Locale similarity semantic search in large groups decision: MUTIRÕ project for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games

The city of Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Olympic and Paralympics Games. Several improvements are being planned for the city in order to prepare it for the so called Rio 2016 event. This sequence of developments will be decided by a Local Committee and many people enthusiastic to participate should contribute by sending ideas and actually collaborate in the planning process. To assist this huge task force, our paper intends to use decision support systems techniques and cognitive means through different approaches in order to aid large groups in their discussions, their alternatives generation and all group choosing process. This work presents a semantic search method in the LaSca system for the MUTIRÕ project, which explores the coordination in a Large Scale decision support system. The importance of a locale semantic search comparing to a classical search method is that most contributors are not formal and well behaved in language structure, using lots of slang and alternative means of communication. As Brazil is a continental country it created several local ways of communications that vary from place to place creating additional difficulties for a search tool. A smart thesaurus must be constructed through semi-automatic means and a search engine should be crated to allow feasible searches by the users. The main task of this project is to help groups interested in the Rio 2016 success taking into account socioeconomic and geographical aspects.