The Decision Deck project is an initiative of a European consortium aimed at collaboratively developing Open Source software tools implementing Multiple Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA).

The software components of Decision Deck implement the common functionalities of a large range of multiple criteria decision aid methods.

We participate in this project since January 2011. In particular, we want to make available the aggregation operators for linguistic data. At the moment, we have developed two components for the Decision Deck platform:

1. The OWA operator as defined by Yager:
   • R.R. Yager, On Ordered Weighted Averaging Aggregation, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 18, pp. 119-145 (1988)
2. The ULOWA operator that we defined at:
   • Isern, L. Marin, A. Valls, A. Moreno, The Unbalanced Linguistic Ordered Weighted Averaging Operator, In: Proc. IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, FUZZ-IEEE 2010, IEEE Computer Society, Barcelona, Catalonia, 2010, pp. 3063-3070.

Project code: TIN2012-34369
Main contact: Dr. Aïda Valls
Dates: February 2013 - February 2016 (3 years)

Abstract

The main aim of the SHADE project is the development of new techniques to solve some of the current limitations of decision support systems, focusing on these three aspects:

• Management of multi-valued semantic variables, with the assistance of domain ontologies.
• Management of hierarchically structured criteria in multi-criteria decision support systems based on outranking relations.
• Automatic dynamic adaptation of the users’ preferences based on the analysis of their interaction with the system.

The developed techniques will be tested and refined in three specific domains, for which domain experts and datasets are already available from previous projects:

• Recommendation of tourism activities (data and ontologies from the DAMASK, SigTur and EnoSigTur projects, experience of the Scientific and Technological Park of Tourism and Leisure and the Tourism Studies Foundation-Costa Dorada).
• Analysis of the treatment of the brand in Web sites of tourist destinations (data from the CODETUR project), experience from the research groups on Communication involved on that project.
• Analysis and selection of methods for managing river water (data from the SCARCE project, experience of the innovation and technology transfer center TecnATox).

Project code: TIN2009-11005
Main contact: Dr. Antonio Moreno
Dates: September 2009 - August 2012 (3 years)

Abstract

One of the main limitations of traditional data mining methods is the lack of use of domain knowledge. This project proposes the use of semantic domain knowledge, represented in the form of ontologies, to define new methods for extracting and integrating information from heterogeneous Web resources with varying degrees of structure, performing an automatic classification, and making a semantic interpretation of the results.

The project will test the practical applicability of the developed methods in the strategic area of Tourism, with the realization (with the collaboration of 2 relevant entities in this domain) of a Web application for the personalised recommendation of touristic destinations.

ARES gathers six of the most dynamic Spanish research groups in the area of information security and virtually all existing Spanish groups in the area of information privacy.

Some members of ITAKA belong to one of those groups: the IF-PAD Information Fusion for Privacy And Decision. This group is coordinated by Dr. Vicenç Torra from the Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence of CSIC (IIIA-CSIC). Dr. Valls and Dr. Torra have done research in the last 10 years in topics related to information fusion (in a broad sense) and its applications in privacy and decision.

Spanish-Tunisian project, funded by AECID (January 2010 - July 2012).

This project involves the ITAKA research group at URV and the University of La Manouba (Tunis). Its main aim is to study the following two aspects:

• How to use semantic information (e.g. domain ontologies) to improve information search and retrieval.
• How to use the results of information retrieval to improve automatically the domain knowledge.

Algoritmes de mineria de dades amb coneixement semàntic

Coordinator: Dr David Sánchez.

June 2009 - December 2011. Funded by URV with 6,000 euros.

New services for tourists according to their localization and/or tracking.

Coordinator: Dr. Aïda Valls

It involves 3 research groups at URV (ITAKA, CRISES and GRATET).

February - July 2009. Funded by URV with 13,000 euros.

Tourists tracking permits to analyse tourists mobility and provide them with customised advanced services.

Users mobility information can be used to implement intelligent transportation systems in which users pay different taxes depending on the characteristics of their trips (e.g. number of stops) or depending on the road traffic (i.e. road pricing).

In addition, tourists tracking information can be used to infer behavioural patterns that lead to the obtention of user profiles. These profiles are useful to provide them with new services of their interest, or to adapt existing services to their needs. However, tourists tracking endangers tourists privacy. Thus, these tracking systems must properly preserve their privacy (e.g. data must be anonymised before being used).

In this project, the state of the art of these tracking systems is going to be thoroughly studied. The results of this study can lead to identify interesting new research lines that can benefit the tourism industry.

Spanish project (2008-2010)

Development of an exposure and risk assessment model for the application of sewage sludge on agricultural land, based on a neuro-fuzzy expert system integrated into GIS.

Preliminary research project on the application of Information and Communication Technologies to the Management of Touristic Destinations.

Coordinator: Dr. Antonio Moreno

It involves 3 research groups at URV (ITAKA, CRISES and GRATET).

February - July 2008. Funded by URV with 10,800 euros.

The Knowledge Society opens new challenges in the Tourism field. It is important to study which are the current application areas of Communication and Information Technologies in Tourism and which are the open fields for future research. This project intends to study the state of the art in three different aspects: the intelligent management of touristic information, Geographical Information Systems applied to touristic management, and the interactivity in the web pages of touristic destinations. The project is also especially interested in analysing the local situation in the Costa ç Daurada with respect to those aspects, and in widely spreading the results of the project among the local stakeholders.

No description available.

Design and application of new Artificial Intelligence techniques for the acquisition and use of medical knowledge represented in healthcare patterns

(Spanish project, 2007-08-09)

EU Project IST-2004-026968 (March 2006 - September 2009)

K4CARE's main goal has been to design, implement and validate a new ICT knowledge-based Homecare Model by integrating skills, procedures and experiences of several eastern and western European countries as a contribution to the new EU society to manage and respond to the needs of the increasing number of senior population requiring a customised health-care at home.

Other more specific objectives:

• Generate a new ICT Homecare Model (HCM).
• Provide an Electronic Health Care Record (EHCR) to organise the information in the HCM.
• Use the EHR to integrate information coming from different EU countries.
• Provide an Actor Profile Ontology (APO) representing the profiles of the subjects involved in the HCM.
• Provide a patient-Case Profile Ontology (CPO) representing related symptoms, diseases, syndromes, and case mix.
• Define Formal Intervention Plans (FIPs) for a number of disease and syndrome treatments.