UrbanData-Brasil/CEM is a bibliographic database for monitoring, registering, classifying, and disseminating scientific knowledge about Brazilian cities. Founded in the early 1990s by Prof. Dr. Licia Valladares, since 2014 UrbanData-Brasil has been under the coordination of Bianca Freire-Medeiros. In 2018, the project had links to the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM/CEPID), and currently consists of a team of six Scientific Initiation fellows, as well as collaborators in different stages of their academic careers (ranging from undergraduate to postdoctoral levels).
More than a mere repository of bibliographic references, UrbanData-Brasil/CEM provides systematized information about articles in academic journals, books, collections, dissertations, theses, among other editorial formats. The database is also an important tool for advancing accumulated knowledge due to periodical reviews of the multidisciplinary production.
In addition to the conventional indexers, the classification in the database is conceived through Thematic Areas (TAs), an indexing criterion created by UrbanData-Brasil to aggregate bibliographic references according to the wide range of the body of knowledge found in the scholarly literature. While simultaneously extending across several disciplines – therefore operating at an important level of generalization – the TAs also avoid the arbitrariness of keywords. To this end, UrbanData-Brasil/CEM makes use of the “Thematic Areas Thesaurus”, a tool that gathers, for each TA, a specific set of terms for indexing and retrieving references cataloged in the database. Unlike a dictionary, the thesaurus does not define words, but indicates semantic relationships for a fast and accurate identification of TAs with references of interest, or for classifying the researcher's work