Model Driven Security: A Systematic Mapping Study

We present a static verification tool (SVT), a system that performs static verification on UML models composed of UML class and state machine diagrams. Additionally, the SVT allows the user to add extra behavior specification in the form of guards and effects by defining a small action language. UML models are checked against properties written in a special-purpose property language that allows the user to specify linear temporal logic formulas that explicitly reason about UML components. Thus, the SVT provides a strong foundation for the design of reliable systems and a step towards model-driven security.

Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering — A systematic survey of practices and needs in industry

This issue contains two highly technical papers on fault prediction and model checking. Non-negative sparse-based SemiBoost for software defect prediction, by Tiejian Wang, Zhiwu Zhang, Xiaoyuan Jing, and Yanli Liu, presents a novel semi-supervised learning technique to predict where faults could be in software. (Recommended by Giuliano Antoniol.) Past-Free[ze] reachability analysis: Reaching further with DAG-directed exhaustive state-space analysis, by Ciprian Teodorov, Luka Le Roux, Zoé Drey, and Philippe Dhaussy, presents a new algorithm to perform reachability analysis in model checkers that significantly reduces the state-space explosion problem. (Recommended by Ronald Olsson.) In a previous editorial, I set out STVR's policy on extending conference papers to journal submissions [May 2016]. The major requirements are that the journal version must have at least 30% new material, the journal version must include a citation to the conference paper, and the journal version must discuss the conference paper and summarize the new material. Here I suggest some practical guidelines for how to do the extension. If the same title is used, then you would have two papers with the same title. That is confusing to everybody who reads or references either paper. If the same abstract is used, then no reader (reviewer or otherwise) will believe the journal submission is different. Don't just add a few sentences, rewrite the whole thing! It might be possible to just have one of (3) or (4), not both, but from my experience, it would be very hard to get that through the reviewers. Many times I have seen papers extended with only a new idea, and the reviewers almost invariably ask for a major revision, with an empirical evaluation required. Likewise, if a paper extends the experiment without adding a new theory or idea, the reviewers are very likely to respond by saying “nothing new, reject.” That is, a stronger experiment (more subjects, more rigorous analysis, etc.) may increase our confidence in the conclusions, but if the conclusions are unchanged, it's very hard to convince the reviewers to publish the new version. Several other things should be changed as well. I suggest throwing out the old introduction, outlining a new introduction, and then writing it completely from a blank page. Again, if the reviewers have read the introduction before, you are almost asking them to reject the paper on the basis of not enough new material. Add additional related work. Add a lot of additional related work! Conference papers are almost always limited to 8 to 10 pages, and we often make our related work section as short as possible to leave room for the “good stuff” (our ideas). With a journal version, you have much more space to write, so use it. Journal reviewers are much more likely to criticize not having enough references than having too many references. Add more examples and explanations. Add more data in the form of tables and figures. Reflect on all the hard decisions you made when forcing the conference paper into a small box, and put some of that material back in. The editor or reviewers will do a side-by-side comparison of the conference and journal papers. You want it to look as if the conference paper was the primitive or immature version, and the journal paper is all grown up. You emphatically do not want the journal version to look like the same paper with a few sentences added here and there. Finally, rewrite everything. Clean up the writing, polish the sentence structure, check the grammar and punctuation again, and edit, edit, edit. My favorite writing teacher told me there are no great writers, just great editors. I want to thank Rob Hierons for discussions leading to this editorial, and many students for helping me refine these suggestions.

This proposal is about a study we recently published in the IEEE Transaction of Software Engineering journal [4]. Context: Collaborative software engineering (CoSE) deals with methods, processes and tools for enhancing collaboration, communication, and co-ordination (3C) among team members [5]. CoSE can be employed to conceive different kinds of artifacts during the development and evolution of software systems. For instance, when focusing on software design, multiple stakeholders with different expertise and responsibility collaborate on the system design. Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) provides suitable techniques and tools for specifying, manipulating, and analyzing modeling artifacts including metamodels, models, and transformations [1]. Collaborative MDSE consists of methods or techniques in which multiple stakeholders manage, collaborate, and are aware of each others' work on a set of shared models. A collaborative MDSE approach is composed of three main complementary dimensions: (i) a model management infrastructure for managing the life cycle of the models, (ii) a set of collaboration means for allowing involved stakeholders to work on the modelling artifacts collaboratively, and (iii) a set of communication means for allowing involved stakeholders to exchange, share, and communicate information within the team. Collaborative MDSE is attracting several research efforts from different research areas (e.g., model-driven engineering, global software engineering, etc.), resulting in a variegated scientific body of knowledge on the topic. Objective: In this study we aim at identifying, classifying, and understanding existing collaborative MDSE approaches. More specifically, our goal is to assess (i) the key characteristics of collaborative MDSE approaches (e.g., model editing environments, model versioning mechanisms, model repositories, support for communication and decision making), (ii) their faced challenges and limitations, and (iii) the interest of researchers in collaborative MDSE approaches over time and their focus on the three dimensions of collaborative MDSE. Method: In order to achieve this, we designed and conducted a systematic mapping study [6] on collaborative MDSE. Starting from over 3,000 potentially relevant studies, we applied a rigorous selection procedure [3] resulting in 106 selected papers, further clustered into 48 primary studies, along a time span of nineteen years. A suitable classification framework has been empirically defined and rigorously applied for extracting key information from each selected study. We collated, summarized, and analyzed extracted data by applying scientifically sound data synthesis techniques. Results: In addition to a number of specific insights, our analysis revealed the following key findings: (i) there is a growing scientific interest on collaborative MDSE in the last years; (ii) multi-view modeling, validation support, reuse, and branching are more rarely covered with respect to other aspects about collaborative MDSE; (iii) different primary studies focus differently on individual dimensions of collaborative MDSE (i.e., model management, collaboration, and communication); (iv) most approaches are language-specific, with a prominence of UML-based approaches; (v) few approaches support the interplay between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Conclusion: This study gives a solid foundation for a thorough identification and comparison of existing and future approaches for collaborative MDSE [2]. Those results can be used by both researchers and practitioners for identifying existing research/technical gaps to attack, better scoping their own contributions to the field, or better understanding or refining existing ones.

Context: Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) consists of methods and techniques where multiple stakeholders manage, collaborate, and are aware of each others' work on shared models. Objective: Collaborative MDSE is attracting research efforts from different areas, resulting in a variegated scientific body of knowledge. This study aims at identifying, classifying, and understanding existing collaborative MDSE approaches. Method: We designed and conducted a systematic mapping study. Starting from over 3,000 potentially relevant studies, we applied a rigorous selection procedure resulting in 106 selected papers, further clustered into 48 primary studies along a time span of 19 years. We rigorously defined and applied a classification framework and extracted key information from each selected study for subsequent analysis. Results: Our analysis revealed the following main fidings: (i) there is a growing scientific interest on collaborative MDSE in the last years; (ii) multi-view modeling, validation support, reuse, and branching are more rarely covered with respect to other aspects about collaborative MDSE; (iii) different primary studies focus differently on individual dimensions of collaborative MDSE (i.e., model management, collaboration, and communication); (iv) most approaches are language-specific, with a prominence of UML-based approaches; (v) few approaches support the interplay between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Conclusion: This study gives a solid foundation for classifying existing and future approaches for collaborative MDSE. Researchers and practitioners can use our results for identifying existing research/technical gaps to attack, better scoping their own contributions, or understanding existing ones.

There are many issues raised by Shull et al. that I would whole-heartedly endorse. For example, replication is a basic component of the scientific method, so it hardly needs to be justified. Furthermore, a full comprehensive report of any empirical study is a requirement of good science. When restrictions on the length of conference or journal paper prevent such reporting, it is an extremely good idea to record all the experimental details somewhere, whether in a “laboratory package” or a technical report. However, is such supporting information essential for subsequent replications? The authors give examples such as insufficient training, or systems not having defects appropriate for the technique, causing replications to wrongly contradict the original experiment. I believe issues such as the criticality of training or the type of relevant defects should be reported in the published study not hidden in ancillary data. It may be preferable to advise empirical researchers to make very clear the critical components of the software engineering methods they are studying in their journal and conference papers. I also disagree with some of the other arguments in favour of close replications. The authors suggest when arguing against independent replications that it may contradict the original experiment and researchers will not know why. They conclude “conducting a replication that has the risk of producing no useful results is too risky to be the norm”. They suggest it is therefore cheaper and more feasible to run replications that reuse aspects of the existing experiments. However, it is equally risky to undertake a long series of experiments with relatively small changes if the experiments propagate a problem in the original experiment. The authors note this problem but don’t seem willing to assess its implications. By Kampenes (2007) reported that something like 30% of the 113 experiments reviewed by Sjoberg et al. (2005) were quasi-experiments and six of those used one of the weakest forms of quasi-experiment—a within subject study without any cross-over (i.e. all subjects used treatment A first and treatment B second). This design completely confounds treatment and order. Furthermore any learning effects that occur (particularly an issue when the subjects are students) are also confounded with treatment. Several of these studies Empir Software Eng (2008) 13:219–221 DOI 10.1007/s10664-008-9061-0

Like conventional software projects, projects in model-driven software engineering require adequate management of multiple versions of development artifacts, importantly allowing living with temporary inconsistencies. In previous work, we have introduced multi-version models for model-driven software engineering, which allow checking well-formedness and finding merge conflicts for multiple versions of the same model at once. However, situations where different models are linked via automatic model transformations also have to be handled for multi-version models. In this paper, we propose a technique for jointly handling the transformation of multiple versions of a source model into corresponding versions of a target model. This enables the use of a more compact representation that may afford improved execution time of both the transformation and further analysis. Our approach is based on the well-known formalism of triple graph grammars and the aforementioned encoding of model version histories called multi-version models. In addition to batch transformation of an entire history, the technique covers incremental synchronization of changes in the framework of multi-version models. Our solution is complemented by a dedicated pattern matching technique for multi-version models. We show the correctness of our approach with respect to the standard semantics of triple graph grammars and conduct an empirical evaluation to investigate the performance of our technique regarding execution time and memory consumption. Our results indicate that the proposed solution affords lower memory consumption and may improve execution time for batch transformation of large version histories, but can also come with computational overhead in unfavorable cases.

The dominance of English in academic discourses is well established, with increased English publication used to evidence its increasing use at the expense of national language publication. However, while English publication frequency has increased over time, few studies have examined how university faculties outside higher education’s Anglophone center have changed their language of publication frequency. Thus, in this investigation, we analyzed a Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s overall frequency of publication along with publication frequency by language medium, expanding on an earlier diachronic analysis of university publication reports. We previously found English language publications largely replaced Japanese language publications for journal articles and that overall publication frequency dramatically increased. However, that initial diachronic analysis did not show when those changes manifested. The current investigation explores this through a decennial time trend historical document analysis of publication reports from 1979 to 2020. This analysis elucidates how publication frequency, type, and language medium have changed. Specifically, we find that the largest change in the overall frequency of publication is between 1989–1990 and 1999–2000. These changes are primarily driven by conference papers and other publications, publication types not typically examined in analyses of journal citation databases. Our findings establish a foundation to discuss potential causes of the trends we identify in this Japanese national university’s medical faculty’s publications.

Librarians, informationists, researchers, health policymakers, and health care professionals retrieve reports of health technology assessments (HTAs) to review the evidence on medical, socioeconomic, and ethical implications of health care and health care investments [1]. These assessments are a useful type of gray literature that include cost-benefit analyses of health interventions, syntheses of intervention research findings, and discussion of the economic implications of health care and medical technology [2]. The HTA Database Canadian Repository is a new, valuable tool that aggregates these assessments and makes them findable via a convenient search interface. This international repository includes records for in-progress and published reports of HTAs, reviews, guidelines, protocols, journals, and articles. Launched in January of 2015, the database includes records beginning in 2003. The HTA Database is funded by the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and administered by the University of York Centre for Reviews and Dissemination. The Canadian repository aggregates HTA records from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and pan-Canadian agencies (CADTH) in addition to records from the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA). The database includes reports from 93 INAHTA and other international repositories [3]. All records and documents are translated into English, French, and/or Spanish, representing about 20 source languages. As of May 2015, the Canadian repository contains over 14,000 unique records; approximately 2,400 are Canadian. Canadian search interface The Canadian interface for the HTA Database is free for noncommercial use [4]. The basic search can include title, full text, province, author, agency, and funder. Additional options allow the user to limit searches to Canadian databases, Canadian and international HTA databases, the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), Cochrane reviews, and the National Health Service Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED) of assessed economic evaluations. While items in the DARE and NHS EED databases are critically appraised—in other words, reviewed for trustworthiness, value, and contextual relevance—items in the HTA database are not. However, if a critical appraisal exists, it is linked with the HTA database record [1]. Other search criteria include record date, publication year, and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term search. While search text can be truncated and wildcards accepted, special characters, such as the German umlaut, are not. Search results include year—although it is unclear if this indicates publication or record year—source database, source agency, and title. Although additional metadata exist for each record, search queries are limited to the basic metadata only. The Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT are available, as well as the proximity operators NEAR and ADJ. Using proximity operators and restricting searches to specific fields (e.g., author [:au], title [:ti], language [:lp], source journal [:so], and funding [xfu]) are particularly helpful when performing advanced, full-text, and keyword searches. The MeSH terminology search is also helpful, if not ideal. MeSH terms can be searched by string (permut), stemming, or tree criteria, but combinations of terms cannot be selected for post-coordinated searching by index concept. Terms selected for searching are not visible in the interface for review or modification; using the interface can be frustrating when executing a high volume of advanced or expert searches. Also, terms cannot be exploded, and MeSH terms are not accompanied by MeSH tree numbers. This is significant for content and keyword analysis, because the tree number indicates the context of the MeSH term. Overall, the MeSH terminology search will not hinder basic or advanced terminology searches but may hinder expert searches. Records can be exported in hypertext markup language (HTML) format; however, downloading full-text reports, when available, must be done one-by-one on a case-by-case basis. Metadata Each record notes the title, agency location, publisher, year of publication, publication type, agency-assigned MeSH terms, HTA accession number, language, source database, and uniform resource locator (URL), along with other metadata. Some metadata are unique to the database from which they derive. For example, metadata vary in records from DARE, NHS EED, or HTA. Conformity of metadata is primarily applied when agencies upload records and input their metadata through the HTA interface. Considerations and advantages For record inclusion, the HTA Database has an “extremely flexible definition of what constitutes a health technology assessment,” which, although potentially beneficial to a variety of users, does not provide a reliable description of publications included in the database [3]. As a result, the database also contains records such as protocols for systematic reviews and care guidelines. Also, documentation is incomplete for metadata fields and database coverage, and there are no descriptions of governance policies. For example, in reviewing a sample of records, we found that not all metadata fields include the same type of information; however, this was a minor occurrence. As a final note, records appear to be added weekly, but since agencies add content on a voluntary basis, frequency of updates varies. The HTA Database Canadian repository and its interface will be helpful to librarians who support HTA investigators and policymakers, as well as patrons interested in assessments of health and health technologies. This new resource facilitates information retrieval and research and may reduce costly duplication of effort by enabling queries of both Canadian and international databases via one search interface. Additionally, the search interface enables discovery of gray literature that is otherwise unavailable or subject to purchase. Although its interface does not support expert searching, the superior aggregation of content makes the HTA Database Canadian Repository a valuable resource.

A documentary review was carried out on the production and publication of research papers related to the study of the variables Strategic Planning and Sustainability of Economic Policies. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis proposed in this document was to know the main characteristics of the volume of publications registered in the Scopus database during the period 2018-2022, achieving the identification of 275 publications. The information provided by this platform was organized through graphs and figures categorizing the information by Year of Publication, Country of Origin, Area of Knowledge and Type of Publication. Once these characteristics have been described, the position of different authors towards the proposed theme is referenced through a qualitative analysis. Among the main findings made through this research, it is found that the United States, with 41 publications, was the country with the highest scientific production registered in the name of authors affiliated with institutions in that country. The Area of Knowledge that made the greatest contribution to the construction of bibliographic material referring to Strategic Planning and Sustainability of Economic Policies was Environmental Science with 153 published documents, and the Type of Publication most used during the period indicated above was the Journal Article with 197 documents of the total scientific production.

A documentary review was conducted on the production and publication of research papers related to the study of ICT, Literacy, and Covid-19 variables. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis proposed in this paper was to know the main characteristics of the volume of publications registered in the Scopus database during the period 2020-2022, achieving the identification of 111 publications. The information provided by this platform was organized employing tables and figures categorizing the information by Year of Publication, Country of Origin, Area of Knowledge, and Type of Publication. Once these characteristics were described, a qualitative analysis was used to refer to the position of the different authors on the proposed topic. Among the main findings of this research was that Spain, with 11 publications, was the country with the highest scientific production registered in the name of authors affiliated with institutions of that nation. The area of knowledge that contributed most to the construction of bibliographic material referring to the study of the variables Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Innovation was Social Sciences with 61 published documents, and the type of publication most used during the period mentioned was Journal Articles with 67% of the total scientific production.

A documentary review was carried out on the production and publication of research papers related to the study of the variables strategic analysis, simulation environments and Business Competitiveness. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis proposed in this document was to know the main characteristics of the volume of publications registered in the Scopus database during the period 2018-2022, achieving the identification of 155 publications. The information provided by this platform was organized through graphs and figures categorizing the information by Year of Publication, Country of Origin, Area of Knowledge and Type of Publication. Once these characteristics have been described, the position of different authors towards the proposed theme is referenced through a qualitative analysis. Among the main findings made through this research, it is found that Rusia, with 28 publications, was the country with the highest scientific production registered in the name of authors affiliated with institutions in that country. The Area of Knowledge that made the greatest contribution to the construction of bibliographic material referring to Economic Analysis and Business Competitiveness was the Social Sciences with 6 4 published documents, and the Type of Publication most used during the period indicated above was the Journal Article with 11 4 documents of the total scientific production.

A documentary review was carried out on the production and publication of research papers related to the study of the variables Student Scientific Production and Writing at the Latin American level. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis proposed in this document was to know the main characteristics of the volume of publications registered in the Scopus database during the period 2018-2022, achieving the identification of 234 publications. The information provided by this platform was organized through graphs and figures categorizing the information by Year of Publication, Country of Origin, Area of Knowledge and Type of Publication. Once these characteristics have been described, the position of different authors towards the proposed theme is referenced through a qualitative analysis. Among the main findings made through this research, it is found that Brazil, with 114 publications, was the country with the highest scientific production registered in the name of authors affiliated with institutions in that country. The Area of Knowledge that made the greatest contribution to the construction of bibliographic material referring to the study of Student Scientific Production and Writing was the Social Sciences with 204 published documents, and the Type of Publication most used during the period indicated above was the Journal Article with 213 documents of the total scientific production.

<p>Context-aware services are attracting attention of world as the use of web services are rapidly growing. We designed an architecture of context-aware semantic web which provides on demand flexibility and scalability in extracting and mining the research papers from well-known digital libraries i.e. ACM, IEEE and SpringerLink. This paper proposes a context-aware administrations system, which supports programmed revelation and incorporation of setting dependent on Semantic Web administrations. This work has been done using the python programming language with a dedicated library for the semantic web analysis named as “Cubic-Web” on any defined dataset, in our case as we have used a dataset for extracting and studying several publications to measure the impact of context aware semantic web application on the results. We have found the average recall and averge accuracy for all the context aware research journals in our research work. Moreover, as this study is limited journal documents, other future studies can be approached by examining different types of publications using this advance research. An efficient system has been designed considering the parameters of research article meta-data to find out the papers from the web using semantic web technology. Parameters like year of publication, type of publication, number of contributors, evaluation methods and analysis method used in publication. All this data has been extracted using the designed context-aware semantic web technology.</p>

A documentary review was carried out on the production and publication of research papers related to the study of ICT variables and Digital Marketing. The purpose of the bibliometric analysis proposed in this document was to know the main characteristics of the volume of publications registered in the Scopus database during the period 201 7-2022, achieving the identification of145 publications. The information provided by this platform was organized through graphs and figures categorizing the information by Year of Publication, Country of Origin, Area of Knowledge and Type of Publication. Once these characteristics have been described, the position of different authors towards the proposed theme is referenced through a qualitative analysis. Among the main findings made through this research, it is found that India, with 21 publications, was the country with the highest scientific production registered in the name of authors affiliated with institutions in that country. The Area of Knowledge that made the greatest contribution to the construction of bibliographic material referring to the study of knowledge management and ICT within Digital Marketing, was Computer Science with 59 published documents, and the Type of Publication most used during the period indicated above was the Conference Articles with 52% of the total scientific production.