appeal in advertisements on print media must be made with caution, and several implications for the textile and apparel industry are expressed in the conclusions.

The study’s relevance is threefold: the authors present more recent results about the relationship between sexual appeal and brand recall, as the most recent research study of a similar type was published in the late 1990s; they adopt key concepts from the neuromarketing field in an attempt to connect memory with the capacity of different components of the advertisements, to attract the visual attention of consumers; and they present results for three different product categories (alcohol, apparel and perfume).

The evolution of tourism must be framed into policies that aim a development model perspective for the destinations, based on the analysis of economic, political, and social indicators. Therefore, emerging destinations, located in territories with low population density, should be a target of a careful strategy policy, considering the characteristics of the region. In particular, the disaster caused by the pandemic context (i.e., COVID-19) implied profound changes in tourism thinking, planning, and development of regions in Portugal and throughout the world. The present chapter proposes the creation of a tourism monitoring system for Arouca (Portugal), a territory classified as Low-Density Territory, with specific characteristics. The monitoring will involve the planning and management of database, at the disposal of all stakeholders, ensuring that the tourism flows in analysis do not get overwhelmed, allowing the discussion of opportunities and threats for the territory, based on the partnership between the population, public and private sector, adjusted to the social, cultural, economic, and environment perception. Will also be considered the perspective of the local community from Arouca's region, the main actors from the territory such as Geopark Association of Arouca and the City Council, according to the surveys used as data basis of this study, along with statistics analysis.

During a fall, a significant part of the major forces is absorbed by the dorsolumbar column area. When the applied stresses exceed the yield strength of the bone tissue, fractures can occur in the vertebrae. Vertebral fractures constitute one of the leading causes of trauma-related hospitalizations, accounting for 15% of all admissions. Posterior pedicle screw fixation has become a common method for treating burst fractures. However, physicians remain divided on the number of fixed segments that are needed to improve clinical outcomes. The present work aims to understand the biomechanical impact of different fixation methods, improving surgical treatments.

A finite element model of the dorsolumbar spine (T11–L3) section, including cartilages, discs and ligaments, was created. The dorsolumbar stability was tested by comparing two different surgical orthopedic treatments for a fractured first lumbar vertebra on the L1 vertebra: the posterior short segment fixation with intermediate screws (PSS) and the posterior long segment fixation (PL). Distinct loads were applied to represent daily activities.

Results show that both procedures provide acceptable segment fixation, with the PL offering less freedom of movement, making it more stable than the PSS. The PL approach can be the best choice for an unstable fracture as it leads to a stiffer spine segment.

This study introduces a novel computational model designed for the biomechanical analysis of dorsolumbar injuries, aiming to identify the optimal treatment approaches within both clinical and surgical contexts.