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Recent developments in the fields of medicinal chemistry and computer science have made possible to perform rational drug design, helping reduce the cost and time required to discover new therapeutic agents. Particularly, quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) studies have been widely employed to correlate molecular structure to biological activity. Such analyses take into account a set of chemical compounds encoded by numerical descriptors and biological data for generating mathematical models capable to predict biological activity values for structurally similar unknown compounds. Although a huge amount of chemical and biological data has become publicly available, there is an increasing need for integrating and sharing the data from various repositories in order to derive a reusable domain knowledge base. Attempting to overcome such limitation, this article proposes an ontology for QSAR studies, named OntoQSAR, which describes the major concepts in these analyses, like methods used to obtain chemical descriptors and biological properties of chemical compounds. Since the compounds of interest in these studies must be subjected to the same methods for obtaining the necessary numerical descriptors, the developed ontology will allow that information to be reused in other related researches.

Given the potential use of open data and the obstacles for implementing Open Government Data OGD initiatives, this paper aims at describing the strategies adopted for preparing the implementation of an open Official Gazette at the municipal level. It is important to emphasize the potential value of the Official Gazette as a source of information, since it is perhaps the most detailed and comprehensive report the society can have on government daily activities. However, the data are mostly unstructured, and this fact, combined with the size of the database, makes any attempt to analyze it a non-trivial matter. Publishing the Official Gazette as OGD certainly does not address all the problems related to its use, but hopefully barriers can be overcome to allow more groups to make use of it. In this paper, three research methods are combined; a bibliographical review, documentary research, and direct observation. This paper describes the strategies and activities put into effect by a public body and an academic group in preparing the implementation of the open Official Gazette. It also analyses the outcomes of these strategies and activities by examining the tool implemented, the traffic and the reported uses of the Open Gazette. The paper concludes by reflecting on the main challenges that are raised in implementing open data initiatives at a local level in a developing country, and proposing an agenda for future research.

A tecnologia faz parte do dia a dia das pessoas, e esse espaco ocupado pela tecnologia tem crescido ao longo dos anos. Em especial, pode-se destacar a internet, que e utilizada para as mais diversas finalidades, a internet utilizada por todos e resultado de diversas modificacoes tecnologicas e o futuro exige que novas modalidades de internet sejam exploradas, e nesse cenario que vemos a Internet das Coisas tomar forma e ganhar forca. A IOT, como tambem e conhecida ao redor do mundo traz a audaciosa proposta de integracao do mundo real com o mundo virtual. Porem poucos estudos existem sobre formas de insercao estrategica da IOT nas organizacoes. Assim, com a intencao de contribuir de alguma forma a superar esta lacuna, este artigo visa propor uma estrutura conceitual para analisar fatores criticos na insercao de IOT em organizacoes. A pesquisa foi exploratoria e com abordagem qualitativa.

Este artigo apresenta um ambiente para o desenvolvimento de software baseado no reuso de componentes, que combina tecnologias de gerenciamento de workflows, semântica e componentes de software. O ambiente desenvolvido pode ser utilizado por desenvolvedores de software, projetistas de workflows e usuarios finais. Um estudo de caso real e apresentado para demonstrar a utilizacao do ambiente.

This article describes advances in a methodology for evaluating the strategic uses of Information technology (IT) in companies. Its objective is to help fill in for the absence in the literature of an integrated, flexible and holistic methodology with the necessary contemporary tools that will sustain analyses of different aspects related to the use of IT and its effects on the competitive advantage of companies. The article shows that a methodology for evaluating the strategic uses of IT is an essential component in the process of strategic planning in information technology. The methodology described here encompasses different aspects not considered in current methodologies and refers to contributions from different authors, some in the area of technological auditing and others who deal with IT. The above-mentioned methodology has been applied as a pilot project and is in its first phase at a large oil company in Colombia. In this article we will show only the procedures followed and the results of the application of certain components of this methodology. The research was bibliographic and exploratory, and involves a case study.

Despite the recent advances in the area of Business Process Management (BPM), today’s business processes have largely been implemented without clearly defined conceptual modeling. This results in growing difficulties for identification, maintenance, and reuse of rules, processes, and control-flow patterns. To mitigate these problems in future implementations, we propose a new approach to business process modeling using conceptual schemas, which represent hierarchies of concepts for rules and processes shared among collaborating information systems. This methodology bridges the gap between conceptual model description and identification of actual control-flow patterns for workflow implementation. We identify modeling guidelines that are characterized by clear phase separation, step-by-step execution, and process building through diagrams and tables. The separation of business process modeling in seven mutually exclusive phases clearly delimits information technology from business expertise. The sequential execution of these phases leads to the step-by-step creation of complex control-flow graphs. The process model is refined through intuitive table and diagram generation in each phase. Not only does the rigorous application of our modeling framework minimize the impact of rule and process changes, but it also facilitates the identification and maintenance of control-flow patterns in BPM-based information system architectures.