BackgroundFor many years, the use of chemical agents to control crop pests has been degrading the environment, bringing problems to humans and all living things. An alternative to deal with the pests is the use of biopesticides, biological agents capable of controlling these harmful organisms. One kind of biopesticide is Bacillus thuringiensis, a Gram-positive bacterium that synthesizes a protein that, when ingested by the pests, kills them and does not harm other species.ResultsSince the economical importance of Bacillus thuringiensis and its proteins significance, this work presents a software tool, called CryGetter, that is capable of retrieving data related to these proteins, store it and present it in a user friendly manner. The tool also aims to align the protein sequences and generate reports containing some statistical data concerning the alignments that were made.ConclusionsCryGetter was created to help researchers of Bacillus thuringiensis and its proteins to speed up their data retrieval and analysis, allowing them to generate more accurate results. In this sense, the tool circumvents the error prone task of manually getting all the necessary data and processing them in various software systems to get the same result as CryGetter gets in a unique semiautomatic environment.

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Abstract-This paper presents Cognitor, a common-sense aided framework for the Cog-Learn Pattern Language that aims to help content editors create and contextualize e-learning content through the generation of hyper documents that comprise pedagogical issues, producing learning objects (LO) compatible with the SCORM standard. Cog-Learn have been developed from Learning and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Theories. The goal of Cognitor is to allow for the design of digital learning material with better organization of the content that will be explored by learners, aiming to make easier the interaction with it, addressing HCI issues, as well as the interaction between learners and teachers, addressing Human-Human Interaction (HHI) issues. To reach that, it is important that the LO created in Cognitor be easy to reuse, helping creators to fill out the metadata aiming at addressing cultural issues related to the context in which the LO can be adopted and reused. For that, suggestions coming from a common sense knowledge base automatically appear in some SCORM metadata fields in order to help the task of filling out culturally contextualized metadata.

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This paper describes Contexteller, a collaborative educational system for storytelling that supports teachers in configuring and adapting stories to match children's cultural background, by means of exploiting common sense knowledge. This game is meant to support teachers to interact with students with different social and cultural backgrounds, allowing her/him to create stories according to the students´ cultural reality, expressed in their common sense knowledge, and consequently enabling them to get interested in helping the development of the story. This cultural sensitive storytelling environment intends to promote a closer contact between teacher and students and among students themselves giving them a computer tool to help children to freely express their thoughts, desires and to support them to cooperative work with teachers what is desirable for their intellectual and cognitive development. Contextualization and the narrative are supported by the OMCS-Br common sense knowledge base, which gives to the teacher some resources to perform an activity according to the pedagogical goals