Ijuris Selected Papers Book

Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, Post Doc. (org.)

Ijuris Selected Papers Book

Florianópolis Ijuris Digital Publishing December, 2003

Copyright © 2003 IJURIS Publisher: Tania Cristina D'Agostini Bueno Desktop publishing & cover: Marcos Carlson

ISBN: 85-89587-11-0

IJURIS DIGITAL PUBLISHING Lauro Linhares St, 728 / 212 Trindade 88036-001 Florianópolis SC BRASIL +55 48 3025-6609 / +55 48 234-5434 fax e d it or a d ig ita l@ij u r is.or g www.ij u r is.or g /e d it ora

Biblioteca Nacional – no. 89587

SUMMARY BILETA British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association 18th Annual Conference (2003, London, England)

www.bileta.ac.uk/2003

E-Courts in Brazil Conceptual model for entirely electronic court process

A Brazilian experience on technological distance learning for Law students and professionals

7 21

COLLECTER Collaborative Electronic Commerce Technology and Research (2003, Santiago, Chile) ing.utalca.cl/CollECTeR

Electronic transparency How Information Technology based on Internet Structure (using UNL) is able to contribute for public business transparency in the countries

Usability

31 45

The first border of e-Gov

IFIP

3rd I3E2003 IFIP Conference on e-Commerce, e-Business, and e-Government (2003, Guarujá, Brazil) www.cenpra.gov.br/noticiaseeventos/I3E_conference

The strategic information production for the modernization of public policies The Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs case

57

UNL International Conference on Universal Knowledge and Language (2002, Goa, India) www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/icukl2002

A proposal of an UNL application development environment

75

Semiotic approach for the design of adaptive graphical user interfaces using Universal Networking Language

87

Object oriented modeling applied to UNL

101

ROBOCUP

The First RoboCup American Open (2003, Pittsburg, USA) www.americanopen03.org

Soccer Intelligence

111

E-Courts in Brazil Conceptual model for entirely electronic court process Tania C. D. Bueno [email protected] Erica B.Q. Ribeiro [email protected] Hugo C. Hoeschl [email protected] Samantha Hoffmann [email protected]

ABSTRACT The objective of the e-Courts project is to revolutionize the application of Justice in Brazil by making the whole process of justice available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week via the world-wide web. It is a new way of managing juridical knowledge with integrity, quality and faster distribution of information, making the access to Justice easier and speeding up the whole judgement process. The proposal is innovative both in terms of its strategy for juridical knowledge management, as well as in terms of the technology to be applied. Technology-based companies, State Courts of Justice, Universities and Investment Funds are involved in the process of turning the project into reality.

1. INTRODUCTION Electronic Government experience in the Brazilian Judiciary System has been very successful: currently most Brazilian courts turn their jurisprudence available on the web, as they IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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make it possible for law professionals and citizens to follow lawsuits, except for those protected by secrecy. Some of those websites already allow the sending of petitions via Internet; they do not require the subsequent sending of the originals signed by the lawyer as they recognise, through the password or the digital signature, the authenticity and the juridical validity of the documents electronically sent. Although Communication and Information Technologies (CIT) are widely used to improve and modernise structures of public governance in Brazil, it can be noticed that most of the Courts are only just starting to think about knowledge management as a policy for those improvements. The initiatives on e-government for the Brazilian Judiciary Power are commonly restricted to the digitalisation of documents and availability of information concerning to lawsuits, keeping aside a global evaluation of the judicial process and bureaucracy. It is common to hear, in legal spheres, that transparency can be reached through the availability of important information. We believe that the ultimate revolution CIT can implement on e-governance is the change of view on problem solving, gathering and making available, for juridical operators (judge, lawyer, prosecutor) and citizens all the information required for a fair decision, enabling fast sentence implementation and identifying useless procedures. Since 1999, researchers of the Juridical Institute of Intelligence and Systems [10] have been studying the evolution of the Brazilian courts websites, evaluating the usability and the ergonomics of their format, content and services offered. Since 1999, researchers of the Juridical Institute of Intelligence and Systems (www.ijuris.org) have been studying the evolution of the Brazilian courts websites, evaluating the usability and the ergonomics of their format, content and services offered. Since 1997, IJURIS researchers have been carrying out studies on Artificial Intelligence for the IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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retrieval of juridical information. Many papers on conceptual models and software have been presented at International Conferences in Europe and in the USA [3] [4] [7] [8] [9] [14]. In December 2002, IJURIS was awarded the e-Gov Excellency Prize for its contribution in the Brazilian Observatory [12] of Information on Drugs, an initiative of Brazilian Federal Government to prevent the use of drugs. The development of a complex and comprehensive model for digital lawsuits as a whole is the result of a consolidated experience in using CIT in the Brazilian judicial field, reflecting its concern with the citizenship and with fair and fast trials. In this way, the Electronic Court project (e-Court) was devised to develop the complete digitalization of the judicial process allowing parties of a lawsuit and the judge to simultaneously handle the documentation of the process, freeing courts from having to handle huge amounts of papers. The functionality of each legal procedure is evaluated and the unnecessary ones discarded. Given the size and scope of the project, some legislative modernization will be required. In order to guarantee security to the beneficiaries of the initiative, the technology applied to the system is chosen from the ones widely tested on fields where precision and security are essential (for instance, banks and electronic income tax declaration).

2. PRESENT STAGE OF THE PROJECT The modular structure of the project allows the different modules to be developed independently and added in accordance with the demand. Currently, the most important software of the Distribution Module is under development: the Intelligent System for Validation of Parts of the Judicial Process (Sistema Inteligente de Validação de Peças Processuais SIVAPP) [2], which uses the most recent techniques of Artificial Intelligence. Due to this feature, it is possible to IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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classify and store the petitions received via web, which allows the processing time of a judicial litigation to be optimised. This system includes a complex knowledge representation: to automatically index the petition text it will be necessary to organize the most important Brazilian Codes in the form of an ontological tree. At this moment, the Criminal Code and Consumers Code are already implemented into the system. Estimates indicate that about 16 months are required to complete all the codes. The knowledge representation will be used in other modules and systems of the Electronic Court, mainly in the Judge Module. This development will be shown in more details under item 3.

3. THE COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURE ON THE WEB The Electronic Court Project – E-Court - was idealized in modules to enable its portability and scalability, so that the implementation of the modules is made according to the demand. The Distribution Module is already in advanced phase of development with the construction of the Intelligent System for the Validation of Parts of the Judicial Process. The application of this technology in the Judicial district of Brusque – SC - Brazil has also been widely discussed, as a pilot project. To have a demonstration of the system ready in the short term, professionals and institutions who were involved in a specific, socially relevant type of legal procedure were identified. The process chosen for the pilot scheme was the Fiscal Execution (a specific procedure for the judicial collection of public tax credits). The system is designed to be formed by different modules (see Figure 1), which gives the eCourts system the flexibility to be integrated in more complex systems.

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Figure 1. The Modular Structure of the Electronic Court Project

The other modules of the project, like the Judge Cabinet Management, Official Publication and Summon, Nomination of Assets, Center of Relationship with the User, Payment, among others, can be implemented in parallel, since the lack of one does not interfere with the other. Therefore, the modules are sufficiently independent and their construction can be made jointly or separately. Wireless communication, videoconference, tools for group work, corporative portal, electronic document management, relationship center, electronic signature and authentication, electronic banking system, electronic auction, e-post (universal and permanent e-mail) and Artificial Intelligence are examples of the innovations to be adopted by the E-Court project. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Moreover, the project attempts to turn into reality the digital communication of the Judiciary with the auxiliary agencies of Justice, such as the Public Prosecution service, Notary of Real estate offices, Police Stations, Banking Institutions, the Official Press and other institutions that facilitate the exchange of information to improve the efficiency of solving litigations. The project is also meant to rescue the notion of citizenship, improving the efficiency of judicial proceeding and, consequently, improving the image of the Judiciary Power as perceived by the national and international public opinions. The main advantages of the proposed model are: •

•

•

The judicial registry can be removed: as the main support to the Magistrate’s activities, the judicial registry is the administrative structure responsible for classifying and directing the process to the judge for rulings and sentences, assisting the public, parties and enquirers, issuing certificates, and accomplishing summons; all of them are activities that can be easily automated because they are highly standardized; Accomplishment of summons becomes faster: the current personal summon made by a bailiff and the one done by mail are both replaced by an e-mail; this becomes possible under the federal government's daring project by which each Brazilian citizen will be given a permanent e-mail address; and Judicial process transparency: the proposed model will guarantee the rendering of fast judicial service to the community. This will be achieved by having cases randomly distributed among the judges working in the same city. The criterion of “the previous process” will also be satisfied, i.e. the first lawsuit on a particular legal matter received will be the first to be judged.

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4. LEADING TECHNOLOGIES INVOLVED Many technologies and tools are expected to be used in the development of the e-Court project. The following technologies and tools will be handled for the development of the e-Court project: • • • • • • • • • • •

Wireless Communication; Videoconference; Groupware tools; Corporate portal; Electronic management of documents; Call centre; Electronic signature and authentication; Electronic payment system; Electronic auction; E-post (universal and permanent electronic mail); and Artificial intelligence.

5. THE INTELLIGENT SYSTEM FOR THE VALIDATION OF PARTS OF THE JUDICIAL PROCESS – SIVAPP The development and implementation of SIVAPP software is the start of the Electronic Court project, which main objective is the modernization of the Judiciary Power and the introduction of technological tools. The SIVAPP marks the beginning of a process of solving legal conflicts, where the citizen and the law operators will have access to all the procedures, at any time and any place, allowing enhanced transparency in the activities related to a judicial process, from the initial petition until the final judgment. Moreover, this form of organizing the knowledge will allow IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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the many steps and mere bureaucratic structures of the Brazilian justice simply to disappear, improving the speed and quality of the judgment. The use of Artificial Intelligence in the development of this software has to be highlighted since this is the great differential of the system when compared to the other systems available on the market. The development and implementation of SIVAPP with the use of techniques of Artificial Intelligence will turn this procedure instantaneous, decisively contributing for the optimisation and acceleration of the judgment. All the knowledge contained in the procedural parts, as well as the identification of the legal requirements of the complaint brief, is extracted through techniques of knowledge representation like CBR - Case-Based Reasoning [11] [12], DCKR®, SCS® [4], Text Mining and Data Warehouse [7]. CBR allows the texts to be represented in the form of cases, using indices. The texts of the procedural parts will be represented in an accessible way, through the mapping the document on a structured representation, defining a set of indices to facilitate the recovery process. For text representation there is a bank of cases organized through pairs of attribute-value, which are determined after collecting and analysing a representative percentage of different parts. The indices represent characteristics of the cases that indicate its utility in a specific situation. Domain specialists and the team of legal knowledge engineering determine the set of attributes and indices (see figure 2).

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Figure 2. The Judge Module

At the end of the pilot project, there will be a database and a structured knowledge that can be applied at any agency of Brazilian justice. SIVAPP will make the recognition of the subject of the petition, in order to identify the minimum requirements of the complaint brief: The parties in the process, the claim, the related proceeding and the competent judgment.

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Dictionary of normative terms

Controlled Vocabulary

Extraction

Partial matching

Indexes– present name of case the parties appropriate court lawsuit’s value indicative expression s

… … … … …

Indexes– template in database the appropriate court

…

lawsuit’s value … …

… … …

…

Similarity degree

Figure 3. The Process of Knowledge Extraction of SIVAPP

6. CONCLUSIONS In view of the problems involved in the implementation of efficient technological tools, the Brazilian Judiciary System is determined to find solutions to make possible the access to Justice. The Judiciary Modernization project includes subjects beyond a pure technological improvement. The organization of knowledge and its availability is the driving force for technological evolution, generating solutions with a high degree of usability and social reach. Therefore, it is possible to IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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visualize the future application of the e-Court project, help to synchronize the operations of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial arms of the state. The use of AI in this intention adds much value once it makes possible the development of systems that are capable to carry through complex tasks, without needing great interference of the human being. This means evolution in Justice Central Institution: the expenses with employees can be reduced; the work environment becomes more pleasant, without the physical presence of files of legal documents and only with virtual files of legal documents; and the citizen, the ultimate beneficiary of this process, will have a faster and fairer service. Another factor to be considered is that presenting a consensual definition of "Government" certainly is not an easy task; however several notions are scientifically accepted. One of them is the administration of the public power, in its hierarchies and functions. Its functions are considered starting from the classic triple view: Legislative, Executive and Judiciary Powers, hierarchically categorized in federal, state and city structures. So, it is important to differentiate "Government" from “Federal Executive Power”, especially in Brazil.

7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS State modernization and the concourse of technology-based companies (like Web Intelligence Systems) guarantee the project applicability and various alternatives of financing for the e-Courts project to become a reality. Post-graduate and graduate students of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, especially Fabrício T. Donatti, are involved in the development of e-Courts project. We would like to mention Dr. Carlos Prudêncio, Vice-President of TRE-SC (Regional IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Elections Court of Santa Catarina) for the support given to the whole idea.

REFERENCES 1. Bueno, T. C. D.; Ribeiro, E. B. Q.; Hoeschl, H. C. E-courts in Brazil: conceptual modeling for entirely electronic court process. Booklet: 18th Annual Conference of the British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association – BILETA 2003. 2. Bueno, T. C. D; Hoeschl, H. C; Santos, C. S.; Bortolon, A.; Theiss, I. Modeling an intelligence system for the evolution of Justice using the web. Submitted to 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law - ICAIL 2003. 3. Bueno, T. C. D., Hoeschl, H. C., Mattos, E. S., Barcia, R. M., Wangenheim, C. G. V. JurisConsulto: Retrieval in jurisprudencial text bases using juridical terminology In: The 7th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, 1999, OsloNorway. Proceedings of the Conference. New York: ACM, 1999. v.1. p.147 – 155. 4. Hoeschl, H. C., Bueno, T. C. D., Mattos, E. S., Bortolon, A., Ribeiro, M. S., Theiss, I., Barcia, R. M. Structured contextual research for the UN Security Council. 5th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2003, AngersFrance. Selected Papers Books: Enterprise Information Systems IV. Kluwer, 2003 5. Hoeschl, Hugo Cesar. Introduction to electronic government (ebook). Available at: www.phoenix-library.org. Access in: Feb. 26th, 2003. Original title: Introdução ao Governo Eletrônico. 6. Hoeschl, Hugo Cesar. Elements on electronic government (ebook). Available at: www.phoenix-library.org. Access in: Feb. 26th, 2003. Original title: Elementos de Governo Eletrônico. 7. Hoeschl, H. C., Bueno, T. C. D., Bortolon, A., Mattos, E. S., Ribeiro, M. S. AlphaThemis - from text into knowledge. In: 1st Workshop on Automatic Deduction and Artificial Intelligence (IDEIA), in the 8th Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA), 2002, Sevilha-Spain. Proceedings of the IDEIA, 2002. v.1. p.91 – 100. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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8. Hoeschl, H. C., Bueno, T. C. D., Barcia, R. M., Bortolon, A., Mattos, E. S. Olimpo: Contextual structured search to improve the representation of UN Security Council with information extraction methods In: 8th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, 2001, St. Louis-EUA. ICAIL 2001 Proceedings. New York: ACM SIGART, 2001. p.217 – 218. 9. Hoeschl, H. C., Barcia, R. M. Access to information and knowledge using distance learning and artificial intelligence In: 1st UNL Open Conference, 2001, Suzhou-China. UNL 2001 Open Conference Proceedings, 2001. 10. Juridical Institute of Intelligence and Systems. Available at: www.ijuris.org. Access in: Feb. 26th, 2003. Original title: Instituto Jurídico de Inteligência e Sistemas - IJURIS. 11. Lenz, M.; Burkhard, H.-D. CBR for document retrieval: the FAllQ Project. Lecture notes in artificial intelligence: 2nd International Conference on CBR, ICCBR97. D. Leake, E. Plaza (ed.) Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1997. 12. Lenz M.; Hübner A.; Kunze M. Textual CBR. M. Lens, B. BoutshSporl, H.-D. Burkhard, S. Wess (eds.). Case-Based Reasoning Technology. Springer Verlag. 1998. 13. OBID - Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs. Available at: www.obid.senad.gov.br. Access in: Feb. 26th, 2003. Original title: - Observatório Brasileiro de Informações sobre Drogas. 14. Weber, R., Barcia, R. M., Rodrigues, A. M., Mattos, E. S., Bueno, T. C. D., Hoeschl, H. C., Pacheco, R. C. S. Reusing cases to the automatic index assignment from textual documents. In: 6th German workshop on case-based reasoning - foundations, systems and applications, 1998, Berlin-Germany. Proceedings of the Workshop, 1998.

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IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

A Brazilian experience on technological distance learning for Law students and professionals Erica B. Q. Ribeiro [email protected] Hugo C. Hoeschl [email protected] Tania C. D. Bueno [email protected] Samantha Hoffmann [email protected]

ABSTRACT This paper is to describe an experience on technological distance learning for law students and professionals which has been undertaken in Santa Catarina/Brazil aiming, firstly, to qualify professionals and students to use the internet as a source of information for their works and, secondly, to insert them into a positive discussion regarding the most appropriate technologies for the development of a more efficient Judiciary system and for the implementation of electronic courts in Brazil. The course indicates that there is a highly positive atmosphere for the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) in the Brazilian professional and academic legal environment.

1. INTRODUCTION The methodologies of distance learning have been increasingly finding more and more acceptance in the academic and professional fields of Law in Brazil as in the entire world. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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People are becoming more and more reliant on computers and technology to perform basic tasks of their daily life. In the same way, students and professionals of Law are becoming more aware of the fact that the many contents to be taught and learnt by them have no need of the physical presence of a teacher talking and gesticulating in front of them, in the same way that ideas, to be transmitted, do not need the physical presence of the author/thinker (Would Shakespeare’s lines be better appreciated if he were telling them to us in person?). The reason for that is simple: ideas have a life of their own, they are independent of the mind or paper where they were created - from the very moment when they touch the first receiver/pupil. In this trace of thought we can consider that the on-line teaching brings a number of advantages: to start with, in the distance learning system the idea is transmitted and received, one can daresay, on its purest form, the written word. With this educational technique the word alone is the item to be interpreted in the teaching/learning, the students don’t have to interpret the expressions of the teacher. It can stimulate certain students to expose their own ideas and questions more openly; likewise, it can inspire the ones whose brilliance comes more from an easy and fluent expression than from the originality of ideas, to better elaborate the “content” aspect of their abilities, since in the on-line learning system they would have to show and develop their skills and ideas in a simple and clear environment (considering that they will no longer be able to conceal any lacking or limitations with pleasant gestures and graceful actions because no one is physically present in on-line environments). Also, there is no timetable for classes or lessons, students are free to perform the tasks when they consider more appropriate or when they have a better inspiration for it. Not having the limit of scheduled lessons, students have all twenty-four hours of the day to choose the moment they want IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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to dedicate to their study, which makes the system very practical – they can even spend the whole day in the Virtual Learning Environment.

2. THE JURIDICAL WEB RESEARCH EXPERIENCE – CONTENT AND METHODOLOGY Taking these aspects into account and with an enthusiastic disposition, the researchers of the Juridical Institute of Intelligence and Systems – www.ijuris.org - and the University of the South of Santa Catarina – www.virtual.unisul.br - started an experience on distance learning, in October 2001. Through this new course, Law students and professionals (lawyers, judges and prosecutors) would qualify for an efficient use of the most recent technology in the juridical ambit. IJURIS supplied scientific content and experience in developing technological tools in the juridical field. UNISUL contributed with technical support on distance learning. Both institutions wished to innovate and bring about something new - the course “Juridical Web Research” was created, a revolutionary way of learning designed for students and professionals interested in give a vigorous impulse in their careers. The strategy was to combine the use of ICT with the study of certain topics in Law (Civil and Criminal Procedures, Electoral and Civil Law especially). The exchange of ideas and opinions was stimulated. Debates about interrogatories via videoconference were proposed on subjects such as the use of such technological tool for the interrogatory of arrested defendants, which is in frank expansion in Brazil notwithstanding the controversy it raises in terms of both principles, the Due Process of Law and Wide Defence. Gathering statements and reports digitally available in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), as well as visits to the site of the judge who first accomplished such an experience of interrogating via videoconference, were other efficient IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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methods to raise discussion concerning the proposed subjects. The quality of the interaction between students and between students and teachers was evident through the material produced by the students as response to the topics proposed or even mentioned by chance during the exercises. Technical subjects, such as the safety of the identification of the sender and the safety of contents in procedural documents transmitted via web, were discussed with the help of specialists on the subject. The Brazilian experience on the sending of official certificates and documents through the Internet as well as on on-line income declarations allowed exercises on the production of evidences in the lawsuit. One of the matters to raise debates when the use of consolidated technologies was analysed, was regarding the safety of the current Judiciary System, which is strongly based on physical solemnities (paperwork mostly). The conclusion was that technological tools could guarantee a better control of the procedural acts and the identification of responsibility for the evil use, as they can accelerate the judicial activity with the elimination of dispensable institutions such as the judicial registry. Because jurisprudence are essential for any petition presented to the Brazilian Courts, the use of logical connectors in Boolean searches on the Brazilian courts websites was well regarded by the students, as it makes the jurisprudence searches more efficient. The search system of all the Brazilian courts websites was evaluated through comparison, which allowed students to identify those that are more ergonomic and functional for users.

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Figure 1. The illustration shows one of the twelve exercises available at the Virtual Learning Environment of the “Juridical Web Research” course. The tools for interaction with the teacher, tech support and other students are available on the top of the screen; the content of the course itself is shown above

The goal of the course was to prepare students for a totally digitalized lawsuit, with a study for the integration of technologies of Law Companies with the ones used by the Brazilian Courts websites. Two thirds of the time spent for the IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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elaboration of a sentence or a procedural piece is wasted on the search for doctrine and jurisprudence that can be applied to the case of study. We believe that the emphasis on the memorization of cases and theses for the study of Law, as it happens now in Brazil, will give place, with the coming of new ICT, to the real ability in handling juridical knowledge in wide aspect, as SCHWEINGHOFER indicates to the School of Rights in the European Union; hence the preparation of students to a completely electronic legal process. Inspired in WIDDINSON, we privileged the use of technological tools that favoured four important aspects: (i) deepened approach; (ii) emphasis on the relativism of ideas rather than the dualism of opinions; (iii) balance between holistic approach and detailed study; and (iv) balance between convergent and divergent thought. The content of the course was dimensioned in five modules adding up 20 hours of dedication. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) was available for each student for 30 days, allowing him or her to accomplish their activities at any day of the week and at any schedule, as most of the activities were based on asynchronous tools. Since April 2002 three hundred Law students and professionals were qualified while others already wait for the opening of new groups.

3. EVALUATION AND FUTURE WORK The spontaneous answer to the questionnaire that evaluates the course allowed us to obtain valuable information, such as the satisfaction level with the VLE, content, technological support and teaching. The course today is on its seventh edition. The first edition was made to assemble, in a test-group, Law professionals and students who were especially invited to evaluate the proposal. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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The two following groups were composed by students from the graduation course in Law and also by professional, masters and specialists from other areas. From the 106 registered students of the online program, 47 answered the questionnaire for the evaluation of the course – and their answers were studied and examined by Mr Inacio Reichert. His analysis resulted into a thesis for a Master Degree presented in May 2003 before the board of the Post-Graduate Program in Production Engineer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina – PPGEP-UFSC. The main expectations regarding the course were, among others, a) the good interaction with the course monitors (who offered technical support), with the tutors (who offered support over the content of the course) and a good interection among the students themselves; b) the possibility of group integration for the elaboration of politics, for the programming, and for the creation of projects that made possible the juridical distance learning; c) a wide flexibility regarding the time of study; d) an improvement of skills for the transmission of knowledge; e) fast actualisation; f) agility on the access to jurisprudence. The questionnaire was structured with questions of closed answers, with 5 alternative answers that varied from insufficient, to regular, to satisfactory, good and Excelent. 92% stated that the programmatic content of the course offered a considerable amount of new information for the updating of professional practice. Regarding the technology used for the distance learning, 93% of the questioned students declared that the Virtual Learning Environment was good or excellent for a process of distance learning. As to the relation each one of the students had with the course tutor, 80% stated that the interaction was IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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good/excellent and 85% answered that the teacher showed to have a solid knowledge and was very competent on the area embraced by the course. Concerning the service offered by monitors and equipments, 89% said that the monitor helped them very efficiently when they requested for help. Sixty-three per cent of the students declared that the course completely answered their initial expectations and 61% stated that the purposes of the course were attained. Thus, the spontaneous answer to the mentioned questionnaire that evaluates all the structure of the course allowed us to obtain essential information regarding the level of satisfaction with the Virtual Learning Environment, with the content of the course, the technological support and with the teaching itself. The whole experience allowed us to identify a growing demand for TICs qualifications for Law professionals and students.

BIBLIOGRAPHY BORTOLON, A., MITSUI, J. O., HOESCHL, H. C., BARCIA, R. M., PAULA JÚNIOR, J. L. A Proposal of an UNL Application Development Environment In: International Conference on Universal Knowledge and Language, 2002, GOA. Proceeding. Genebra-Switzerland: UNDLF, 2002. v.1. BUENO, T. C. D., HOESCHL, H. C., MATTOS, E. S., BARCIA, R. M., WANGENHEIM, C. G. V. JurisConsulto: Retrieval in Jurisprudencial Text Bases using Juridical Terminology In: The 7th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, 1999, Oslo-Norway. Proceedings of the Conference. New York: ACM, 1999. v.1. p.147 – 155.

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HOESCHL, H. C., BARCIA, R. M. Access to Information and Knowledge using Distance Learning and Artificial Intelligence In: 1st UNL Open Conference, 2001, Suzhou-China. UNL 2001 Open Conference Proceedings, 2001. HOESCHL, H. C., BUENO, T. C. D., BARCIA, R. M., BORTOLON, A., MATTOS, E. S. Olimpo: Contextual structured search to improve the representation of UN security council with information extraction methods In: 8th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, 2001, St. Louis-EUA. ICAIL 2001 Proceedings. New York: ACM SIGART, 2001. p.217 – 218. HOESCHL, H. C., BUENO, T. C. D., BORTOLON, A., MATTOS, E. S., RIBEIRO, M. S. AlphaThemis - from Text into Knowledge. In: 1st Workshop on Automatic Deduction and Artificial Intelligence (IDEIA), in the 8th Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA), 2002, Sevilha-Spain. Proceedings of the IDEIA, 2002. v.1. p.91 – 100. HOESCHL, H. C., BUENO, T. C. D., MATTOS, E. S., BORTOLON, A., RIBEIRO, M. S., THEISS, I., BARCIA, R. M. Structured Contextual Research for the UN Security Council. 5th International Conference On Enterprise Information Systems, 2003, Angers-France. Selected Papers Books: Enterprise Information Systems IV. Kluwer, 2003. SCHWEINGHOFER, Erich. Establishing the Necessary Link Between Electronic Sources and Legal Education. Paper presented on the 12th BILETA Conference. Available in: www.bileta.ac.uk/97papers/97-13.html. Acess on: January, 20th, 2003. WEBER, R., BARCIA, R. M., RODRIGUES, A. M., MATTOS, E. S., BUENO, T. C. D., HOESCHL, H. C., PACHECO, R. C. S. Reusing cases to the automatic index assignment from textual documents In: 6th German workshop on case-based reasoning foundations, systems and applications, 1998, Berlin-Germany. Proceedings of the Workshop,1998. WIDDINSON, Robin. Learning Law in the Twenty-First Century. Available in: www3.oup.co.uk/inttec/hdb/Volume_08/Issue_02/pdf/0801 66.pdf. Access on: September, 1st, 2002.

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IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

Electronic transparency How Information Technology based on internet structure (using UNL) is able to contribute for public business transparency in the countries Jaime Leonel de Paula Júnior, PhD candidate1 [email protected] Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, PhD2 [email protected] Ricardo Miranda Barcia, PhD1 [email protected] Simone Keller Füchter1 [email protected]

ABSTRACT This article aims to present case studies carry out in the public administration area, specifically in the purchase sectors, in which information technology based on internet infra-structure makes possible better improvements in the public administration purchase control and strongly contributes for purchase prices reduction and for society monitoring. This creates what is called e-transparency (electronic transparency) with UNL technology allows people to communicate in different languages which is an important price reduction factor due to a corruption indices reduction in this area.

1

2

Post-Graduate Program in Production Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Trindade, Florianópolis, Brazil, 88040-900, 55 48 234-0333, www.eps.ufsc.br Law and Intelligence Systems Research Institute, Lauro Linhares St, 728/105, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 88036-002, 55 48 3025-6609, www.ijuris.org IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Ijuris Selected Papers Book Keywords Electronic Transparency, Information Technology, UNL, Public Business.

1. INTRODUCTION The coming of network computers, the micro informatics growing, and the increase of Internet usage, became the word “Virtual” more and more ordinary. In the global economy era, the economy is not been reinvented, but promoting a commercial revolution. It is not maritime navigation anymore, but it is electronic and requires deep knowledge in navigation and new instruments so that businesses do not failure in the new millennium’s end communication network, the Internet. Despite it is beginning, the international electronic commerce has more than 200 million internet users, hundreds of billion dollars, and expects to achieve in five years more than 10% of the international commerce. The different idioms act as a barrier in the businesses, making difficult the international business relationships. The technological dissemination allows the cultural evolution that is a pre-requisite for the new technologies adoption. The Brazilian numbers divulged by IDC have shown more than US$ 3 billion in 2001, and project US$ 25 billion in 2005. Brazil has more then 12 millions of internet connections, which may represent 24 to 32 millions of internet users. Brazil owners a world record of income tax declaration through the Web, totalizing 90 % of total Brazilian declarations.

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As in Brazil as in others countries, the electronic commerce between companies represents 80 % of total volume in internet business. The electronic commerce have been registered important success cases, as the Electronic Bidding System -Sao Paulo(BEC/SP), which has 1200 buyers, and 85 thousand items catalogue served by 37 thousand suppliers. The BEC have been provided 22% savings on purchase prices and reduction of buying periods from months to days. The Florianópolis city administration, capital of Santa Catarina State, has 11 thousand suppliers and 10 thousand items catalogue, and savings are around 30%. São Luís city, in Maranhão State, has started its public purchase process through the Internet. The Federal Government started to discuss this issue, and is going to launch, with considerable delay, its solution for public purchases. This article aims to present the technological tools as a support to considerable reduction in the corruption indices in these sectors, if the dissemination and use of these tools are supported by correct politics determinations.

2. WHY UNL PROMOTES E-TRANSPARENCY? It is extremely important to have friendly and comprehensive systems for the end users so that they can access worldwide information in their mother languages. The Universal Networking Language (UNL) is presented as a highly important initiative within the scope of actions of the United Nations Organization, representing a solution to overcome the barriers of linguistic differences. E-transparency asks a language that must be understood in anyplace. With UNL is possible doing that. It is made up by: a vocabulary formed by Universal Words (UW); a set of relations and IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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attributes representing the syntax of UNL; and UNL’s knowledge base, which is the semantic of the language. The representation of information using UNL is done sentence by sentence. The sentence is represented by a hyper graph where the UW is the nodes and the relations and attributes constitute the arcs of the graph. There is at least one binary relation between the UW of a sentence, and the classification of subjects and objects of the sentence is expressed, respectively, by relations and attributes. In this way, a UNL document assumes the format of a long list of relations between concepts.

3. DEFINITIONS For this article, electronic transactions between government and business, usually called “G2B” (government to business) is defined as the use of technology to the easiness of public institutions relationship and their suppliers relation, leading to buying process automation followed by productivity improvements (buying prices, bureaucracy, and purchase time reductions), all of that motivated by electronic transparency and allowing a better society control. It is formed by all services and goods flow, the information and the financial processes among buyers and sellers using electronic technology. Through out electronic commerce, businesses between companies are conduct and through out electronic cooperation, information and common objectives are shared. Also, electronic compensation allows finance negotiations on the net.

4. BACKGROUNDS In the following quotation, De Masi (1999, p.25) tries to explain in his book The Pos-industrial society, it is not the reality that is in crisis, but our way to understand and evaluate it. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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“Noting much have been said on crisis since the promotion of new technologies that eliminate man physical fatigue, increase his memory, calculus and intelligence capacities, help his physical health, improve his knowledge, make possible new perspectives to biogenetics, agriculture, and transportation, and allow, a this time, to transform the employers´ job time into free time to be used in people and society growth.” In order to show the “international ranking” of corruption, the results of Annual Corruption Perceptions Index prepared by Transparency International (TI). Country Rank

Country

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 46

Finland Denmark New Zealand Iceland Singapore Sweden Canada Netherlands Luxembourg Norway Brazil

2001 CPI Score 9.9 9.5 9.4 9.2 9.2 9.0 8.9 8.8 8.7 8.6 4.0

Surveys Used

Standard Deviation

High-Low Range

7 7 7 6 12 8 8 7 6 7 9

0.6 0.7 0.6 1.1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.3 0.5 0.8 0.3

9.2 - 10.6 8.8 - 10.6 8.6 - 10.2 7.4 - 10.1 8.5 - 9.9 8.2 - 9.7 8.2 - 9.7 8.4 - 9.2 8.1 - 9.5 7.4 - 9.6 3.5 - 4.5

Table 1. Transparency International Annual Corruption Perceptions Index

This index consists of “poll of polls” drawing upon numerous distinct surveys, which uses different indices prepared by international consultancy companies specialized in country risks and advices for international investors. These indices are based on surveys that show the perception of national and international business man in different countries. The results were compiled to prepare the Corruption IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Perception Index by the professor Johann Graf Lambsdorff, of the Göttingen University, in Germany. This index ranges the countries in a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (highly clean), corresponding to an average of the different indices used. In 1995, for example, among the 41 surveyed countries, Brazil held the 36º position, average about 2,70. In 1996, with 54 surveyed countries, Brazil held the 40º position with little better average, 2,96. In 1997, it had some improvement grading 3,56, backing to 36º position, among 52 countries. In 1998, TI had include 85 countries and Brazil held 46º position, average about 4,0. In 1998, in Latin America, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay held better positions than Brazil, but Jamaica, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Equator, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras and Paraguay were in worse positions. In 1999, the business man Antonio Ermírio de Moraes, in his weekly article in Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, said that Brazil would face problems in its evaluation due to recently dishonesty events in public management. The Latin America 2001 report conclusion states the main causes of corruption derives from government no-transparency structures that maintains a law disrespect tradition and the need to finance politicians and money laundering from traffic and other illegalities. According to Fernando Dal Piero, in his article Informação & Corrupção, published in Guia da Imprensa, on June 16, 2000, “Indeed, If we intend to control the corruption, it requires to activate the citizens and companies power, creating a technology society network, in which everybody is able to communicate with producers and receptors of information, IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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establishing transparency in the developed strategic actions aiming at control the sociopolitical system. This depends on website construction and it’s frequently updated on corruption, observing and promoting how it appears.” Many samples are found around the world, and in Brazil there are pioneer initiatives focusing the network construction on electronic transparency to solve the following problem: the public area purchases used frequently as a way to finance political campaigns in the Latin America countries. The Electronic Bidding System - Sao Paulo (BEC/SP), in Sao Paulo state government (www.bec.sp.gov.br) operates since September 2000 and the Florianopolis city electronic purchasing system have started its operation on December 2001. In the first sample, the system results have been showing 22% prices reduction and around 30% in the second one. This derives from transparency applied by the government in its purchase process. Description Purchase price decrease(ann. average) Bureaucracy reduction (indirect cost) Bidding time reduction Annual purchase volume Suoliers number Items number

UNIT BEC-SP Florianopolis City % 22,23% 30,00% % 73,00% % 80,00% Millions 2,900.00 Unit 37,000 11,000 unit 85,000 10,000

Table 2. Practical results on Internet acquisitions Public Area Cases Summary

5. BASES Based on complete revolution new technologies have been promoting in international scenery, agreeing with new economy tendencies and aiming at prepare people and company competitors to act in global market, the Internet IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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business platform was created. Called “e-transparency”, it intends not to have the writing and speaking idioms limitations and expects to have help from public and private companies for its virtualization process. The basic project concepts are: •

•

• •

• •

•

To promote transparency in public purchases and public revenue so that citizens can see quotations through the Internet in a universal and democratic way. The citizens, using the public purchases site, will have a tool to see from their houses, offices, companies, and public access terminals the purchase process, knowing what is going to be bought, from whom and for what price. Purchase savings that can achieve 25% reduction costs in relation to the reference prices. Possible warehouse cost reduction, leading to decrease in the numbers of purchased products and in required area and quantity of warehouses. Equal conditions to suppliers so that they can attend to public institutions, regardless of the company size. Savings due to less bureaucracy and to a better performance of the buying process, with the possibility to achieve 70%. Digital security, since systems can use the advanced security routines available at the software market, such as: password expiration control, login control, cryptography passwords, user changing password, users´ block, SSL compatibilities, digital certificate login, integration to a pre-existent single login, access control using profiles, profiles configuration by users and function.

Good results from innovative experiences such as Brazilian Federal Revenue and Customs Secretariat have stimulated the sector initiatives. Just in the last year, 11 million taxpayers have sent their income tax through the web, unequivocally demonstrating if the system works, people use it. Just on IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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administrative expenses, the Federal Government spends R$ 11 billions. The Sao Paulo State buys R$ 1 billion in materials from 85 thousand items list that includes from coffee to the employers to official cars to the governors. In this kind of initiative a tool deserves attention: the Dutch Bidding. It works like this: who buys a big volume defines a maximum price, and his possible suppliers aiming at a big selling reduces their profit margins to overcome other competitors. When public money is involved, this method can contribute, even indirectly, to a better resources application in the social area. Besides, as a transparency process to all participants and to society, the corruption levels are reduced. There is no place anymore to the “friend in the government”, who used to help determined suppliers to sell goods for highest prices. As the supplier as the government have the easiness to monitor all business. Besides, the citizen is able to access the site and see, at anytime, commercialized items, selected companies, and prices. These samples have show the government is learning to use the communication tolls derived from internet technology. By giving easy access to public information, the purchase virtual system helps the society to control the government expenses and to monitor the public man honesty. If more and more public institutions adopt this system, it will achieve more people credibility. Although, this question depends on more honesty and political determinations of the government than technology.

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6. METHOD Based on completely revolution that new technologies have been promoting in international scenery, agreeing with new economy tendencies and aiming at prepare people and company competitors to act in the global market, was developed the project to create an “e-transparency”. (Figure 1) The proposal to create an e-transparency, comprises: •

The purchase of products and services must be conducted through the Internet with UNL Technology, using the different business modalities prescribed in law and aiming at transparency and society control; 1. Direct purchase: this modality allows companies to buy products and services directly from certified suppliers. Different items are recorded on the site informing prices, payment conditions, and time expiration dates. The order is placed direct to the supplier. The buyer has the opportunity to evaluate tributary credits according to tax and freightage. The supplier is able to configure many price lists, according to commercial regions and clients groups. 2. Dutch Bidding: electronic version of this Bidding model (Open Dutch Bidding, Closed Dutch Bidding, Book Build and Traditional), in which the purchase company has better products and services prices using bids placed by certified suppliers. The participants send their electronic bids to the WBC, which defines at the end of the establish period the best bid.

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Electronic transparency

Business Intelligence Gestão do Conhecimento UNL (Universal Networking Language)

Data Mining DataWarehouse e-MarketPlace e -Procurement

e -Sale WBC Sales s WBC B2B Empresa Virtual WBC Sales B2B B2C

WBC Procurement B2B WBC WorkFlow B2B

WBC A2A B2B ERPs

e-CRM

Aplicaçõ es Administrativas

Aplicaçõ es Comerciais

EAI

WBT

Parceiros (EDI, XML, Soap) 1

Figure 1. e-Transparency diagram

3.

•

Products and services quotation: in this case the company asks for products and services quotations, for each purchase or for predefined time contracts, in which each certified supplier will present its operational, commercial, and technical conditions to answer the quotation, according to buyers parameters. The buyer has the possibility to analyze the tributary credits and the transaction financial costs and also to save the information in a database and asks for new quotations. The strategies and decisions will be supported by a specialized toll, - Business Intelligence, and integrated to internal management solutions (ERP) and client’s

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•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

management (CRM). This allows understand and analyze the information contributing to modern management. The training and competence development are going to use distance learning tools, promoting the employers certification on different IT tolls used in the company. The UFSC/PPGED has international know-how in distance learning and e-learning, by video-conference or by web, including more than 300.000 trained people. The ERP system, using purchase needs generated module, will be internet integrated to process the product/service purchase. The purchase sector sends the quotations to the different certified suppliers on the site and the supplier’s answer to them. Through the system the best quotation/bid is selected and sends as an order to the supplier. The ERP system integrates the order so that receive the pre-processed invoice, using the WebEDI tool. The payment gateway between companies is started (B2B, business to business). The payment system is notified as well other modules involved in payment process. The finance agent integration will be supported through the Internet, in a safety, quickly, and cost effectiveness way. The project intends to buy and sell to internal and external markets, working on UNL platform (Universal Networking Language), allowing its usage in all countries and by different financial institutions. A foundation coordinates the UNL, base in Genebra, called UNDL Foundation, under United Nations supervision. Finally and most important, the creation of a database to be applied in private and public companies, aiming at helping them to access the digital environment, contributing to transparency, society control and their

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Electronic transparency

own productivity, through purchase prices reduction, bureaucracy reduction, and purchase process quickness.

7. CONCLUSION Nowadays, the information technology allows an easy access to different computational systems and consequently promotes transparency to different communities. No doubts, the Internet is a tool that brings information to people and UNL technology allows people to communicate in different languages. The progress obtained so far in the development of the UNL language allows us to say, with justified optimism, that the barriers of universal communication start falling and in a short period of time the linguistic differences should not be anymore the obstacle for an efficient interchange between all the people of all languages and regions of the world. It is extremely important to have friendly and comprehensive systems for the end users so that they can access worldwide information in their mother languages, allowing them to monitor international financial transactions, mainly that ones related to public administration, which are so important to people’s life.

8. REFERENCES [1]ANNUAL CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS Transparency International (TI).

INDEX

(2001).

[2]BODEN, Margaret (1999). Dimensões da criatividade. Ed. Artes Médicas Sul, Porto Alegre. [3]DAL PIERO, Fernado (2000). Artigo Informação & Corrupção. Guia da Imprensa. [4]DE MASI, Domênico (1999). A Sociedade pós-industrial. Editora SENAC, São Paulo. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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[5]FIORI, Ernani Maria (1986). “Conscientização e educação”. Artigo publicado na Revista Educação & Realidade. Porto Alegre. jan./jun. p.3-10. [6]GRINSPUN, Mírian P. S. Z. et al. (1999). Educação tecnológica: – desafios e perspectivas. Ed. Cortez, São Paulo. [7]KAYZER, Win (1998). Maravilhosa obra do acaso. Editora Nova Fronteira, Rio de Janeiro. [8]PALMER, Harry (1995). Resurfacing: técnicas para exploração da consciência. Ed. Gente. [9]REVISTA VEJA, ano 32, n 42, 20/10/99. O futuro chegou, e agora? p.163. [10]SOKAL, Alan e BRICMONT, Jean, (1999). intelectuais. Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro.

Imposturas

[11]TAPSCOTT, Don (1997). Economia digital. Editora Makron Books, São Paulo.

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Usability The first border of e-Gov Felipe Zurita Quadros1 [email protected] Patrícia Mascarenhas Bonina Zimath2 [email protected] Hugo Cesar Hoeschl3 [email protected]

ABSTRACT This article is about the importance of the adoption in wide scale of Usability practices for government web portals. Inside of a recent focuses, was given emphasis in parameters definitions that could increase the chances of a successfully enterprise strategy inside of the current reality of the World Wide Web. An evolution was diagnosed concerning the subject that described and established norms and patterns allied interfaces of Electronic Government, Usability development concepts, and also demonstrating their advantages.

1. INTRODUCTION The adoption of good usability practices for government web portals is unquestionable. But the key subject is: how to make more efficient the government web portals and the services offered by them? This point is essential, because implementing 1

2

3

PhD candidate, Post-Graduate Program in Production Engineering Federal University of Santa Catarina Trindade – Florianópolis – Brazil – 88040-900 – 55 48 234-0333 PhD candidate, Law and Intelligence Systems Research Institute, Lauro Linhares St, 728, 105, Zip code 88036-002, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, www.ijuris.org PhD, Law and Intelligence Systems Research Institute, Lauro Linhares St, 728, 105, Zip code 88036-002, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, www.ijuris.org IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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an e-Gov platform and makes it available for to the citizens it is not enough. The usability of the web portal will determine its success. The government web portal is efficiency when the citizen as user of government's site finds the information that seeks or gets to use the service offered appropriately. In the reality most of the time the information and services are decentralized, the navigation lack of standardization, little popularization of the web portal and there are a few points of accesses. Talking about the universe of the initiative deprived certainly is easier to understand how much money is lost when a customer finds the site of the company difficult to navigate, slow, full of mistakes or with old information. But what can we say when talking about Government web portals? How to discover how friendly the interface to the user of an e-Gov web portal? How can we measure how much is spent when a certain information or service has a difficult location inside of a site that intends to be a tool of e-Gov?

2. WHAT IS USABILITY? The term usability was coined some 10 years ago in order to replace the term “user friendly” which by the early 1980s had acquired a host of undesirably vague and subjective connotations. (Bevan et al, 1991). However, in the intervening years, the authors say that the word usability itself has become almost as devalued as the term it was intended to supplant. There are still many different approaches to making a product usable, and no accepted definition of the term usability. The definitions that have been used derive from a number of views of what usability is. Three of the views relate to how usability should be measured:

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Usability

•

• •

47

the product-oriented view, that usability can be measured in terms of the ergonomic attributes of the product; the user-oriented view, that usability can be measured in terms of the mental effort and attitude of the user; the user performance view, that usability can be measured by examining how the user interacts with the product, with particular emphasis on either - ease-of-use: how easy the product is to use, or - acceptability: whether the product will be used in the real world.

According to Bevan et al (op cit), ease of use determines whether a product can be used, and acceptability whether it will be used, and how it will be used. Ease of use in a particular context is determined by the product attributes, and is measured by user performance and satisfaction. The context consists of the user, task and physical and social environment. The site usability.gov defines that usability is the measure of the quality of a user's experience when interacting with a product or system — whether a Web site, a software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device. Usability is a combination of factors that affect the user's experience with the product or system, including: Ease of learning Efficiency of use

Memorability

Error frequency and severity

How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks? Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks? If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start learning everything over again? How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?

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48 Subjective satisfaction

Ijuris Selected Papers Book How much does the seems “user friendly” for the user? Table 1: factors that affect the user's experience

Usability is more than just a matter of convenience. It is a matter of lost productivity and, for businesses, lost revenue. For the government, poor Web site usability translates into wasted money. (Nielsen apud Matthews, 2003). Nowadays people are searching much more for low cost and easy ways to find informations and anything else they’re looking for on the web. Not comprehending this trend would answer if your Web Portal will survive or not. About this Kirakownski (2003) says that “web site owners will increasingly require proof that the design effort they have paid for has some functional benefit for them. We would argue that subjective user-based testing is a 'must' in a competitive environment like designing for the World Wide Web.” He still confirms that the result of his study reported is not only that this dogma is plausible, but also that it is true.

3. THE DIMENSIONS OF THE E-GOV It is necessary to have in mind that all kind of information that cannot being located anytime and in a correct and fast way will generates unnecessary bureaucracy inside of all the e-Gov context. How many people congest the public lines phone because they just can’t easily find in their sites informations as address for correspondence, contact telephones or places for service? Or still people that don't get to proceed a simply processes and document consultation, or even payments of tributes for example? Imagine how much time and money is spent in that kind of situations. According to Abreu (2002) it is unquestionable that the key subject of the e-Gov is not the implantation costs of the platform, but how much money will IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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be saved, mainly if we take into the reality of the gigantic dimensions involved in the public functionalism and the lack of larger control of the processes. Nowadays people have a few time and look for practices and fast solutions, and if possible, with a minimum bureaucracy involved. After all, on the other side somebody will always exist, even an user sometimes with hurry to solve his problem, or still an employee that, if it is not I paid to supply this information, it is stopping his work to supply it. In other words, in one way or another, this means waste of time for both parts, and in this case no longer it advances to put in subject the importance of the request, the time was already lost. Analysing the situations that involves the existence reason of e-Gov Websites, it’s possible to trace a parallel between the realities of the private initiative websites. In a private corporate vision, an unsatisfied customer is equal of no customer. Seybold (2000) confirms this affirmation when explains that if the user of a website feels that you are making him lose his time, certainly he will go away, to never comeback again. Inside of a context of e-Gov Websites, that should provide interaction with the citizens, if it does not obtain it, fatally will be incurring into this kind of error, either due to interactivity, feedback, and mainly, problems involving Website navigation and usability. Godin (200) affirms, in accordance with a research carried through by the Gallup Institute, that more than 85% of the people connected to the Web think that they are more intelligent than the average. And the key question is: what these people think if they seems to be incapable to understand the navigation and functioning of a e-Gov site? In other words, the frustration level of the user will determine if he will go using it again, or not. The analysis is simple: on the web, anyone have an easily way give up the acquisition of a product or service, and this IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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desistance can occur in any stage of the negotiation. It must be remembered that at the first signal of difficulty, the user give up the whole process. Only one click is enough to make him feel free of any inconveniences. In the private companies reality this can mean something relatively more serious, after all, beyond not coming back to their website anymore, the customer can be buying from a competitor. However, in the public sphere this reality is a little different, after all, there’s no alternative governments or competing governments, they are only one. And in this in case is much worse than losing a customer. But how to correctly proceed strategic analyses of e-Gov websites? Bittencourt Filho (2001) suggests a criterion of evaluation by levels of government’s websites. They are judged with regard to some criteria related with standards of Usability like: . Level 1 - Sites of low attractiveness and interactivity, presenting basically institutional information and of spreading of the government, in an initial level of presence in the Internet; . Level 2 - Sites of low attractiveness and interactivity, presenting a small number of services on-line; . Level 3 - Sites of average attractiveness and interactivity, presenting a significant number of services on-line; . Level 4 - Sites of high attractiveness and interactivity, presenting information of great interest of the public, constantly brought up to date and many services on-line. The author still confirms that websites of level four are almost always represented by governmental websites from U.S.A., Canada or United Kingdom. In the case of Brazil, there are a true miscellany in the evaluations, going since level one until level three, what reflects that are much to do by the Brazilian government.

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Currently, beyond the people having little time to play all its functions along the day, they try to prevent physical displacements, even when it’s possible, just for economic questions or even though for comfort. When the citizen looks to a public agency, he interacts with somebody after the attendance and he tends to return his suggestions, points of view that can be improved by the enterprise. In this context, how to evaluate the effectiveness of the e-Gov websites? After all, if the user doesn’t feel good in the e-Gov portal, probably will not give any kind of suggestions for improvement. Perhaps for being afraid that the interface offered doesn’t seem so user friendly, or either, if nobody was worried about what it seems obvious, would he believe that somebody would be worried in answering? Most of times the user doubts if there is someone available to answer his questions. Moreover, sometimes a link to make the contact is not easily found. For a website user, either a governmental website or not, the most important question is feel well about the platform, or either, as well as considered for Edwards (2000), to have in mind that the cyberspace is a personal space, fitting to responsible for the web portal the arduous and highly subjective task of make it a personal and pleasant place for each user individually. The answer or reason for this is that through web the user reverted this entire situation, initially in the private scope, efficient and pleasant interfaces for the users generate profits. In this in case, the customers practically impose that a pleasant experience is offered, and moreover, an interface of access fast, practical and efficient until the information. In this in case, the great question is how to transfer this mentality of profits to the public enterprises sphere. A faithful user is that kind of costumer who constantly acquires a product or service from determined company. Through this we can say that satisfied customers are lucrative in any type of business, either in private or public enterprises. With no doubts, the users of its web interface will be the responsibility owners of the e-Gov platform success, and they IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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will be equally responsible for determining the financial health, the survival, and the self-sufficiency of a government in the future. What a matter is that not use the new technologies to implement the electronic government has a high price, which is represented by the extreme bureaucracy. Besides this unnecessary bureaucracy generated for not using these technologies suggests that the users of the platform, their “customers” in this case, they are not being lucrative, or either, they are not compensating all the human effort involved in the development of the e-Gov platform. It is necessary a deepened analysis about what is incomeproducing user or customer. Kotler (1998) defines what must be an income-producing customer: “ I n c o m e - p r o d u c i n g Customer is a person, residence or organization who generates prescription flow for the supplying company and that the flow of the cost exceeds to attract, to vender and to serve this customer.” The art to attract and keep faithful users into your interface in the World Wide Web involves something much more complex. Something that involves the total knowledge of the users desires doesn’t matter who or where they are. But this task is not too hard, as it seems. The answer: Usability criteria.

4. USABILITY APPLIED TO THE E-GOV The criterion of the usability of systems already exists for a long time, and with the reduction of the digital exclusion and the easiness of access to the Internet the subject had its relevance raised in levels never imagined before. Until this moment, the reality in the world not hardwired to the world-wide-web was much less dependent of usability criteria than nowadays affirms Nielsen (2000). Little time ago IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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there was only way to test and verify if a product or service had a satisfactory degree of usability. And it only could be done just after the business has been closed, or either, after the user have effectively used the service or acquired and paid for the service. The web changed this vision. Nowadays it is totally feasible to affirm that the interface that an institution offers you must be tested, either for sells something or to give any type of service. In the scope of the e-Gov it could not be different; therefore the citizens hardwired in the web portal will test their interface until it becomes beyond trustworthy, very practical, and easy to use. From this moment it was perceived that a Website must offer to visitors a high level of usability, and depending directly on this parameter, these will be able to become or not a frequent user of an e-Gov website. Nielsen (apud Matthews, 2003) contends that such usability problems abound in cyberspace. From corporate Web sites to government pages, ease of use, logic and clarity are often elusive. Poor design is impeding the potential of the Internet, especially for people with disabilities. In a study released in 2001, he found that the Web is three times harder for people with disabilities to use than it is for those without disabilities. The study concentrated on Web users who are blind or have low vision and use screen readers or screen magnification software to navigate the Internet. At first it was known as a pointer called “User Friendly”, according Dias (2001) as a relatively vacant term, the expression usability has passed for a reevaluation and new conceptualization. Confirming this, Dias (op cit) says that the usability concept passed for an evolution. The author says that according to Norm ISO 9241, in titled Guidance on Usability (1998), Usability is had as a capacity of a product to be used for specific users to reach specific objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction into a specific context of use. It confirms that for the creation of websites, mainly IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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governmental websites, the fulfillment of pre-established norms must be demanded, keeping coherence between the sites, bringing more clearance and necessary concepts on logic and clarity in their use. In the Brazilian reality, according to Bittencourt Filho (2001), it fits to the Communication Department of the Federal Government the definition of the visual identity of Electronic Government websites from Brazil. On the other hand, the usability criteria have been target of constant studies by the responsible agency for the Management of the governmental web portals. In Brazil, the Resolution nº 7, of 29 of July of 2002, elaborated by the Executive Committee of the Electronic Government - Civil House - of the Republic Presidency establishes rules and lines of direction for the websites in the Internet of the Federal Public Administration as: • • • • • • • • • • •

Adopt navigation strategy that propitiates fast access, intuitive use of the commands and functions; Simple and direct language, with clear, simple, current and true contents; Images only when associates directly to the agency or service; Declare the name of the unit or responsible server for the attendance of the received messages; Use specific pages with orientation for the cases of devolution of error message; Manuscript and maintenance of the services and information independent of specialized technician; Measurement of the traffic of users in the site; Research on-line about the quality of the services and given information; Use of cookies only with the user authorization; It is obligator the existence of a of direct communication to the user with the agency - "contact us"; The period for reply the requests cannot exceed 5 working days;

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Answers must be available in a page of frequently asked questions; The received messages must be classified and analyzed statistically.

5. CONCLUSION The impact of the new technologies in long period, as well as the speed with that they would be adopted was probably underestimated. Due to this, a true one run by the best service has been observing as the best interface with the user. No longer will appear doubts about the great opportunities that can be generated by the e-Gov in whole levels, essentially in the field of the services installment. Tied up to that competitive advantage, the usability level of an e-Gov web portal should never have its real functionality placed to test, in any moment. An efficient e-Gov web portal should be the mirror of a simple and modern society, just as it should be. More and more should be placed to ourselves of e-Gov websites real function in the society. Not only the managers, but everyone involved in any initiative inside of a e-Gov web portal should, at any moment, go to their website and test it, trying always to simulate the use as an new user. In other words, to motivate people that are not used with the virtual atmosphere, some tasks could be accomplished, even simpler than they can seem. If something is not clear, if the user doesn't know which road to proceed, or as to leave, unfortunately this government web portal has problems that involve usability patterns. In this case, just after the users arrived at the e-Gov platform, if they are having problems to navigate, then were just entering, not finding what they sought, and leaving, to never return again. But, besides this, if you feel so confused has your users, stop, close your browser, and propose a new platform model of your e-Gov website.

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REFERENCES Abreu, Rodrigo. Interview: The challenge is to support the growth. ECommerce Magazine. São Paulo: Publishing Company Segment, n º. 32, January and February of 2002. Bevan, N. Kirakowski, J. & Maissel, J. What is usability. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on HC., Stuttgard, September 1991. Eisevier. 1991. [on line], july 2003. www.usability.serco.com/papers/whatis92.pdf Bittencourt Filho, Jorge Calmon Moniz. LOIOLA, Elizabeth. The public services provided by Brazilian government over the internet. Federal University of the Bahia - School of Administration Nucleus of PhD-in Administration, 04/2001. Dias, Claudia Augusto. Methods of evaluation of usability in the context of corporative web portals: a study of case of the Federal Cured one. 2001. 225 p. Dissertação (Mestrado) College of Applied Social Studies, University of Brasilia, Brasília/DF. Edwards, Paul and Sarah. Gaining money in the InterNet: important information to initiate and to develop its proper on-line business. São Paulo. Makron Books, 2000. Kirakowski, J. Claridge, N. & Whitehand, R. Human centered measures of success in web site design. Proceedingd of the 4th Conference on Human Factors and the Web. [on line]. July 2003. www.research.att.com/conf/hfweb/proceedings/kirakowski Kotler, Philip. Administration of marketing: analysis, planning, implementation and control. 5th ed. São Paulo: Atlas, 1998. Matthews, W. Web usability obstacles abound - Interview with Jacob Nielsen. [on line]. July 2003. www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/1022/web-access-10-22-01.asp Nielsen, Jacob. Projecting websites: designing web usability. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 2000. Seybold, Patricia. Clientes.com: as to create an enterprise strategy of InterNet... São Paulo. Makron Books, 2000.

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The strategic information production for the modernization of public policies The Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs case Marcelo Stopanovski Ribeiro, PhD candidate1 [email protected] Tania Cristina D. Bueno, PhD candidate1 [email protected] Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, PhD1 [email protected] Aline Junckes2 [email protected] Cristina Souza Santos2 [email protected] Ricardo Miranda Barcia, PhD3 [email protected]

ABSTRACT The Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs - OBID is a legitimate application of the concept of Electronic Government and is presented as

1

2 3

Instituto Jurídico de Inteligência e Sistemas – IJURIS, Florianópolis, SC, Brasil, www.ijuris.org Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – UFSC, Florianópolis, SC, Brasil, www.ufsc.br Laboratório de Ensino a Distância – LED/UFSC, Florianópolis, SC, Brasil, www.led.ufsc.br IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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one of the main governmental web portals in Brazil, having been awarded for its social relevance. It is a reference for the future of the development of state emanations in the digital environment and still a new horizon for the construction of the citizenship in the digital democracy. All the process of collection, processing and diffusion of the relevant information on the subject of the drugs is planned and managed by OBID, following the goals traced as the National Antidrugs Policies. The significant detail that jumps to the consideration is the use of a complete methodology that allows to equate the necessary linking between that demand information, that one that produces it and that one that has turns it available. This paper aims at the study of the strategic information production for the modernization of public politics.

Keywords Strategic information production, modernization of public politics, the Brazilian observatory of information on drugs, knowledge management.

1. INTRODUCTION The Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs - OBID is a legitimate application of the concept of Electronic Government and is presented as one of the main governmental web portals in Brazil, being reference for the future of the development of state emanations in the digital environment and still a new horizon for the construction of the citizenship in the digital democracy. The reference of Electronic Government used here can be described paraphrasing the one developed for the Indianapolis City Hall, which describes this principle that joints science politics and technology: “turn available to the citizen permanent access (24 h) to the governmental services, information and agents”. Thus it is the OBID, an information system that turns available a group of services related to drugs with the participation of the citizen for the solution of doubts and guiding of proposals. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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The system is also used of a technological convergence joining a structure of telephonic attendance to a small website in the Internet. OBID joins specialists and advanced technology with the objective of implementation of public policies in national level. The Observatory is configured as a unit of information processing that uses a system of web portals to accomplish its activities. All the process of collection, processing and diffusion of the relevant information on drugs is planned and managed by OBID, following the goals traced as the National Antidrugs Policies described below. The union of the specialists in the subject dealt with support of the technology aims at to inform the population on nuances of the drugs problem, the significant detail that jumps to the consideration is the use of a complete methodology that allows to equate the necessary linking between that demand information, that one that produces it and that one that has turns it available. This model of public policies empowerment with the use of Information Technology and Knowledge Engineering is the entrancing differential of this project and this is its significance for the studies and the proper advance of the practical theories on Electronic Government. Thus, the observatory makes use of an internal structure dedicated to the production and management of information, that includes the workflow of the dissemination of the processed contents, aiming at the most varied organizations compromised to the reduction of the demand of drugs, as well as the Brazilian society, having a web portal as its main vehicle of diffusion. The OBID web portal is a referential example of a corporative knowledge web portal - CKWP used for a purpose of high public interest. It has the necessary layers to be IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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considered top technology for the construction and use of web portals, for example, customizable interface and powerful search tools for integration with legacy systems.

2. INSTITUTIONAL BACKGROUND The first post-graduate course on Electronic Government in Brazil was given by Prof. Hugo Hoeschl, Ph.D., in the ambit of the Post-Graduate Program of Production Engineering - PPGEP of the Federal University of Santa Catarina - UFSC, in the beginning of year 2001. It possesses, since its implementation, a multidisciplinary character. It materializes direct connection between detached aspects of two great areas: Social Applied (mainly Law, Administration and Economy) and Technology (mainly Engineerings and Computer Science). Those studies had allowed to define Electronic Government as: public power management, in its hierarchies and functions, digitally qualified, for tools, medias and procedures”.[1] It means, the emanation of the classic State in the digital environment. Inside this context UFSC was chosen to develop for the National Antidrugs Secretariat, agency of the Institutional Security Cabinet Agency of the Presidency of the Republic, the OBID web portal and, therefore, the management model of the Observatory itself since 2002. The Health department was responsible for its fund raising and the University Research and Extension Support Foundation in UFSC managed the project. The Laboratory of Distance Learning - LED in UFSC and the Juridical Institute of Intelligence and Systems – IJURIS were responsible for the development and implementation of the Observatory. The team was awarded, in December 2002, with General Honor Mention for Social Relevance to the Excellency in IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Electronic Government Prize, instituted by the Brazilian Association of Data Processing State Companies, Brazilian School of Public Administration and Companies of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation and the Ministry of the Planning, Budget and Management of the Federal Government.

3. THE NATIONAL ANTIDRUGS POLICIES – PNAD With the signature of an international agreement between the Brazilian Government and the United Nations Organization aiming at the participation in a world-wide effort for the reduction of the demand for drugs in the planet, Brazil took as goal the creation of mechanisms that allowed to reach the objectives agreeded in June of 1998. At this moment the country adhered to the principle of the shared responsibility among enters the States Members of the United Nations Organization to deal with the international problem of the drugs. Already in 1998, the National Antidrugs System – SISNAD was reorganized, having as maximum decision instance a proportional1 council - constituted by Government agencies and representatives of the scientific community and the civil society - and created the National Antidrugs Secretariat SENAD2 with the purpose to articulate, to co-ordinate and to integrate the public and private sectors and the citizens for the reduction of the demand for drugs. The SISNAD denotes the search of the legitimacy of a collective effort, being structured in the mutual cooperation and the effort union between government and society, in the Federal, state and city ambits. In December 2001 the National Antidrugs Policies - PNAD got presidential approve, condensing contributions of the society and the State agencies, harvested from the I National IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Antidrugs Forum (November 1998), and from the Technical Commission instituted in December 1999, made up of wellknown specialists on the problem. This Brazilian public policies signals, thus, to the SISNAD, that the ways to be adopted must foresee, especially, the social participation, the focus in prevention and local actions. The social participation arrives at the mother unit mother of the Federation, the city. It is in this level that the reality starts to be part of the daily routine of the citizens, the effect are felt and the actions are executed with the organization of the local community and the state agencies gifts in the region. The decentralization of the decision taking is seen in this macro level for adaptation to the local specificities. It must be remarked that the scope of the organization performance focused in this work is the reduction of the demand for drugs, leaving beside the discussion about the combat against the product. Prevention is the most important concept in this field and the information appears as the catalytic element of the awareness process on the problem of the drugs, as well as of other problems related to this thematic, as the violence and the public health.

4. THE BRAZILIAN OBSERVATORY OF INFORMATION ON DRUGS An Observatory is characterized for being a structure capable to collect, to process and to spread out relevant information and knowledge for the users decision taking. In the case of the Brazilian Observatory it is added to these capacities the possibility of management and planning directed to the execution of the National Antidrugs System.

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The played functions and the use of the concepts allow to fit this subject into the Information Management Systems, the technologies for Knowledge Management and the activities of strategical intelligence. The guidelines for the conceptual joint is the knowledge and the process for its construction inside an environment that needs an information flow on a technological base. The Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs and its web portal possesses a series of functions that are part of the literature and the state of the art of the science of the Knowledge Management.[2] It can be described the use of tools that allow the creation of virtual communities, the mapping of individual abilities and groups, the best choice and spreading of practises and the management of the production, storage and diffusion of great volumes of information. The context of the Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs can be defined as an application of a digital nervous system [3], capable to receive a stimulation, to process it and to return it in the form of an accomplished action, with the help of advanced technologies of support the human intellect [4].

5. STRATEGIC INFORMATION PRODUCTION The National Antidrugs Policy (PNAD) establishes, basically, the following objectives for the Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs (OBID): to locate and to have trustworthy access to information sources; to gather, evaluate and process useful information; to define indicators; to use technological tools and to consist in a dynamic data base; to interact with personalities, organizations and governments engaged in the drug cause; and to spread specific contents in a controlled form.

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To reach the cited objectives, the Observatory makes use of a dedicated internal structure to the information production and management, with great focus in their quality and trustworthiness. Such management includes the animation of the workflow related to the dissemination of the processed contents, addressed to international and national organizations that are part of the SISNAD, professionals, people and entities compromised to the reduction of the demand of drugs, as well as the Brazilian society, having a web portal as its main diffusion vehicle.

Figure 1. Production of Strategical Information. Process of collection, processing and diffusion of relevant information on drugs, managed by OBID, aiming at the implementation of the National Antidrugs Policy

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Thus, knowing that any structure developed to produce information, aiming at the support and decision taking, needs to congregate such information, to process and to spread them, it becomes necessary to mobilize basic functions of the Production of Strategical Information - Collection, Analysis and Dissemination, represented in figure 1.

5.1 Collection Is destined to rescue previously accumulated information. Its work consists on collect open and written information, besides keep it selectively, turning it available. Its main information source is the OBID web portal, through the integrated CONEN network - Antidrugs State Comities, the Excellency Centers and also the International Agencies who deal with the drug question. Most of the scientific information necessary for the functioning of the OBID is produced by the Excellency Centers, agencies responsible for the conduction of epidemiologists research and the elaboration of statistics on drugs. SENAD already has some accredited centers, and is able to accredit other related entities. Amongst the accredited Excellency Centers, is distinguished the Brazilian Center of Information on Drugs CEBRID, hosted by the University of São Paulo, whose main task - the epidemiologists research and the elaboration of statistics on drugs - is developed in social loci - social, focus of all actions aiming at the prevention of the use of drugs, or either, the communities, schools, companies and other segments of the society. Amongst the credential Centers of Excellencies already for the SENAD, is distinguished the Brazilian Center of Information on Drugs? CEBRID, tied with the University of São Paulo, whose main task? the research epidemiologists and the IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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elaboration of statisticians on drugs? it is developed together to the social, focus accumulations of the action of prevention of the improper use of drugs, or either, the communities, the schools, the companies, and other segments of the society.

5.2 Analysis Is responsible for the processing of the material gathered by Collection. Having access to all the information that transit for the Observatory through its web portal, specialists of different areas, especially of the SENAD and the State and Municipal Antidrugs Comities, can inside plan its SISNAD policies.

5.3 Dissemination As the proper name indicates, is the unit responsible for the diffusion of the product of the process of Collection and Analysis and, mainly, for the availability of these informations for the society in general.

6. OBID WEB PORTAL In this topic it is discussed the technology applied for the structuration of the solution presented as ideal for the functioning of a results mechanism for public policies. The OBID web portal is a referential example of a corporative knowledge web portal - CKWP used for high importance public interest. It possesses the layers necessary to be considered as top a technology for web portals construction and use, comprising customised interface, powerful search tools and integration with legacy systems. The Corporative Knowledge Web Portal - CKWP presents tools that do not demand ample knowledge in computer science by the users, and either any training. The CKWP simplifies the access to information and the applications, IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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detaching important internal and external notice excellent to the question antidrugs. “CKWP reduces the complexity of the search in complex nets and diversified sources of on line data, improving the return of the investment when supplying subsidies for the decision taking, and generating benefits as the productivity increase, better service to the customer and reduced costs of staff.” [6] It can be affirmed that the maturity of the thought on the functioning of the Brazilian Observatory of Information on Drugs passed through the creation of its web portal, where the historical meeting of specialists, executors and technician of some governmental institutions and research institutes enables deep discussion on the subject, and the creation of a result that exceeds the addition of the parts. This project is an example of the results of multi-institutional contribution. All the applications present at the OBID web portal are described as fallows.

6.1 Web Portal Interface It should be remarked that all the elements of this screen are configurable, that means they can be object of periodic improvements to available a dynamic and participative web portal, adaptable to the emergent demands of the society and the government.

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Figure 2. The description of the interface seen in this figure raises 15 items that can be accessed by any web portal visitor: (1) expandable Menu listing the contents; (2) Journalism Area showing the most important news; (3) Journalism Area showing the latest news; (4) Journalism Area showing the main events of interest; (5) Multisearch tool, described in figure 3; (6) OBID channel with access to stored videos; (7) FAQ Section; (8) Visitors Cadastre, in case the user wants to receive periodic information bulletins; (9) Library, classified by subject, enabling access to pdf texts for download; (10) Discussion List, asynchronous and not moderated tool, proper for availability of opinions and messages; (11) Debate Forum, asynchronous mediated tool that allows monitored discussion; (12) Chat, synchronous tool developed for discussion with special guests or scheduled meetings; (13) Web portal search tool; (14) Simultaneous statistical result surveys; and (15) Banners for special contents or events

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6.2 System Capillarity The system capillarity is described in the National Antidrugs Policies as its implementation centred in the city. This initiative aims at the citizen, located in the smaller state organization unit, that is, in the Brazilian case, the city.

Figure 3. This illustration describes the OBID web portal as an Information System. Through OBID web portal, any federative or municipal unit can create a similar web portal with the same tools and capacities of the federal web portal and manage its projects and informations integrated to the National Antidrugs System. In the figure the web portal on the left top shows the Bahia state web portal and the other, the city of Palms, capital of the state of Tocantins

Brazil is a country of continental dimensions, with about 170 million inhabitants, divided in 26 federative units (states) IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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plus the Federal District, totalising 5,622 cities distributed in 8 million square kilometres. For the achievement of a national goal, preserving the regional peculiarities, the solution found for the management of the public policies for the abusive use of drugs combat was the use of information technology based on an including system, centraliser of information with function of diffusion of these with aggregate value. Each state and city can create its own web portal with no cost.

6.3 Administration Environment All the components of the web portal interface (figure1) are customisable, and an administration environment was created to facilitate it. This environment functions together to the web portal and can be had access by simple user identification. The structure allows the content customisation and report vision. Topic Journalism

Administration

Element

Especificity

Main Page News Survey Events News Suggestions Pendency Report Cadastres

Survey Alternatives Events Categories Images Cadastre

Interface Customization Operation Logs Reports moderations

Chat Moderators Bulletin sending Cadastres Content Management

Channel

Cadastres

Natural Person Legal Entity - LE Permissions Categories Banners Portals

Diaries - Events Weeks - LE Months - Projects Accesses

Menu Static Content Dynamic Content Links Sections Videos

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Services

Element

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Especificity

Library FAQ Help Forum Discussion Lists Chats Subscription Lists Subscriptions Moderation

Table 1. The scheme details general topics that can be administered, the configurable elements to each topic and of the specificities in some elements

6.4 Multisearch

Figure 4. The multisearch tool adds to the concept of metabusca (activation of some external search engines to the site of an only place) the possibility of search in environments that do not possess indexed content, it means, not available for keyword search

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7. NEW DEVELOPMENTS The web portal evolution implies its integration with the National Central on Drug Jurisprudence - CENAJUD system, that will be developed with Artificial Intelligence algorithms for analysis support on the jurisprudence on the subject, project already approved by CNPQ - National Comity for Scientific and Technological Development. The implementation of the National Central on Drug Jurisprudence aims at the centralization of the jurisprudence of the Brazilian Superior Courts relating to the cases involving narcotic. The social impact of the implementation of the CENAJUD is linked to the relevance for the democratisation of the access to the institutional information on the subject, beyond, to optimise, significantly, the decision process of the specialists in the area, through the gathering of jurisprudence related to the repression to the use of drugs so that they can be analysed and serve as support instrument for the elaboration of preventive politics. This application becomes necessary due to the increasing modification of the society in what is related to the generation of information and knowledge. We are in a historical process of unnecessary accumulation of information. CENAJUD comes to assist the production of strategical information, turning available Artificial Intelligence tools for the analysts of the question, aiming at the refining of jurisprudences proceeding from the phase of collection, selecting the really pertinent cases of repression to the consumption of narcotics, turning the future elaboration of those politics more real.

8. NOTES 1

The National Antidrugs Council – CONAD is the SISNAD normative department, collectively deliberating, presided by the Chief Minister of the Institutional Security Cabinet of the Republic Presidency. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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The National Antidrugs Secretariat – SENAD is an structure created in the Republic Presidency which signalises a clear priority that allows, in the operational view, the better coordination of various of various government actions.

9. REFERENCES [1]HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar. Nome do artigo. In: Introduction to Electronic Government (e-book). Available at: www.phoenixlibrary.org. Access in: Feb. 26th, 2003. Original title: Introdução ao Governo Eletrônico. [2]NONAKA, Ikujiro; TAKEUCHI, Hirotaka. Criação de Conhecimento na Empresa: Como as grandes empresas japonesas geram a dinâmica da inovação; Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1997. [3]GATES, Bill. A empresa na velocidade do pensamento: com um sistema nervoso digital; São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999. [4]LÉVY, Pierre. As tecnologias da inteligência; tradução de Carlos Irineu da Costa. – Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1993. [5]HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar. Elements on Electronic Government (ebook). Available at: www.phoenix-library.org. Access in: Feb. 26th, 2003. Original title: Elementos de Governo Eletrônico. [6]TERRA, José Cláudio Cyrineu; GORDON, Cindy. Portais Corporativos. A revolução na Gestão do Conhecimento; tradução de Érica Saubermann e Rodrigo Baroni. – São Paulo: Negócio Editora, 2002.

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A proposal of an UNL application development environment Andre Bortolon, M.Eng1 [email protected] Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, Dr.1 [email protected] Joel Ossamu Mitsui2 [email protected] Jaime Leonel de Paula Júnior, M.Eng.2 [email protected] Ricardo Miranda Barcia, Ph.D3 [email protected]

ABSTRACT The development of UNL applications may have a lot of problems. An experience occurred in Federal University of Santa Catarina showed that the occurrence of more problems then were foreseen in the start of the problem, may destroy the project. The construction of tools to help programmers to develop the applications increases the speed of development. Besides, these tools can popularize the usage of UNL, facilitating the access to the technology and the connection with other languages.

1

2

3

IJURIS, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus Universitário, Trindade, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. CEP: 88040-900 IJURIS Collaborator, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus Universitário, Trindade, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. CEP: 88040-900 Production Engineering Pos-Graduation Coordinator at UFSC, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus Universitário, Trindade, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. CEP: 88040-900 IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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INTRODUCTION The UNL purpose is to “provide a common communication environment for different language.” [1] Since UNL is a language to computers express the knowledge, it is necessary the existence of tools to support the creation of UNL projects and documents. These tools allow people who are interested to publish their documents, papers, and applications in UNL without knowing all the details of the language. In the UNL Project, there is the UNL Editor. The UNL Editor “is linked to a language server equipped with an ‘enconverter’ and a ‘deconverter’ for a natural language. As the author writes a document, e-mail or any other text, in his/her language, UNL editor ‘enconverts’ it into UNL documents. In this process, UNL expressions are produced automatically or interactively with the author.” [1] Normally, applications work in a specific domain. So, it is possible to use just a smaller set of rules and universal words to represent this domain. It is also possible the inexistence of some words in the Master Dictionary, because this domain have not been included yet. These words must be included. But, the inclusion of new words is preceded by a study to correctly contextualize them, finding the appropriated restrictions and so on. Also, the application might need specific rules to “enconvert” or “deconvert” special cases. These rules should be applied just in this domain and cannot be included in the rules general dictionary. This paper suggests an upgrade to the UNL Editor, the UNL Application Development Environment (UDE). This upgrade allows the management of UNL projects. An UNL project is the construction of an application that uses UNL to represent their knowledge. Using the UDE, the developer can create interfaces to link UNL with some other developing tools and programming IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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languages, such as Java or C#. UDE can also manage the creation of transitory UWs and special rules, as if the creation of smaller word and rules dictionaries specific to a domain.

MOTIVATION A research team from Federal University of Santa Catarina is implementing a simulation on Environment Audit using UNL and Virtual Reality. This simulation intends to test a student to audit a chemical warehouse. All the textual elements from the simulation, such as signs and speeches, will be represented in UNL, allowing people from different countries to access the simulation and understand it in their own language. Five languages have been chosen: Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. The texts were revised to avoid more complex structures and expressions only used in Portuguese. After that, it was started the conversion of the sentences to UNL. 164 Universal Words were extracted from 61 sentences. More than 80% of these words weren’t in the knowledge base or in the UW Gate. So, these UWs needed to be created. But, the creation of new UWs needs a study to correctly contextualize them in the knowledge base, avoiding repetition or ambiguity. This study requires time and able people to do that. Also, the UWs must be shared between all the researchers. These problems delayed the work in 2 weeks. The construction of the UNL sentences was affected by some other problems. Typing errors, absence of marks (such as periods before the attributes) and parenthesis occurred in almost a half of the sentences. Three revisions were made and errors were found in the next step, the construction of the dictionaries.

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In the dictionaries, the errors mentioned above were multiplied. Since there is a lot of marks and tags as in the word dictionary as in the rules dictionary, the quantity of errors occurred have increased in the same proportion. Also, the inexperience of the UNL programmers contributed to that. Because of accomplished.

these

problems,

the

deadline

weren’t

UNL APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT The UNL Center’s Universal Word Gate allows users to access the UNL’s centralized UW Dictionary system through the Internet. This tool is useful to find UWs that correspond to meaning in many language like Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etc. It’s only available to UNL Society members. However, this UW Dictionary System has only the words that have already been included in previous projects done by the UNL Center. In the project described in the previous section, a lot of UWs were not found in the UW Gate, since this new UWs correspond to concepts that have not been studied in UNL yet. According to the normal UNL procedure, the UWs need to be requested to UNL Center and then included in UNL Center’s UW Dictionary to be used. This procedure could waste more time than create this UWs locally only, probably delaying the delivering of the project. So, the UWs had been created locally and restricted the attributes to the general form. To store and retrieve the locally created UWs and to improve and reduce the time of UNL sentences codification, the Brazilian research group of UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina) has developed a tool, based on UNL Center’s Universal Word Gate, called UWGATEBR (www.ijuris.org/uwgatebr) (Figure 1). Also, as verified on the development of Environment Audit application, this tool allows a progressive study of the UW restrictions, from the most IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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general to the most specific, improving the best format to be used in the application without compromise the whole process because the UWs stored in the UWGATEBR database can be edited in any time. Consequently, the syntax errors of UNL code will be minimized before its use in Deconverter, reducing the rework and the development time.

Figure 1. UW Gate Brazil Home page

The UWGATE.BR stands out for the easy way to add new UWs to the UW Dictionary used to codify UNL sentences. Everyone may include a new UW in the database. In the beginning, this new UW will be analyzed to be verified and corrected by the responsible administrators and they will decide approve the UW in the dictionary.

Public module This module is available to anyone and works in the following way. The user can type all or part of the word in the Palavra IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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field or/and a Head Word, and clicks on the P e s q u i s a r (search) button. If the command is accepted, the UWGATEBR retrieves the correspondent UW entries from the UW Dictionary database and shows the results in two columns: in the left column will appear the matched words (if the user input was a word), and in the right column the corresponding UW (or the matched UW from the user Head Word input). Clicking in any item of both columns, automatically the corresponding item in other column will be selected (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Search page

To include a new word not found in the search, the user can click the hyperlink Incluir nova UW (add new UW) on the top of page. Four data fields are required in the input: palavra (word), radical (stem), HW (Head Word) and UW (Universal Word). Click in Enviar (send) button after fill out the data in the form (Figure 3).

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Figure 3. Inclusion page

Administrative module

Figure 4. List page

The access to this module is restricted to UWGATEBR administrators. Besides the public functions like search or add new UWs, the administrator module has additional functions IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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such as approving new UWs, editing, remove and consulting all the UWs available on the UW dictionary database, and also manage the system users. To approve a UW, just select the words and click in homologar (approve) (Figure 4). To remove a UW, just select the word(s) and click in remover (remove). Any necessary correction in the word can be done clicking the UW and will be loaded a page to edit the word, stem, HW and UW. After editing click Gravar (record) button (figure 5).

Figure 5. Edition page

The UWAGATEBR is an effort to create the U N L Application Development Environment (UDE) capable to organize, manage and create the necessary elements, such as Word Dictionaries, UNL Sentences and UNL rules dictionary (language grammar), to build an application using UNL. The tool uses all the UNL conventions, syntax and rules described in the UNL Specifications. The importance to build knowledge base libraries specific to each application project is the high performance and precision of the conversion from UNL code to the target language. This modularity of knowledge can be improved individually, and then gradually will reach the entire language. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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UNL Application Development Environment will works like a Visual Studio. Each project created on UNL Application Development Environment will be associated to a database, which contains all the information necessary to build and manage the UNL rules dictionary files and word dictionary files grouped by language. Even aid on application sentences files and UNL sentences files creation. The UDE databases will be linked with the UNL Center and UNL Language Center databases, using the dictionaries already existing. The UW Dictionary structure table will store the UWs and the respective meanings grouped by language. These UWs will be extracted from the user sentences. Once identified the UW, the user will complete the dictionary entry with the appropriated restrictions. Also, the user has to insert the grammatical attributes of the word. The goal is to provide a tool that supports the building of all elements of a word dictionary entry. The sentences will be displayed in the screen as a hyper graph with nodes and edges. According to the node selected by user, all the relations, attributes set to this node will be displayed, permitting to user changes them in any time. The tool interface will provide more agility on UNL Rules Dictionary, Word Dictionary and UNL code building because the users, that must have a basic knowledge of programming concepts, will not worry about the UNL syntax. All the information, explanation, and fields of the syntax will be displayed on screen. To add a new entry in word dictionary, the users just have to set the entry priority, describe the UW, stem and add all necessary attributes, saving this information in the project database (Figure 6).

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Figure 6. Interface of word dictionary builder tool prototype

The same concepts can be used applied to create rules. The interface will display a list of rule types (attribute changing, left shift, right shift, and so on). Left insertion and right insertion will be indicated as different rule types to facilitate user work. To complete the rule is necessary set the conditions, actions, relations and roles of the nodes on the Left and Right Generation Window (Figure 7). Different databases are used to enconversion and deconversion process. The user can indicate the same word dictionary for both process, but the rule databases need to be different.

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Figure 7. Interface of rules dictionary builder tool prototype

CONCLUSION The construction of tools to facilitate the integration of UNL with other applications and the creation of UNL documents can help the dissemination and the popularization of UNL. Allowing people quickly create and develop small applications using UNL, even in specific domains, will generate a lot of new words and the continuous increasing of rules to solve the deconversion. This process has already happened with other IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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languages, such as Java. Collecting the best sets of words, the most efficient rules, will generate better and better dictionaries. Also, the easy access to the mechanisms of UNL can motivate people from countries that don’t still have UNL Centers to produce the dictionaries to enconvert and deconvert.

REFERENCES [1] Uchida, Hiroshi; Zhu, Meying; Senta, Tarcisio Della. A gift for a millennium. Tokyo, 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Uchida, Hiroshi; Zhu, Meying. The Universal Networking Language beyond the machine translation. in: International Symposium on Language in Cyberspace. Seoul, 2001. UNL Centre. Deconverter specifications. Version 2.5. Tokyo, 2001.

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Semiotic approach for the design of adaptive graphical user interfaces using Universal Networking Language Gabriela Tissiani1 [email protected] Hugo Cesar Hoeschl2 [email protected] Ricardo Miranda Barcia1 [email protected]

ABSTRACT The growing Internet infrastructures are providing a larger platform for communication among people across the world. The technological advances and the socialization of Internet have challenged web developers to search for new strategies to help the communication among people from different countries. It is a fact that a gap exists between the information and culture in different languages. In order to overcome the language barrier, the Universal Networking Language (UNL) emerges as a new technology that can reduce this problem. Furthermore, the ultimate goal of UNL is to expand education and business opportunities around the world, through a mutual understanding among different cultures based on the translation of the textual media available on the Internet. Although most of UNL infrastructure and architecture is already designed, it is still at an early stage of development. One of the challenges to be achieved during this development process is how to represent the distribution of the same textual content in different languages, considering all the elements of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is a huge step for those who are used to deal with GUI for standard web pages to start working with Adaptive User Interfaces (AUI) for different cultures and languages. A GUI that uses UNL technology request a 1

2

Distance Learning Laboratory, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus da Trindade, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Campus da Trindade, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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more organized flow to allow users interacts with the application in a friendly and effective way. The authors believe that it is possible to generate a framework to UNL GUIs design, based on semiotic studies for standard GUIs design, besides the requirements for the UNL system. Considering that semiotics covers a diversity of si gn-usage like images and texts, it is helpful to the task of interface design. In the case of UNL interfaces, it may contribute to the proper design of textual content, menus and labels, representing the best way to identify the interface elements meanings for a universal understanding. This work presents a semiotic approach for UNL interfaces. It aims to help designers in the creation of more accessible interfaces for UNL applications.

1 INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Semiotics has been helpful in providing theories for the user interface design. Therefore, it may be helpful in defining the properties of the UNL system and situating its special interface issues in the context of HCI-systems. Although impressive research about semiotics approaches to user interface design has been made and analyzed, a few number of articles has been leaded introducing UNL technology in order to give a briefing of its task performance. A sort of consideration has being established, but no position have already been verified about the design of a GUI application that uses UNL technology. This new technology aims to share information and provide a common communication environment for different language, but how to assure that this communication will cover well the diversity of special signage of all different languages? The interface between man and computer works as the interaction media that makes possible this communication. Since this communication is basically visual, the graphics have been playing the most important role to the user-interfaces evolution, which migrated from command- line to desktop metaphor, creating the GUI. To go further, many people expected that “purely visual communication”, without the use of words, could become an international auxiliary language, to IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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whom Horn (apud Jacobson, 2000) calls “Universalits”. However, says Horn, purely iconic languages do not usually catch the meaning of the information. In fact, the use of graphics is extremely important to communicate, but the most of the concrete information can be communicate only by textual media. It means that the main GUI paradigm still remains on the textual capability and that language is an essential factor to achieve that. According to Andersen [2], semiotics is an abstraction of individual disciplines such as linguistics, art theory, drama theory and film theory. Since it can be considered a “multimedia” discipline and so computers are, it is useful in designing computer interfaces. However, new technologies such as UNL normally have their own unique interface (or communication) requirements, and it takes time to discover what they are. Therefore, since a coherent framework is needed to describe then, semiotics can help to achieve it. Today, any kind of visual and textual information can be communicated to the world through the Internet, independent of the traditional mass media. However, according to Della Senta (1999), at present, most information materials, scientific, technical and educational, are written in English or in a few other languages. While this benefits millions of people, millions more are denied access to these information materials, because they do not speak the required languages. Considering that a UNL GUI must be adaptive, in order to migrate the information from a specific original language to a requested one, it is necessary to study how make standard GUIs’ design principles applicable to them. This paper emphasis is on sharing ideas about a semiotic approach to the development of UNL GUIs, not only as a try to find a solution for UNL interface systems, but as a way to point up a subject that must be more explored in advanced Interface IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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studies: how to achieve an efficient interface design for AUI. The complexity of AUI was considered by Wayne Iba, Haym Hirsh, & Seth Rogers: “We broadly define adaptive user interfaces as any system that is intended to help a user accomplish some task, and that autonomously modifies its behavior as a result of actions taken by the user.” Among it we believe that the UNL system is a good case to be studied as an AUI, because it introduces a new point of view: it is not a case that the user, developer or administrator has the power to customize the interface, allowing it to be adaptive, but it is a case in which the one user must receive the information transformed without be aware of it, necessarily. Facing such fact we believe this article can contribute for the creation of a UNL GUIs’ semiotic framework, as one of the main goals for Tissiani’s thesis research. Using the Jakobson’s communication model to analyze the HCI approach to interface development, we explain how communication aspects have to be considered by designers of UNL user interfaces.

2 UNL DEFINITION AND ITS INTERFACE ASPECTS The UNL is still at an early stage of development and has been rarely found in the literature. A few number of documents were published and their authors have described or simple investigate UNL issues. The reason we adopted the UNL as the main topic of this paper is because 1) we believe UNL is an emerging technology that will be largely used in the Web and; 2) UNL applications require user interface specific techniques during the design process. One of the main purposes of UNL concerns on sharing information and providing a common educational environment IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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across different languages. According to Della Senta (1999) “The Universal Networking Language is an electronic language for computers to express and exchange every kind of information. The UNL represents information, i.e. meaning, sentence by sentence.” Sentence information is represented as a set of directed binary relations, each between two of the concepts present in the sentence. Concepts are represented as character-strings called "Universal Words (UWs)". UWs can be annotated with attributes which provide further information about how the concept is being used in the specific sentence. A UNL document, then, will be a long list of relations between concepts. It can be said that its main purpose is create documents in UNL format, as a common language to exchange information through computers and generate the conversion to the natural language, with a high degree of precision. “The UNL system allows people to communicate with peoples of different languages in their mother tongue.” (Della Senta,1999). UNL consists on a UN (United Nations) global project of digital and linguistic inclusion. However, its relevance consists not only in the social aspect, but also in the technological one, since it proposes international standards for knowledge representation. In order to achieve a universal standard for UNL content representation, we propose to review some important semiotics theories to motivate a userfriendly interface from the technical processes behind the stage of an UNL application.

3 GUIS AND ITS ASPECTS FOR UNL APPLICATIONS In order to enhance its use and aesthetic, the GUI may be based on solid interface design principles to provide, otherwise, visual consistency, user control and feedback (Apple, 1996). Besides that, an efficient user interface is the IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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one that allows people to work with the application easily and in an intuitive way, increasing the users satisfaction associated to the work performance (Ambler, 1998). Therefore, the first step to achieve a successful GUI is guarantee its main qualities: the functional and aesthetics ones. The aesthetic aspect has to do with the satisfaction of the user and is largely important on his acting. At the same time, the functional aspect can be understood as the usability aspect, which concerns the main goal of Human Factors discipline.

3.1 Usability The usability is described as the main quality of a GUI. Shackel (1993) defines usability as the “capacity of the interface to be easily and effectively used by humans, where ‘easiness’ is related to a specific level of subjectivity of the evaluation and ‘effectiveness’ to a specific level of performance.” However, the Human Factors discipline proposes several usability related goal, including the ones listed by Shneirderman (1998): proper functionality3, reliability, availability, security, data integrity4, standardization, integration5, consistency and portability. The most of these goals depends on common issues to be applied for a UNL GUI. For instance, functionality can be assured by usability conditions, since integrity, readability and control depend highly on a consistent visual structure (Mullet, 1996), as well as we can consider that reliability, availability and security 3

4

5

(Proper functionality): “What tasks and subtasks must be carried out.” (Shneirderman, 1998) (Reliability, availability, security and data integrity): “(…) commands must function as specified, displayed data must reflect the database contents, and updates must be applied correctly. (…) Protection must be provided from unauthorized access, inadvertent destruction of data, or malicious tampering.” (Shneirderman, 1998) (Integration): “Can be considered the integration across application packages and software tools.” (Shneirderman, 1998) IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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depend on the same. However, to achieve an efficient UNL GUI, we must consider special issues regarding AUI. In this case, standardization, consistency and portability are not only necessary to cause benefits on increasing the learning times and annoying dangerous errors across different formats, software versions, platforms or hardware (Shneirderman,1998). For a UNL GUI, these tasks presents other meanings like 1) standardization is needed to assure a common user interface for the multiple languages that a UNL system can display; 2) consistency is the key attribute that may guarantee the visual unit in terms of layouts, color, typography and so on within the multilingual application and 3) portability is the biggest challenge to be achieve in a UNL GUI, since it refers to the potential of convert data and share the same user interface across multiple application environments.

3.2 Standard GUIs design rules applied to the design of UNL GUIs Shneiderman (1998) give a tip for user interface designers that is very useful in the case of UNL GUIs design: “try to predict subjective satisfaction or emotional reactions”. It makes us to remind that many users do not approve the idea, that had been implemented by some international websites, of recognizing his IP, carrying out a special website in his/her official country language, rather then the original one. In the case of a website that uses UNL technology, we believe that the user may have the option of visualizing the original website in its native language, as well as in any other language, and not only in his official country one. It implies that the user ma y have control on what he wants to see and that he will be secure of all its contents, since he will be able to check its consistency. Control and consistency are only two of the eight golden rules, presented by Shneiderman (1998) based on his earlier stud ies. We consider that these are the rules that can assure IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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a successful interface. We consider these rules can help formulate the proposed framework in order to achieve a UNL GUI guideline (Tissiani, 2002/1). They are: 1) Consistency; 2) Shortcuts; 3) Feedback; 4) Closure; 5) Error; 6) Reversal of actions; 7) Control; 8) Reduce short -term memory load.

4 SEMIOTICS APPROACHES TO UNL GUIS DESIGN Considering that semiotics covers a diversity of sign-usage like images and texts, it is helpful to the task of interface design. In the case of UNL systems, it may contribute to proper design and represent its user interfaces for a universal understanding. Our first observation regarding the semiotics contributions to UNL GUIs design is that UNL system’s communication is a special kind of communication, which, in some way, can be more similar to computer-computer communication than human- computer interaction. Likewise, we feel the need to study semiotics in order to reach the right concept of communication for this case: the human-computer one. The processes of communication that are investigated by semiotics methods are both the representation and the interpretation ones. According to Andersen (2000), the computational context can be analyzed by semiotics through the representations (the algorithms and data structures as signifiers) as well as through the user’s interpretation of these representations (user representations and domain concepts as signified). “Thus, only those parts of the computational processes that inf luence interpretation, and only those parts of the interpretation that are influenced by the computation, can be analyzed by semiotic methods” (Andersen, 2000). Therefore, we believe that a semiotic study is quite relevant to the conception of UNL application’s user interfaces. For instance, depending on the development of the UWs, its dictionaries and the other UNL components of an application, IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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its content representation can generate different kinds of interpretation by the user. Moreover, semiotics theories can help not only to increase communicate in UNL systems by appropriate HCI techniques, but also by an adequate study of its programming. To Philip Armour (apud de Souza, 2001) the software is not a product, but a media, where our knowledge is encoded. We believe that in the case of a UNL system this insight is quite applicable and that is one of the reasons why we need to study semiotics to improve the power of UNL system’s communication.

4.1 A model of communication Ronald Jakobson proposed a model based on his earlier studies on linguistics that has powerfully affected communication related disciplines since its first publication in 1960 (Jakobson apud de Souza, 2001). In his work he identifies six basic constituent elements of natural communication: 1) sender, 2) receiver, 3) message, 4) context, 5) medium and 6) code. Using the Jakobson communication model, we observe how its communication functions can be well applied in the human- computer interface design and we propose that some of its functionalities may be better studied and evaluated in order to achieve an interface effectiveness to an UNL system. According to De Souza (2001), Jakobson “called our attention to the fact that natural language can be used to achieve specific functions associated to each one of these constituents”. For example, we can use language to check if the receiver and the sender are functional, and so on. We think that all of this communication functions are pertinent in the case of a UNL GUI. However, in agreement to Scalis i (2001) that proposes in her thesis research “A Semiotic Communication Model for Interface Design”, based on Jacobson´s model, we consider that the function of the sender IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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must be better studied in a HCI perspective, specially in the case of UNL interface design. Therefore, we will make a sort of consideration about this factor. It is a fact that there isn’t any communication without a receiver and that the meaning of a message is defined by the receiver’s interpretation (Scalisi, 2001). Therefore the receiver plays a central role in our field of research as well as Scalisi (2001) proposes to the field of HCI in general. Since HCI has extensively studied the user as the center of design process, we think we can take their methods for better reconize the user and develop his interface in an effective way, like the user observation, usability evaluations, cognitive studies on human understanding, etc. Semiotic HCI defines interfaces as messages sent by the designers to the users (de Souza, 1993). But, in the case of an UNL GUI, will the user perceive that the designer is the sender or they will think that the real sender in this communication is the computer? According to Scafisi (2001), “The interface system is a world of signs in which we operate and manipulate, but sometimes computer also “speaks” to us (…) The point is that we should better clarify to the user, through the interface, the characteristics of this special sender (the computer) in order to avoid interaction problems derived from the misunderstanding of the sender’s function.” Our research aims to point the designer and the computer’s function as the sender of the message in a UNL GUI, in order to avoid user’s meaning misinterpretation.

4.2 A Propose of an Evaluation Method According to de Souza (1993), “given the nature of computing machines, we can rightfully expect semiotics to have a word to say not only about HCI, but also about programming and computing as a whole” (de Souza, 1993). Moreover, de Souza (1993) says that the notion of computational communicability IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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is the property of software that efficiently shows to users its underlying design intent and an interactive principle, which means that the designer must efficiently transmit the message to users, allowing then to interpret meanings in a consistent way. Based on this notion, we believe that the best way to improve our knowledge about the UNL GUIs requirements, in order to achieve a good communication between designers and users, is to propose an evaluation method. This evaluation is based on de Souza´s method (2001) and may tell designers how well their message is getting across to users, as well as identify communication breakdowns that may appear during the interaction with an UNL system. “As in most evaluation methods, the test involves a set of tasks, and a digital recording of all users’ interactive moves to achieve the goal associated to each task”. (de Souza, 2001). The evaluation may take place within a case study that is to be presented at ICTE 2002 (Tissiani, 2002/2). The case study brings UNL into an application, which has been developed for a Distance Learning course, by both Virtual Reality Laboratory (LRV) and Distance Learning Laboratory (LED) at UFSC. It has been implemented modules that allow the visualization of the program in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. Our future work is to model the evaluation method proposed and apply it to the interface application.

5 CONCLUSION By putting in evidence some questions about a semiotic approach for UNL GUIs design, this paper presents the earlier studies that compose the main subject of Tissiani’s thesis research. The research emphasis is on sharing ideas about a semiotic approach to the development of AUI as a way to point IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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up a subject that must be more explored: how to achieve an efficient interface design for AUI that autonomously adapts its appearance as a result of system’s actions and not by user’s one. We establish Shneiderman’s taxonomy as the basis for the HCI case study diagnosis and we propose an adaptation of de Souza’s method of communicability evaluation, based on Jakobson´s one, as the model to analyze the case study. The semiotic approach may support an effective study of UNL GUI design, and guarantee the activeness of usability and the assuredness of the 8 golden rules exposed in section 3. As a result, the research may collaborate to establish assessments criteria’s for the design of UNL GUIs, in the form of a guideline. Starting from the issues presented, it is possible to describe a number of techniques that may also be considered in order to help the construction of the proposed guideline. Some of the techniques that can complement this study are listed bellow: •

•

Graphic Design Principles: Since language can also be considered a graphical media as well as images, the UNL GUI principles may be based on graphical design. Studies on visual communication discipline are essential to assure both an efficient communication from designers to users as well as from the user interaction back to the system. The theoretical approaches to graphical design include insights on layout, colors, typography, signs and all the specific screen elements common for different languages. Cognitive aspects and Ergonomics: The study of appropriate colors, fonts, forms, icons and other elements of design that better work as international standards. Moreover, these elements may assure the screen to be easily readable, besides helping those who have some visual disability. Visual aspects related to

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cognition should also be carefully designed in order to obtain a satisfactory rate during the use process.

REFERENCES 1. Ambler, S. W. User interface design: tips and techniques. USA: SIGS Books/Cambridge University Press, 1998. (www.ambysoft.com/userInterfaceDesign.pdf) . 2. Andersen P.B., What semiotics can and cannot do for HCI, in CHI'2000 Workshop on Semiotic Approaches to User Interface Design. 3. Apple Computer (1992). Human interface guidelines: the Apple desktop interface. USA: Addison-Wesley. 2nd Ed., 1992, 410p. 4. Cybis, W. Apostila do LabUtil: recomendações para desgin ergonômico de interfaces. BR: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção. UFSC, 1997,145 p. 5. Della Senta, T.; Uchida, H.; Zhu, M. The UNL, A gift for a millennium. On-line reference: Institute of Advanced Studies, The United Nations University, 1999. (www.unl.ias.unu.edu/publications/gm) . 6. De Souza C.S., The semiotic engineering of user interface languages, in International Journal of Man-Machine studies. No. 39, 753-773, 1993. 7. De Souza C. S., The semiotic engineering of human-computer interaction, in SERG, Informática/PUC-Rio - peirce.inf.puc- rio -br, February 12th, 2001. 8. Iba, W., Hirsh, H., & Rogers, S. Machine learning special issue on adaptive user interfaces. Call for papers of AAAI 2000 Spring Symposium on Adaptive User Interfaces, at Stanford University March 20-22, 2000. (www.isle.org/~aui/aaaisymp00.html) 9. Jacobson, R. E., Information design, England: The MIT Press. 1st Ed., 2000. 357 p. 10. Marcus, A. (1998). Metaphor design in user interfaces. The Journal of Computer Documentation ACM/SIGDOC, New York, NY, May 1998, volume 22, No. 2, pp. 43-57. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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11.

Mullet, K. and Sano, D. Designing visual interfacescommunication oriented techniques. USA: SunSoft Press, 1st ed., 1995, 273 p.

12. Nielsen, J. Usability engineering. USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. 1993: 1st ed., 362 p. 13. Galitz, W.O. The essential guide for user interface design. USA: Wiley Computer Publishing, 2nd Ed.,1997, 743p. 14. Scalisi, R. A semiotic communication model for interface design in CiteSeer - Scientific Literature Digital Library (citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs), 2001. 15. Shneiderman, B. Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction, 3rd Ed. USA: Addison Wesley Longman Inc, 1998. 638p. 16. Tissiani, G.; Garcia, F. Guideline for adaptive graphical user interfaces using Universal Networking Language. SPAIN: to be in ICTE Conference Proceedings, November 13-16th, 2002. 17. Tissiani, G.; Bortolon, A.; Fialho, F.; Garcia, F.; dos Santos, J. S. Virtual reality and Universal Networking Language: a case study for distance learning. SPAIN: to be in ICTE Conference Proceedings, November 13-16th, 2002.

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Object oriented modeling applied to UNL Adriana Gomes Alves, M.Eng. [email protected] Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, Dr.Eng. [email protected] Andre Bortolon, M.Eng. [email protected]

ABSTRACT During the last few years, the Internet has emerged as one of the main channels for communication and access of information. The number of people getting connected and the interchange of experiences at all knowledge levels have grown at incredible speed, but yet, along with the advantages of a rapid access at long distances, comes the difficulty of communication due to the language barrier. The UNL (Universal Networking Language) has appeared as a way out to the minimization of this problem. Along with UNL also came the need for new projects that may turn feasible the use of this technology through the WEB. In this paper we present a way of using object oriented modeling in order to organize and better understand the basic elements of UNL from a computational point of view.

Keywords UNL, Object oriented modeling.

I. INTRODUCTION From among all emerging social problems, digital inclusion has stood out during the last few years as a topic for discussion among those who search for equal opportunities for all citizens. The final document issued at the Workshop for Digital IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Inclusion in 2001 [4], concludes that digital exclusion deepens social and cultural exclusion since those who have no access to the new technologies and means of knowledge, will find themselves less prepared to live with and get adapted to the new social processes. Digital inclusion should therefore guarantee equal opportunities for all. The reality of computer technology in the world is still a privilege of a few. Statistics show that the gap between those who are connected and those who don’t even have access to a computer will continue to grow. According to data from Internet Business [1], 41% of all Internet users in the world are concentrated in the USA. Asia, in spite of having the greatest part of the world population, represents only 20% of all internet access, and Latin America, ridiculous 4%. Besides the problem of access to technology, there is also the problem of language, which constitutes one of the main barriers for a greater dissemination of web usage. This is due to the fact that most of the information on the internet is only available in English. As an initiative to reduce this problem, UNL (Universal Networking Language) is presented as an artificial language whose goal is to allow translations between natural languages without the need to use an intermediate one, like English. Until now, the main concerns with respect to UNL have been the questions regarding language and the definition of its structures, leaving the computational view of the problem more as a background study. In this paper, we intend to present some suggestions on how to model the basic structures of UNL as to better visualize and understand its elements, following an object oriented approach. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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II. BASIC UNL CONCEPTS UNL is an artificial language for computers in the form of semantic networks used to express any type of information. It is made of Universal Words (UWs), relations, attributes, and a Knowledge Base (KB). The Universal Words are themselves the vocabulary of the UNL, relations and attributes constitute the syntax, while the Knowledge Base constitutes the semantics [5].

A. Relations Being that relations and attributes constitute the syntax of the UNL, it is by means of relations that complex ideas can be expressed, and hence, texts and sentences elaborated. Relations are represented by labels that bind two or more UWs. Labels are represented by strings of 3 characters or less. The following constitutes an example of a relation: agt(agent). Here, we define a “thing” which starts an action. Its syntax is agt(do,thing), where “do” is an action and “thing” the agent that executes the action. A practical example for the sentence “John breaks” is agt(break(agt>thing,obj>thing),John(icl>person). The UNL presents a variety of around 42 types of relations which represent all possible associations between Universal Words. The UNL also tries to cover all the expressions necessary for any type of message that may be wished to be transmitted.

B. Universal Words Universal Words may represent either simple or compound concepts. We have therefore two types of UWs: simple “UWs”, describing simple unit concepts, and “Compound UWs”, which are compound structures of binary relations grouped together. A UW is made up of a string of characters (in English) followed IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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by a list of restrictions, or Constraint List. A basic UW corresponds to an English word, while a restricted UW represents a more restricted or specific concept. For example, if we take the basic word “state”, we may restrict it to more specific meanings by associating constraints to it, such as: state(icl>express), denoting an action that expresses something, or state(icl>country), which denotes a nation or country.

C. Attributes Attributes are used with UWs to describe the subjectivity of sentences. They show what is said from the speaker’s point of view. This type of information may include things like feelings, attitudes, references or the moment in time when the sentence occurs. With attributes we can give more meaning and details to the message being presented. Attributes are always connected to a UW and we can have several attributes for one same word in one single UNL expression. For example, if we take the UW “eat” and associate to it the attribute @past, we will be expressing that the action of eating happened in the past. The time represented by attribute does not represent a verbal tense (like ate or was eating), only the moment in time with respect to the point of reference.

D. Dictionary A dictionary of UNL words must be created for each native language which we may wish to make available on the web, for example: Portuguese, Japanese and German, among others. Linguists are responsible for the association of words (or radicals) and expressions of each language with the Universal Word (UWs). They must also inform all the grammatical attributes such as morphology, verbal inflexions, semantics, etc. which will make possible the translation of UNL expressions to a native language and vice versa.

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E. Knowledge Base The Knowledge Base (KB) is a hierarchic set of UNL expressions (UW, relations) that make up the UNL semantics. The categories of the KB allow for a better contextualization of words within a certain concept hierarchy. In this way, the word or expression that best fits to a certain translation can be found. The present categories of the KB are: thing, do, occur, be, aoj>thing, mod
III. OBJECT ORIENTATION The Object Oriented paradigm has been consolidating itself during the last few decades as an efficient technique used in the process of analysis and modeling of applications. Rumbaugh [3] defines object orientation as “a new way of thinking about problems with models organized around real world concepts. The main component is the object which combines structure and behavior in one single entity”. The main concept in object orientation is the object itself, which represents one specific occurrence or instance of a class, corresponding to something abstract or from the real world. Objects are made up of attributes, that is, information or data. Objects are also made of the operations or methods that can executed upon them. For example, considering the object “ball”, we may specify information (attributes) about it such as color, size, material, etc. On the other hand, we may also say that our object “ball” is capable of rolling, bouncing, being thrown etc (methods). Objects can be classified considering their common characteristics (same attributes and methods). This represents the concept “class” of the object. Objects or classes may be associated with one another, forming networks known as Class IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Diagrams or Object Diagrams. A Class Diagram represents an abstraction of a system or concept which is desired to be modeled and understood. There are several types of associations between objects and/or classes, for example: specification, generalization, aggregation, simple association. We do not intend in this paper to enter into details of these concepts. These can all easily be found in the specialized literature. Graphically, an object or class is usually represented with a rectangle divided into three sections: name of the class, list of attributes, and list of methods. The associations are defined with lines connecting these rectangles and, depending on the type of association, some symbol that may represent it. In this paper we shall use the UML notation for class diagrams [2].

IV. AN OBJECT MODELING PROPOSAL FOR UNL The KB and the native words dictionary are both currently implemented in the computer in the form of sequential files [6], which is not an efficient method to access data. Knowing that the amount of gathered information will surely increase at amazing speed as applications for UNL are developed, the need appears to review the way in which this information is to be stored and retrieved by using more powerful computing tools. The use of an object oriented data base, for instance, is one of the possible solutions. The object paradigm can be applied to any type of system or concept. It is thinking like this that we pretend in this chapter to present an initial proposal for the modeling of the basic UNL elements, seeking to obtain a diagram that may represent them graphically. This would surely facilitate its understanding and would also serve as a starting point for its implementation. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Figure 1 shows a class diagram that represents the UWs, including the possible classifications of the KB, that is, how the UWs can be classified according to UNL definitions. The concept of inheritance applied to UWs, according to the KB, can be desirable when we come to give more details on relations, since these define the types of UWs that can be associated. UWs are, by definition, composed of a HeadWord and may or may not be restricted by means of Constraints, associating a more specific concept to it. Constraints, in turn, are composed of Relation Labels associated to other UWs.

Figure 1. Class Diagram of Universal Words (UW)

In Figure 2 (next page) we show a proposal for the modeling of a complete text in UNL. A text is made up of sentences, which in turn is composed of UNL binary relations. Relations associate two UWs, which in turn may have a series of attributes that will give them more meaning in the sentence. But, to use this model, we still have to include some restrictions between the Relational Labels and the UWs. This is due to the fact that for each type of relation the types of UWs that can be related together are well defined in UNL.

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Figure 2. Text Modeling with UNL

This problem and other details like this one will remain to be treated in a revision of the models we have just presented. We suggest for this matter the collaboration of researchers on UNL that possess knowledge on object oriented programming.

V. CONCLUSION The UNL appears as an artificial language that pretends to substantially increase as well as to improve the quality of communications among people from different places and of different tongues. It is not only concerned with serving as a mere tool for translations. It also seeks to put built-in knowledge into the process of interpretation of texts, preserving the original ideas. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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There is still a lot to be done so that UNL may effectively be used at large scale. In the area of computer sciences, many projects will still appear that may come to use the technology behind UNL or to improve the quality of the information processing. This paper presented some ideas on how the basic elements of UNL could be modeled by means of the object oriented paradigm. Nevertheless, there is still a lot left to detail and specify so that the model may be considered robust and stable.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to acknowledge Damián Rodríguez Sánchez for the paper revision and translation to English.

REFERENCES 1. DIEGUEZ, Flávio. Analfabetismo digital. Revista Educação, São Paulo, year 28, n. 248, pp 28-36, dec. 2001. 2. FOWLER, Martin, SCOTT, Kendall. UML essencial: um breve guia para a linguagem padrão de modelagem de objetos. 2nd ed. Porto Alegre: Bookman, 2000. 3. FURLAN, José Davi. Modelagem de objetos através da UML: the Unified Modeling Language. São Paulo: Makron Books, 1998. 4. OFICINA PARA INCLUSÃO DIGITAL. Relatório final. Brasília, 2001. Available from: www.governoeletronico.gov.br/default2.cfm?idarea=10. Accesed on: April 04, 2002. 5. UNL Center. The Universal Networking Language (UNL): specifications. Version 3 Edition 1. Available from: www.unl.ias.unu.edu/unlsys/unl/UNL%20Specifications.htm. Accessed on: March 27, 2002. 6. HOESCHL, Hugo C. Aplicações em Engenharia do Conhecimento: UNL. Florianópolis: UFSC. 2002. (Class notes) IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Soccer Intelligence 1

Hugo Cesar Hoeschl, Ph.D [email protected]

Andre Bortolon, Msc. [email protected]

2

ABSTRACT This work describes empirical knowledge extraction methodologies on soccer and the creation of representation methods to soccer robotics.

1 INTRODUCTION The objective of this work is to describe the “soccer intelligence” (SI), specially the Brazilian one, which has been developed through the history of soccer. To do this, it is necessary to find the empirical basis, develop methodologies to correctly identify, and establish a process to represent the SI. In this scope, it is important to define what the SI represents relating to performance, where and how it appears, based from real-world examples, including World Cup’s facts. To speed the work, it is useful to classify the soccer knowledge in different levels of specialty and complexity.

1

2

Brazilian Government Federal Attorney; Ijuris researcher; WBSA Scientific Council President. Lauro Linhares, 728 – S. 105. Florianópolis, SC, Brazil Instituto Jurídico de Inteligência e Sistemas – Ijuris. Lauro Linhares, 728 – 212. Florianópolis, SC, Brazil IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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2 WHAT IS THE SI? The concept here called SI represents a knowledge structuring process, involving its construction and discovery, its utilization and transmission, aiming at creating alternatives to clearly visualize all the steps of the process and to extract precise conclusions, supported by information technology. The SI objective is to increase the performance of new teams. The usage of specific knowledge in the soccer area, besides other ones, has been the main factor to explain the great performance of Brazilian soccer team in international tournaments. The World Cup history, for instance is mentioned highlighting the 2002 World Cup and the millennium final. It is necessary to present more details.

3 ABILITY DEVELOPED BY BRAZIL IN SOCCER AREA

Figure 1. World Cup winners

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Brazil has won five times the biggest soccer event of the world, the World Cup. The chart showed in figure 1 shows World Cup winners. Also, Brazil is the current FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking. It is the country that occupied the first place for more time in all the ranking’s history. It has never been below the third position. Brazil is the only one country that has participated in all World Cup editions, finishing in the top-five twelve times, nine of them as top-3 and winning five. Besides that, it has a series of other expressive marks in this sport. There also are expressive facts to be registered related to individual players. The Brazilian player Zagallo is the only one person who won the World Cup four times (twice as a player, once as a coach and once as coach assistant). Also, he participated in other two editions, being finalist once and semifinalist once. So, he has the incredible mark of never going to a World Cup and finish worse than top-four. Another Brazilian player, Pelé, was a world champion by the first time being only seventeen years old. After that, he also won other four world championships, two other World Cups with a Brazilian Team, and two with Santos team. In World Cups, he had the incredible performance of 75% of success (3 wins in 4 disputes). Also, he is the professional player who made more goals in history, almost 1,300. In our days, the most famous player is other Brazilian, Ronaldo. He has already played three World Cups, winning two and being runner-up in the other. Also, he got the Intercontinental Club Championship playing in Real Madrid. Also, he has already been top scorer in Brazil, Netherlands and Spain. Theoretically, according to his age, he can play two more World Cups. Recently, he was awarded by FIFA as the best world player. It was the third time he got this prize, becoming the player that more times ever won it. Moreover, Brazil has a magnific performance in other soccer modalities, as the Beach Soccer and the Futsal, being, in both, the greater all time world champion.

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An interesting detail is that Brazil is a country of the third world, with infrastructure problems, and these problems are present in soccer. The Brazilian clubs do not have the same structure of the great international clubs. They cannot pay great salaries. They don’t have good centers of training. Even the Brazilian National Team does not have a structure equivalent to the main European countries’ National Teams. How can be can this great collection of victories be justified studied, and stimulated in the whole world? The task of this work is: (a) to locate the intelligence and the knowledge that generate these victories; (b) to develop extraction and identification methods; and (c) to create representation methodologies and identify the types of knowledge that can be represented for the soccer robotics.

4 CAN SI BE APPLIED IN ROBOCUP? The answer is YES, according to the aim of the Robocup. An automaton team will never win a human team if they don’t have a deep knowledge of the environment, reactions, history and tradition. This task involves an extreme degree of complexity, making the chess challenge between machine and man seem a single trick. The option suggested here, to make the SI arrive at Robocup is the use of Dynamically Contextualized Knowledge Representation technique, as Hoeschl [5]. According to it, it is possible to map the main knowledge repositories, its storage forms, and the main methodologies of efficient representation.

5 WHAT IS THIS EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE? The empirical knowledge that bases SI can be observed in three moments: IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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1. When the team is constructed. Choice of players, managers and technical commission. Choice of the global position of the club; 2. In the definition of the specific strategies, for competitions and matches. Choice of start-up players, offensive and defensive strategies; 3. In the dynamics of the game, during the 90 minutes and, specially, when the team has the ball possession. Accomplishment of plays. Positioning. Tactical alterations. Neutralization of the adversary plays. All of them can be applied in the scope of Robocup. However, they must be correctly extracted and represented. Some relevant points are the following ones: • • • •

• • •

What this knowledge is; How it can be detected; How it is silently transmitted among the Brazilian, following a cultural construction process; How the experience acquired is stored and transmitted through the time from a great soccer personality (player, coach, or manager); What the imporovisation capacity is (strong characteristic of Brazilian soccer); How the individual games of disequilibrium occur; How the incredible offensive force of Brazilian football is drawn.

It´s possible that all these aspects can be applied in the soccer robotics, and they will, gradually, be analyzed in future works. By now, they are identified as significant milestones in the construction of the SI. Besides that, other significant aspects exist. But, they are difficult to transport for the Robocup’s environment:

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Extra field factors (psychological pressure, host, violence, emotional factors, social scaling, regional motivations); Referees errors (as occurred in World Cup 2002); Lack of concentration; To compensate the technical incapacity with physical violence and excess of faults.

6 CLASSIFICATION OF SOCCER KNOWLEDGE An important step in the diagnosis of the SI’s premises is the classification of the soccer knowledge stored by the Brazilians, in different levels of complexity and specialty. Initially, we have the generic knowledge, accessible to the general public. Second, we have the specialized knowledge, divided into three other levels: a ) Level 1: people interested in soccer subjects that follow the events and games (mainly fans); b) Level 2: analysts, journalists and professionals from the area. They are people who have professional contact with soccer, including players, managers, coaches and referees; c) Level 3: deep experts on the subject, including the winners of World Cups, successful players, great journalists, soccer studiers and personalities of prominence in the soccer world. These groups generate inversely proportional vectors related to the number of people and the complexity of the knowledge, as shown in figure 2. In other words, the more refined the information is, the less the number of people who know them.

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Level 3: Deep knowing people WC Chanpions, great scholars Knowledge complexity

Specific Knowledge

Level 2: Journalists, Journalists, proffessionals in the area area,, analists

Level 1: Public interested and fans

Number of people

Generic knowledge about soccer

Figure 2. Relation between information relevance and people

7 HOW WILL THEY BE EXTRACTED? This knowledge can eventually be also registered in documents. Thus, for its correct extraction, three sources are excellent: a) Documents (news, matches reports); a) Databases (statistics, game analyses); b) In the people’s alive memory. A good way of identifying the knowledge from these three sources and to use it in the SI, is collecting it through an IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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extraction process , grouping and classifying , generating new uses as intelligent bases, hypercubes, framed knowledge and new decision processes. KNOWLEDGE SOUCES

PROCESS

NEW UTILIZATION

Intelligent Bases

Extraction Grouping

Databases

Classification

Hypercubs

Documents

Framed Knowledge

Decision Process

Scholars

Figure 3. Information Extraction process

Good alternatives of extraction are: • • • •

Collection of statistical data; Analysis of paradigmatic situations; Case Modeling – CBR; Dynamically Contextualized Knowledge Representation – DCKR (documentary memory).

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8 DCKR The Dynamically Contextualized Knowledge Representation, DCKR, is a process of knowledge engineering, which tries to represent it in a dynamic form, that is, taking into consideration its constant changeability, as well as its specific adaptations in specific contexts. The concept was formulated when the construction of Olimpo System [5], applying it in the extraction of the knowledge from the resolutions of the UN Security Council. Its procedure is described in the figure 4. 1.b) Contextualised search on UNO´s database

1) ReadingtheResolutionspreviouslyselected

+ 2) Draftinglist1

2.b) Draftinglist2

3) Obtaininga temporarylist

4) Extractionfromdatabase 5) manual adjustments

6) Obtaining additionallist1

4.b) Manualsearch

9) Draftlistbecomes thenewtemporarylist

+

5.b) manual adjustments

+

6.b) Obtaining additionallist2

7) Additionallistsaddedto temporarylist

8) Afterobtainingthe newdraftlist, returnto 3

10) Aftera numberof iterations,theKB is obtained

Figure 4. Dynamically Contextualized Knowledge Representation IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.

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Its objective is to generate a knowledge base on the focused subject. In the case of Olimpo, the work was executed on documents of the UN Security Council, more specifically its resolutions and regiment, besides the United Nations Charter. In the case of soccer, the application of the same methodology is possible. Due to document analysis and contextualized searches in open bases (textual documents, news, matches reports, etc), a great amount of contextualized knowledge can be extracted. The DCKR process was developed to be applied in document search, and is part of the Context Structured Search - SCS, a technique also developed for application in the Olimpo System. The SCS allows the realization of queries with great amounts of texts (approximately 2,300 words), also allowing the comparison between textual documents. However, the precision level of the contained knowledge in a KB, after the DCKR, allows its use in other activities beyond the documentary recovery, such as the programming of independent agents, the pattern recognition, and applications on the fly. Moreover, important techniques of text mining, developed to be used in the AlphaThemis System [4], can also be used for the achievement of valuable information in the the scope of soccer as the extraction of statistics from texts, as shown in figure 5:

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Figure 5. Statistics from AlphaThemis System

9 APPLYING THE CONTEXTUALIZED KNOWLEDGE IN SOCCER ROBOTICS The SI, based on the dynamically contextualized knowledge, can be used successfully in soccer robotics. Knowledge of soccer can have an efficient usage in Robocup, especially in Soccer Simulation, in a first moment, and other categories, in a later phase, emphasizing the following tasks: • • •

Analysis and comparison of descriptions of matches Evaluation of the behavior of the teams in victorious situations; Evaluation of the behavior of the teams in adverse situations;

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Study of the tactical behavior of adversary team; Discovering of strong and weak points.

All these information can be got through the analysis of log of the matches, supplied for the logplayer application. Since this application can store all the information and movements of a match in textual form, the recovery engine offered by the DCKR has total capacity to extract the embedded knowledge in these data.

10 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS The main conclusions of this work are the following : I. II. III.

Brazilian soccer has a valuable accumulated knowledge that can be modeled and applied in soccer robotics; The DCKR process is an efficient alternative for extraction and representation of this knowledge; This modeling will allow the design of Soccer Intelligence (SI), through the identification of a conceptual model, with the aim of constructing a software for knowledge management.

For the evolution of SI it is important to describe, in the future, the alternatives to the application of the contextualized knowledge in soccer robotics, in a more detailed form, as well as a better detailing of the efficiency of the empirical knowledge related here. Another important aspect is the future use of know how and the technology in the development of the SI in other technological applications, as in other areas of software engineering and robotics, as in other strategic sports and, still, in other subjects (commercial disputes, warlike, and politics).

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REFERENCES [1] HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar; BUENO, Tania Cristina D'agostini; BORTOLON, André; MATTOS, Eduardo da Silva; RIBEIRO, Marcelo Stopanowski. AlphaThemis - from text into knowledge. In: 1st Workshop On Automatic Deduction And Artificial Intelligence (IDEIA), in the 8th Iberoamerican Conference On Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA), 2002, Sevilha. Proceedings of the IDEIA. 2002. v. 1, p. 91-100. [2] HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar; BUENO, Tania Cristina D'agostini; BORTOLON, André; MATTOS, Eduardo da Silva; RIBEIRO, Marcelo Stopanowski; BARCIA, Ricardo Miranda. Structured contextual search for the UN Security Council. In: 1st Workshop On Automatic Deduction And Artificial Intelligence (IDEIA), in the 8th Iberoamerican Conference On Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA), 2002, Sevilha. Proceedings of the IDEIA. 2002. v. 1, p. 55-66. [3] HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar; BARCIA, Ricardo Miranda. Access to information and knowledge using distance learning and artificial intelligence. In: First UNL Open Conference, 2001, Suzhou. UNL 2001 Open Conference Proceedings. 2001. [4] HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar; BUENO, Tania Cristina D'agostini; BARCIA, Ricardo Miranda; BORTOLON, André; MATTOS, Eduardo da Silva. Olimpo: Contextual structured search to improve the representation on UN Security Council with information extraction methods. In: 8th International Conference On Artificial Inteligence And Law, 2001, St. Louis. ICAIL 2001 Proceedings. New York: ACM SIGART, 2001. p. 217-218. [5]

HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar. Sistema Olimpo: tecnologia da informação jurídica para o Conselho de Segurança da ONU. Rio de Janeiro: Papel Virtual, 2002. v. 1. 220 p. ISBN: 8574932728

[6] BUENO, Tania Cristina D'agostini; HOESCHL, Hugo Cesar; MATTOS, Eduardo da Silva; BARCIA, Ricardo Miranda; WANGENHEIM, Christiane Gresse Von. JurisConsulto: Retrieval in jurisprudencial text bases using juridical terminology. In: The Seventh International Conference On Artificial Intelligence And Law, 1999, Oslo. Proceedings of the Conference. New York: ACM, 1999. v. 1, p. 147-155. IJURIS - Institute of Electronic Government, Juridical Intelligence and Systems. All rights reserved to the authors.