Application of knowledge views

A metamodel-driven approach to collaborative software engineering is presented. The approach employs optimistic replication of UML models and a novel semantics-based method for reconciliation of long-lived transactions in collaborative environments using metamodel information. The research described addresses the general problem of semantically consistent and functionally meaningful reconciliation of divergent replicas and enables significant simplification and formalization of its solution. The software engineering application is presented to illustrate how the approach can be effectively applied for cooperatively elaborated UML diagrams under strong consistency guarantees for produced software artifacts.

The Sixth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2006) held in Palo Alto, California, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, hosted the workshops MDWE, AEWSE and SMIWEP-MATeS. This volume of the ACM Digital Library contains a selection of papers presented at the three workshops which took place on July, 10th and July, 11th.ICWE 2006 and the associated workshops aim to promote research and scientific exchange related to Web Engineering and to bring together practitioners, scientists and researchers, as well as those interested in learning more about Web Engineering. The Web Engineering discipline comprises the development and use of models, methodologies, technologies, tools and techniques that are used to develop and maintain Web applications within economic constraints. In the era of Web-based information and services we are living in, the development of such Web systems is demanding our attention in order to provide sound and engineered solutions to specific problems in the Web Engineering field. The articles presented at the ICWE 2006 workshops have proposed novel results in this area focusing each on a specific domain:The Second International Workshop on Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE'06) focused on model-based and model-driven development of Web applications. The main goal of this workshop series is to promote the use of models and model transformations as well as the definition of domain specific modeling languages (DSML) and construction of CASE tools supporting model-driven processes. Strengths and weaknesses of model-driven approaches in the Web domain were lively discussed during the workshop.The First International Workshop on Adaptation and Evolution in Web Systems Engineering (AEWSE'06) aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners with different research interests, belonging to communities like Web Engineering, Adaptive Hypermedia, User Modeling, Active Databases, Semantic Web, Ontology Evolution, Database Evolution, Temporal Data, Software Engineering and Mobile Computing. The goal of the workshop was to address adaptation and evolution of Web applications both during design, implementation and deployment.The Joint Workshop on Web Services Modeling and Implementation using Sound Web Engineering Practices and Methods, Architectures & Technologies for e-Service Engineering (SMIWEP-MATeS'06) covered current state-of-the-art and best practices in e-Service engineering, focusing on aspects such as development of semantic Web applications, integration of technologies, requirements engineering, patterns and reference architectures, design methodologies and processes and quality models.

The Ontology is increasingly important for many information systems and Semantic Web, while the cost of constructing ontology is too much. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for ontology construction to assist the knowledge engineers to construct the specific domain ontology from the documents, which are gathered from Internet. We hope to raise the automation level to make correctly and efficiently build the ontology while applying the method to different domains. For different domains, we propose an approach to extract new Chinese terms from the specific corpus automatically. And we use information retrieval, natural language processing, and soft computing techniques to find out the concepts of the ontology. In addition, we extend the concept of episode to construct an Episode Net. Using Episode Net, we can find out the static attributes, dynamic operations, and the associations between concepts of the ontology. Finally, we use object-oriented model to represent the ontology and then construct the ontology with four-layer object-oriented structure. The experimental results show that our approach can effectively assist ontology engineers to construct the domain ontology.

Software Engineering courses are perceived as being dry and boring. The education community has been looking at active learning and hands-on training techniques to engage students better and thereby provide a better understanding of concepts. This paper presents a web-based game called Scrumify, developed by undergraduate students, that is designed to introduce students to the Scrum software development process through story elements, and quiz mechanics. The game is designed to reinforce software engineering concepts more specifically agile software processes. Quizzes within the game are designed to grant points that inject a sense of competition for the users and motivation to learn the agile methodology concepts. Scrumify serves two objectives: software engineering education for audience of the game and web-based game development and software testing education for the developers of the game. Use of this game in classroom provides an active learning technique for agile software processes. Students are more engaged with games and thereby absorb the concepts better. The game was evaluated in a sophomore software engineering class and the results are presented.

Since archaeology in particular and humanities in general are interdisciplinary disciplines, there is an imperious need to enhance the accessibility and harmonise data integration, given their varied resource types (books, archives, scientific data, GIS, 3D models etc) and their different conceptual and technological structures and standards. A factor that further reduces accessibility and query performances is related to storing, such as physical location of data, language, and interface. The advent of Semantic Web technology represents an important advance in creating networks of archaeological knowledge based on various resources available on-line. While the valuable use of CIDOC-CRM (Comite International pour la Documentation -Conceptual Reference Model) ontology for specific CH (Cultural Heritage) domains (e.g. museums, libraries, etc) has been partially demonstrated, the interdisciplinary implementations are limited. In this article, we explore the potential of the CIDOC-CRM for a cross-domain implementation of CH data integration. We conducted tha mappings of different on-line resources related to Stonehenge to CIDOC-CRM, and evaluated them in the MAD database, a web-based application that manages natively XML-based datasets. The result ensures the validity of mapping mechanism and the semantic integration of CH data from different sources.

We present the structure and the use of a knowledge database of tunnel for teaching purposes. This database, called KBT, is complementary to the e-learning tool DIDACTU. The development of KBT will give an important help to teaching providing text an images to illustrate courses. 2000). Words are ambiguous, so we must express them with definitions in order to resolve their ambiguity. A word and its definition is what we call a “concept”, which refers to every and each item which matches the definition and – hence – the name. So, that we call concept is each thing and tool clearly identified in tunnel works. A jumbo, a beam, a computer code, a theory are concepts. The identification of these concepts is done by automatic language treatment running on chosen texts. An expert of the world of tunnel give definition for any concept and set it in a tree that checks subsumed relations (IS A) between all concepts. The same process applies to various relations between concepts, mainly aggregation (IS A PART OF); the sum of these various trees, featuring the same concepts, offers a kind of common reference for concepts organisation in the field of tunnels. This helps to define some conceptual neighbourhoods, which, we hope, will allow some reasoning in a next future or for the educational software DIDACTU a new kind of navigation and for the knowledge base KBT a new query mode. This part is still under development, and shall be presented next symposium. 3 MAIN CONCEPTS LEADING TO THE KBT DATABASE 3.1 What is an “interesting” tunnel and for what use? When teaching, examples are used for showing some feature or some problem that may occur during the construction of a tunnel. Interesting tunnel are these where something unexpected occurs and where an original solution must be founded. For a teacher, but also for a young engineer, the discussion that can develop when showing the case is usually fruitful, and the student will remember the causes of the incident and its remedial. Several cases, well chosen, would be an appreciated help when teaching, or for new engineers, who wish to upgrade their own knowledge. 3.2 What were the previous works about databases? The previous works about on-line databases are numerous, and the authors contributed to these progresses (Faure et al, 1992). A recurrent subject of discussion about that kind of database is the property of the data. In the WASSS project (Faure, 1999), (Faure et al, 2001) we have decided to share the data into two parts, the first one that we call meta-data, which are information on the data, and the data itself. The meta-data are access free, but the detailed data remains under the acknowledgement of its owner. It is quite heavy and we worried about the management of the rights (Faure et al, 2002). For the actual release of KBT we skip that approach and we think that all data must be free for a gentle use of the database. One other aspect of that kind of database is the feeding of it. Preparation of a case must be very light, if we want obtain numerous cases. We observed that for a men knowing correctly the case he want to display, the capture of the structured data all must no be longer than few minutes, and we conceive KBT as to agree with this constraint. The building of the web 316 Figure 1. First page when entering DIDACTU with the link to KBT. pages presenting the case may be longer, but as the form is completely free, it is easy for the writer to describe his case generally already existing on an other format, and he can use images, maps, sketches and also web links. The WEB page(s) is written in his own language, as KBT allows the use of several languages. 4 THE ON-LINE KBT DATABASE KBT means: “Knowledge data Base for Tunnels”. The word knowledge is used in its full signification, that is to say, that we want collect not only information about tunnel, but also reasoning about it when an incident occurs. For this, when filling the database four kinds of data are asked in a chosen language among French, Italian, Spanish, German and English. 4.1 What data for KBT? 4.1.1 General data about the tunnel These data are asked in a form, the user must fill: Name of the tunnel Country GPS coordinates of the two entrances Owner of the tunnel Builder (name of the company) Number of tubes Mean declivity Shape of section (circular, horse shoe shape, elliptic, rectangular....) (a combo list) Length of the tunnel Excavated volume Name of the road (railways) that uses the tunnel Date of the opening Date of writing the form Name of the writer Used language for web pages.

Software engineers have to cope with uncertainties and changing requirements. Agile methods provide flexibility towards changes and the emergence of continuous delivery has made regular feedback loops possible. The abilities to maintain high code quality through reviews, to regularly release software, and to collect and prioritize user feedback, are necessary for continuous software engineering (CSE). However, there exists no software process metamodel that handles the continuous character of software engineering. In this paper, we describe an empirical process metamodel for continuous software engineering called CSEPM, which treats development activities as parallel running workflows and allows tailoring and customization. CSEPM includes static aspects that describe the relations between specific CSE concepts including reviews, releases, and feedback. It also describes the dynamic aspect of CSE, how development workflows are activated through change events. We show how CSEPM allows to instantiate linear, iterative, agile and continuous process models and how it enables tailoring and customization.

This paper proposes a framework to support the development and use of tools that support the teaching of software and Web engineering. It describes the evolution of tools to support the teaching of software engineering from simple client-side tools that support drawing DFDs and UML diagrams to Web-based repositories that support process modelling. The paper specifically introduces the concept of and describes their use within the WWW. It also describes tools that automatically create automated walkthroughs for the World Wide Web (WWW) and their evaluation within a masters-level software engineering module. Conclusions are drawn about the general applicability of the framework and proposals are made for further work in this area.

The vision of the Semantic Web is to reduce manual discovery and usage of Web resources (documents and services) and to allow software agents to automatically identify these Web resources, integrate them and execute them for achieving the intended goals of the user. Such a composed Web service may be represented as a workflow, called service flow. Current studies of Web services are not sufficient for automatic composition. This paper presents different types of compositional knowledge required for Web service discovery and composition: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge. As a proof of concept, we have implemented our framework in a cardiovascular domain which requires advanced service discovery and composition across heterogeneous platforms of multiple organizations. Within this framework, we describe (1) How to represent the compositional knowledge, which plays a role in service discovery and composition, in DAML-S; (2) How heterogeneous medical services intemperate in a composed medical service flow. (3) To solve this knowledge level integration, we build on an ontology integration method called SEMIO (Semantic Interoperability).

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

Estimation models in software engineering are used to predict some important attributes of future entities such as software development effort, software reliability and programmers productivity. Among these models, those estimating software effort have motivated considerable research in recent years. Estimation by analogy is one of the attractive techniques in software effort estimation field. However, the procedure used in estimation by analogy is not yet able to handle correctly categorical data. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on reasoning by analogy, fuzzy logic and linguistic quantifiers to estimate effort when the software project is described either by categorical or numerical data. Fuzzy logic-based cost estimation models are more appropriate when vague and imprecise information is to be accounted for. Fuzzy systems try to behave just like the processes of the brain with a rule base. In our proposed method the effort and the cost can be estimated using the Fuzzy logic based analogy method and the cost can be calculated. The performance of the proposed system is calculated using MARE (Mean Absolute Relative Error).

An Internet-based computing platform for the boundary element method

The popularity of smartphone has increased explosively for the last few years, and it brought a new ecology of software developers. It has been always true that developing software is not an easy task for the not-properly- trained developers. Therefore, support for easier development process has been an important topic in computer science, especially in software engineering. The Live Sequence Chart specification is an extended variant of Message Sequence Charts, giving more expressiveness and correctness to system behavior scenarios. However, the LSC specification has been suffered from the lack of rigorous formal semantics, which is the shortcoming of other requirement specification languages too. In this paper, I define the formal semantics of the LSC specification. With the refined formal semantics, I propose an algorithm which synthesizes an FSM out of a set of LSCs. I also propose an optimization technique and a verification scheme for the generated FSM. The range of proposed formal semantics of the LSC specification is broader than the previous work, and much closer to the complete LSC semantics. Therefore, generated FSMs carry much more information than previous work, and maintain the efficiency through the proposed optimization technique.

Very little research in software engineering has focused on the model of a programmer working alone. These so-called cowboys are disdained for not working in teams to build software. In reality many cowboys work by themselves due to the circumstances of their work environment, not because they are unable or unwilling to work with well with others. These solo programmers could benefit from a methodology to assist them in consistently developing reliable software on time and within budget while satisfying the customer's needs. Cowboy was designed to help fill this void. This agile-based system incorporates the benefits of agile methodologies into a lightweight, customer-centered approach to software development for the lone developer. This thesis describes Cowboy and its successful application in developing a prototype for a web application.

Software is the object of study in software engineering and computer science. Software is an intellectual artifact that provides a solution for a repeatable computer application, which enables existing tasks to be done easier, faster, and smarter, or which provides innovative applications for the industries and daily life. This paper attempts to explore the basic characteristics of software and to search the informatics and cognitive foundations of software in supplement to theories of computer science. In this paper, the nature of software is characterized by its informatics, behavioral, mathematical, and cognitive properties. Then, the cognitive informatics foundations of software engineering are developed on the basis of the informatics laws of software and software engineering psychology.