Engineer Yolanda Aucapiña, representative of the University of Cuenca, participant of TICAL 2017 Costa Rica, tells us about her research work and her experience being the only woman, and one of the three winners of Young People for Innovation, being her first participation in the TICAL 2017 edition.
It is an honor to represent the University of Cuenca. I also want to emphasize that the project is not only mine, but also that of my colleague Carlos Plaza. It is an honor to present it at TICAL 2017. The project to be presented is our graduation work, in coordination with Engineer Victor Saquicela as director. The research topic is a semantic search engine that aims to facilitate the search for information in the existing data sources at a university.
Since there are not many specialists in materials characterization, and new materials are generated every day in university chemistry laboratories, we saw the importance of creating a working group of people dedicated to materials characterization and research on this topic, since today the economy is geared towards value-added products and not raw materials.
RDF stands for Research Description Framework. It's a language that allows you to model terms. It's based on triples, meaning three terms: subject, predicate, and object. Modeling uses these three elements, allowing you to describe terms simply and download them. You can define inference relationships so that the computer can infer knowledge. It's not the same as a database, where you search for something related to it. You can perform reverse searches, that is, related searches that integrate everything into a single model.
Our work began when we graduated in February. The actual work started in March. We were in a research phase, which is necessary to establish the foundation and groundwork for the project. Currently, we are in the ontology modeling phase. Before this, we have to conduct a requirements gathering process, which is a complex part. We have to develop competency-based questions and, based on that, create vocabularies to find existing resources. The anthology design is essentially based on reuse; that is, not creating everything from scratch, but rather finding parts that can be reused.
At this moment we are looking for what can be reused, we find different vocabularies that can be joined together to build the organizational ontology of the university.
Make them interested, make them see it as something useful, get the solution to them and then continue working and show an implemented solution, so that the result and feasibility can be seen in a visual way.
We learned about TICAL precisely from the Director of Technologies, Victor Saquicela, who informed us that we could send the proposal.
I know that CEDIA is an institution that helps research projects, that provides funding; I know of research projects and colleagues at the university who have worked with CEDIA , and I know that it is an institution that has greatly supported this field.
Absolutely! That would be excellent, because the project is expandable, so much more can be done, and if CEDIA supports us, that would be fantastic!
I would like to thank CEDIA for their assistance, and my sincere thanks to Engineer Juan Pablo Carvallo; he is a wonderful person and a magnificent teacher. I have had the pleasure of being his student on several occasions, and my sincere thanks to you all.
