ICSOFT 2011 Abstracts

Area 1 - Enterprise Software Technology
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Software Engineering
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 3 - Distributed Systems
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 4 - Data Management
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 5 - Knowledge-Based Systems
Full Papers Short Papers

Area 1 - Enterprise Software Technology

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 34
Title:

TOWARDS AUTOMATIC PROCESS-AWARE COORDINATION IN COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Authors:

Gregor Grambow, Roy Oberhauser and Manfred Reichert
Abstract: The dynamic nature and high degree of collaboration and communication inherent in software development projects raises various challenges for the automated coordination of tasks in software engineering environments (SEEs). To address these challenges and to enable automated coordination, adaptive process-aware SEEs are required that enhance process quality while not encumbering software development. This paper describes a synergistic approach that extends a process-aware information system with contextual awareness and integrates this in a SEE. Abstract processes and the actually executed workflows are automatically and contextually associated. In particular, intrinsic and extrinsic process activities are considered and a context-based reasoning process is used to automatically derive possible (artifact) activity relations and consequences. Thus, necessary follow-up activities can be automatically governed. Our results show support for improved team coordination, greater situational awareness for developers, and process guidance as well as process navigability for collaborating software engineers.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 4
Title:

COMPLEXITY IMPACT FACTORS ON THE INTEGRATION PROCESS OF ERP AND NON ERP SYSTEMS - A Basis for an Evaluation Instrument
Authors:

Guy Janssens, Marinus Hoeijenbos and Rob Kusters
Abstract: This study shows an expert confirmed initial list of factors which influence the complexity of the integration process of ERP systems and non ERP systems. After a thorough search for complexity factors in scientific literature, a survey amongst 8 experts in a leading European long special steel products company, which was recently composed out of independent international companies, was conducted. The participants confirmed the retrieved list from literature, consisting of 5 quantitative and 21 qualitative factors. The participants added one extra qualitative factor and scored the importance of all factors. Three quantitative factors, i.e. a technology, a business and a project factor, scored highest. When dealing with integration issues, this initial list of factors can provide awareness for organizations to support activities such as planning, control and risk management.
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Paper Nr: 18
Title:

TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICE CREATION: TOWARDS EXTENSIONS FOR ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE MODELING LANGUAGES
Authors:

Vanea Chiprianov, Iyas Alloush, Yvon Kermarrec and Siegfried Rouvrais
Abstract: From the 90’s, the telecommunications service creation industry has undergone radical change. Services have shifted from being based on a switching environment to being mainly based on software. To remain competitive in these new dynamic conditions of an open market, telecommunications organizations need to produce high quality services at low prices within short periods of time. Concerning Service Providers, they need an overall representation of service creation taking in all business, management, and technical activities. To reduce their concept-to-market time for new services, they also need tools specialized for their tasks and domain. In this position paper, we argue that a telecommunications profile for an Enterprise Architecture modeling language answers these needs. We also design a telecommunications profile for ArchiMate that offers conformity to standards through the reuse of a recognized Enterprise Architecture modeling language. Moreover, this profile provides easier adoption by Service Providers due to inclusion of domain specific concepts. The profiling mechanism we propose may be used for defining language extensions specific to other industries as well.
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Paper Nr: 24
Title:

GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: CURRENT CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Authors:

Juho Eskeli and Jon Maurolagoitia
Abstract: Global, collaborative and distributed development is increasingly common in software development. This way of working, widely adopted by big corporations has been also included lately in smaller organisations including SMEs. The traditional product and software development technologies do not correctly support this way of working, e.g., time and cultural differences add new requirements for these technologies. The Prisma project1 aims to provide the tools, experiences and guidelines to help companies that face these issues in their everyday project management. One of its main outcomes is the PSW (Prisma Workbench). PSW is a platform and a set of tools that addresses the issues that need to be overcome in adoption of a collaborative and distributed development in organisations. This paper will present the results of the study performed during the Prisma Project and highlight the features of the PSW that will facilitate global collaborative software development teams to work more effectively in this kind of environments.
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Paper Nr: 83
Title:

AN APPROACH FOR IMPROVING THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS BY USING A GAME THEORETIC PERSPECTIVE - Towards a Theory of Social Productivity of Software Development Teams
Authors:

Murat Yilmaz and Rory V. O'Connor
Abstract: As software development is considered a form of knowledge based social activity, investigating social interactions and behaviors of individuals and teams constitutes a starting point for improving organizational performance and productivity. Therefore, a software development organization is regarded as a form of social network, which may be more efficiently structured based upon participants’ skills, roles and capacities to exchange information. This paper aims to propose a research framework for modeling development activities in terms of social interrelationships. It investigates ways for improving the productivity of the software development process to several social issues (e.g. team formations, interpersonal conflicts, social loafing) that affect the group setting during the software development process. An industrial survey will be conducted to validate the proposed framework. This survey will be applied to three medium size software organizations; (i) to measure social aspects of productivity, (ii) to assess the effectiveness of our approach, (iii) and to improve the welfare of the software development organization. Semi-structured interviews with practitioners, and expert reviews with the managers will be used to evaluate the results. Ultimately, based on the principles of our game theoretical approach and collected data, we propose a research framework, which will benefit future research by drawing a road map that establishes a body of knowledge, specifically on software development teams and organizations.
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Paper Nr: 107
Title:

APPLYING ONE CLASS CLASSIFIER TECHNIQUES TO REDUCE MAINTENANCE COSTS OF EAI
Authors:

Iñaki Fernández de Viana, Pedro J. Abad, José L. Álvarez and José L. Arjona
Abstract: Reducing maintenance costs of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions becomes a challenge when you are trying to integrate friendly web applications. This problem can be solved if we use automated systems which allow navigating, extracting, structuring and verifying relevant information. The verification task aims to check if the information is correct. In this work we intend to solve the verify problem regarding One Class Classification Problem. One Class Classification Problems are classification problems where the training set contains classes that have either no instances at all or very few. During training, in the verify problem, we only have instances of the classes we know. Therefore, the One Class Classifier techniques could be applied. In order to evaluate the performance of these methods we use different databases proposed in the current literature. Statistical analyses of the results obtained by some basic One Class Classification techniques will be described.
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Paper Nr: 111
Title:

WORK BEHAVIOR PREDICTION DURING SOFTWARE PROJECTS DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Ciprian-Leontin Stanciu
Abstract: Software projects are well known for their high overruns in terms of budget and time. As they grow larger, project monitoring becomes harder. In such a context, forecasting becomes a critical “ability”, helping the project manager to understand where the project is heading, in terms of required budged and implementation time. In this paper, we present a forecasting method that we developed, which makes use of a distinct representation of the observed behavior of project team members towards work that is Work Behavior. Moreover, we present the first results from experiments on real-world software project development data that show that our method is more accurate than a very popular prediction method, implemented by most ALM tools.
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Paper Nr: 118
Title:

DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE INTEGRATION MODEL BASED ON ATTRIBUTE-DRIVEN DESIGN ADD METHOD
Authors:

Hamid Mcheick, Yan Qi and Hani Charara
Abstract: Software integration in distributed architecture plays an important role to improve software quality. Engineers often face challenges coming from connectors. Especially, design of connectors in a distributed system encounters more design issues such as: i) how to fulfil the functional and quality requirements of connectors in distributed system; ii) how do multiple technologies combine together to resolve design issues of connectors. In order to design connectors in distributed software, this paper proposes a design model by using ADD methods. And then we give an example of MVC architecture for presenting how to instantiate that model based on ADD design method.
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Paper Nr: 182
Title:

RE-THINKING SOFTWARE ENGINEERING APPROACHES: A CRITICAL REFLECTION ON THEORY BUILDING
Authors:

Balbir S. Barn and Tony Clark
Abstract: This paper re-appraises Peter Naur’s influential paper on Programming as Theory Building in the context of modern software engineering practice. The central argument is that such practice is focussed primarily on methods, notations, lifecycles and the description of artifacts such as models. Instead we propose that a theory building view is more appropriate, and that the concept of a theory should underpin a software design process which then calls for new tools and a new research agenda.
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Paper Nr: 188
Title:

A MODEL BASED SYSTEMS ENGINEERING PROCESSES DEPLOYMENT FRAMEWORK

Authors:

Clémentine Cornu, Bernard Chiavassa, Vincent Chapurlat and François Irigoin
Abstract: Systems Engineering is a tried and tested methodological approach to design and test new products. It acts as a model based engineering approach and promotes for this purpose a set of standardized collaborative processes, modelling languages and frameworks. The systems engineering processes imply many interactions and exchanges between resources. Nevertheless, currently there is no method guiding companies in the deployment of these processes adapted to meet their stakeholders' expectations. Particularly, interoperability abilities and capacities which are required at each level of the company and by each resource remain poorly addressed. The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to present an approach for deploying systems engineering processes taking into account the interoperability assessment of resources to guide their allocations; and 2) to identify and propose a dedicated software framework having to be developed in order to support this approach.
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Paper Nr: 204
Title:

IMPROVING COOPERATIVE MANAGEMENT - Fuzzy Modeling and Proximity Networks
Authors:

Seyed Shahrestani
Abstract: The Internet, and perhaps of more relevance to this work, large enterprise networks are complex ICT systems of prime business importance. The effectiveness of management of any complex system is heavily dependent on understanding the functions of its components and their interactions with one another. As such, quantifying collaboration and awareness levels can play significant roles in improving the management efficiency. In most cases though, it is impossible to identify precise crisp models describing the roles, functions, and interactions of such components in a useful manner. This can in turn be related to the fact that the characterization of these concepts by human beings and managers is heavily based on the use of linguistic variables. These variables and the communication of perceptions based on them are fuzzy concepts in nature. This paper further elaborates these issues. To identify solutions, it discusses the relevant notions of soft computing and explores the ways that the utilization of fuzzy awareness modelling can help in improving cooperative management effectiveness.
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Paper Nr: 205
Title:

BUSINESS DIAGNOSTIC TOOL - Designing and Programming an Application for Use of SME Partners
Authors:

David Plandor and Lenka Landryova
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to describe a newly designed diagnostic software application for a small and medium enterprise (SME). This application was driven by a need of small and medium sized companies and by a focus on a simple, comfortable and user-friendly interface. The diagnostic process provided by the application consists of 4 main parts – a questionnaire, a processing system, a report and an action plan. The entirely new generic diagnostic system developed according to the functional specifications given by partnering companies in our project includes a system of questionnaires with processing logic conditions, and was tested with end users and upgraded based on end users’ feedback. A live version and implementation into a web site on the server is ongoing.
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Paper Nr: 207
Title:

SEMANTIC DESIGN PATTERNS FOR BUSINESS PROCESSES
Authors:

Lobna Makni, Nahla Zaaboub Haddar and Hanêne Ben-abdallah
Abstract: Both the academic and industrial communities are increasingly interested in developing methods and tools for automating the design of business process models. In this context, several approaches were proposed to make modeling easier and to enhance the quality of the resulting artifacts. To achieve these objectives, these approaches are based on pattern reuse. Despite the agreed uppon advantages of patterns in accelerating the design process and improving the produced model quality, a few researchers showed how to construct business process patterns. In this paper, we describe an approach to construct Semantic Business Process Patterns (SB2P) from a set of process models. A SB2P is a pattern synthesized from a set of process models belonging to the same business domain. It is composed of process fragments that are semantically close but may have structural and/or behavioral differences.
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Paper Nr: 25
Title:

WORKFLOW-BASED DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT FOR LEGACY SIMULATION APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Mirko Sonntag, Sven Hotta, Dimka Karastoyanova, David Molnar and Siegfried Schmauder
Abstract: Computer simulations play an increasingly important role to explain or predict phenomena of the real world. We recognized during our work with scientific institutes that many simulation programs can be considered legacy applications with low software ergonomics, usability, and hardware support. Often there is no GUI and tedious manual tasks have to be conducted. We are convinced that the information technology and software engineering concepts can help to improve this situation to a great extent. In this poster presentation we therefore propose a concept of a simulation environment for legacy scientific applications. Core of the concept are simulation workflows that enable a distributed execution of former monolithic programs and a resource manager that steers server work load and handles data. As proof of concept we implemented a Monte-Carlo simulation of precipitations in copper-alloyed iron and tested it with real data.
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Paper Nr: 129
Title:

ENHANCING DATA EXCHANGE AND MANAGEMENT SUPERVISION IN A COMPLEX MESH OF SUBCONTRACTORS - A Theoretic Approach to Counter Interface Issues in Micro-, Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises
Authors:

Peter Burnickl and Josef Basl
Abstract: Modern companies face quickly changing demands of customers, selling conditions, and a high fluctuation of employees because of global competition. Frequently, firms recruit subcontractors and freelancers to handle short-term bottlenecks and to acquire know-how. Because of various interfaces and internal structures and a complex mesh of responsibilities between all participating teams, the exchange of information and data is highly sophisticated. This paper describes the current situation of most small and medium enterprises that co-operate with subcontractors and, hence, face empirical problems. Key features and demands for a possible approach are shown to solve these issues with a minimum effort on existing systems and processes.
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Area 2 - Software Engineering

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 7
Title:

ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF SOURCE CODE FILE SIZES
Authors:

Israel Herraiz, Daniel M. German and Ahmed E. Hassan
Abstract: Source code size is an estimator of software effort. Size is also often used to calibrate models and equations to estimate the cost of software. The distribution of source code file sizes has been shown in the literature to be a lognormal distribution. In this paper, we measure the size of a large collection of software (the Debian GNU/Linux distribution version 5.0.2), and we find that the statistical distribution of its source code file sizes follows a double Pareto distribution. This means that large files are to be found more often than predicted by the lognormal distribution, therefore the previously proposed models underestimate the cost of software.
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Paper Nr: 16
Title:

COLLECTIVE SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF BEHAVIOR MODELS AND OBJECT-ORIENTED IMPLEMENTATIONS
Authors:

Qing Yi, Jianwei Niu and Anitha R. Marneni
Abstract: We present a finite-state-machine-based language, iFSM, to seamlessly integrate the behavioral logic and implementation strategies of object-oriented abstractions and prevent them from being out-of-sync. We provide a transformation engine which automatically translates iFSM specifications to lower-level C++/Java class implementations that are similar in style to manually written code. Further, we automatically verify that these implementations are consistent with their behavior models by translating iFSM specifications into the input language of model checker NuSMV.
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Paper Nr: 19
Title:

JHYDE - THE JAVA HYBRID DEBUGGER
Authors:

Christian Hermanns and Herbert Kuchen
Abstract: We present a hybrid debugger for the Java programming language which integrates declarative and omniscient debugging techniques. Omniscient debugging is an extension of trace debugging which is the most common debugging method for Java programs. Declarative debugging is a technique mostly used in the area of functional and logic approaches. By combining both techniques our debugger benefits from the advantages of both techniques. We demonstrate how to use our debugger and mention important aspects of its implementation. Furthermore, we develop a declarative debugging strategy to reduce the number of questions and give empirical evidence of its usefulness.
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Paper Nr: 102
Title:

CTGE: AN EFFECTIVE CONSTRAINT-BASED TEST-CASE GENERATION ALGORITHM FOR DETECTING REGRESSION BUGS IN EVOLVING PROGRAMS
Authors:

Anh D. Le, Tho T. Quan, Nguyen T. Huynh and Phung H. Nguyen
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a kind of logic error occurring in evolving programs, known as regression bug. This error reflects a practical situation that when a program or software is evolved to meet with new requirements, it may accidentally violate the original requirements. Hence, the paper makes three theoretical contributions. First, we show that the test-case generated by typical white-box approach are not sufficient to cover all probable regression bugs. Next, we propose a new approach based on combined constraint to solve this problem. Finally, we introduce an ultimate CTGE (Efficient Constraint-based Test-cases Generation) algorithm whose complexity is reduced into linear time, thus becoming practical. The soundness of our theoretical contribution is formally proved and supported by some initial experiments conducted in education environment.
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Paper Nr: 108
Title:

GOAL DRIVEN ITERATIVE SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Yves Wautelet and Manuel Kolp
Abstract: Iterative development has gained popularity in the software industry notably in the development of enterprise applications where requirements and needs are difficult to express for the users and business processes difficult to understand by analysts. Such a software development life cycle is nevertheless often used in an ad-hoc manner. Even when templates such as the Unified Process are furnished, poor documentation is provided on how to breakdown the project into manageable units and to plan their development. This paper defines a template for agent-oriented iterative development as well as a software project management framework to plan the project iterations. The agent paradigm is used at analysis level with actors’ goals considered as piecing elements, an iterative template is proposed for planning purpose. High-level risk and quality issues focus on prioritizing the project goals so that each element’s “criticality” can be evaluated and a model-driven schedule of the overall software project can be set up. The software process is illustrated with the development of a production planning system for a steel industry.
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Paper Nr: 115
Title:

MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN OF PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS WITH UML AND MARTE
Authors:

Antonio García-Domínguez, Inmaculada Medina-Bulo and Mariano Marcos-Bárcena
Abstract: High-quality software needs to meet both functional and non-functional requirements. In some cases, software must accomplish specific performance requirements, but most of the time, only high-level performance requirements are available: it is up to the developer to decide what performance should be expected from each part of the system. In this context, the MARTE profile was proposed by the OMG to extend UML for modeldriven development of real-time and embedded systems, focusing on assisting early performance analysis and scheduling. We propose using the MARTE profile to derive the performance requirements of each action in an UML activity diagram from the requirements of the containing activity and some local annotations. In this work, we show how the MARTE profile can be used for this purpose, define algorithms for computing the required throughput and time limit for each action and study their theoretical and empirical performance. The algorithms have been integrated into the Papyrus UML diagram editor and feed back their results into the original model. Running both algorithms on activities with 225 paths requires 10 seconds on average.
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Paper Nr: 120
Title:

TYPE-FLOW ANALYSIS FOR LEGACY COBOL CODE
Authors:

Alvise Spanò, Michele Bugliesi and Agostino Cortesi
Abstract: Many business applications today still rely on COBOL programs written decades ago that are difficult to maintain and upgrade due to technological limitations and lack of experts in the language. Several companies have been trying to migrate their software base to modern platforms, but code translation is problematic because most business processes implemented are often no longer documented or even known. Applying existing Program Understanding techniques to COBOL could be a way for aiding IT specialists in charge of a porting - but useful raw information must be extracted from the source code in order to get these techniques yield to meaningful results. We believe that the types of variables used in programs are an important part of such raw information and we present an approach based on static analysis of types rather than data. Our system is capable of reconstructing the type-flow of a COBOL program throughout branches, jumps and loops in finite time and to track type information on reused variables occurring in the code. It also detects a number of error-prone situations, type mismatches or misuses and notifies that by means of messages annotated in the code along with types inferred for each variable occurrence.
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Paper Nr: 123
Title:

A MODEL-BASED REPOSITORY FOR OPEN SOURCE SERVICE AND COMPONENT INTEGRATION
Authors:

Rodrigo García-Carmona, Félix Cuadrado, Juan C. Dueñas and Álvaro Navas
Abstract: Open source is a software development paradigm that has seen a huge rise in recent years. It reduces IT costs and time to market, while increasing security and reliability. However, the difficulty in integrating developments from different communities and stakeholders prevents this model from reaching its full potential. This is mainly due to the challenge of determining and locating the correct dependencies for a given software artifact. To solve this problem we propose the development of an extensible software component repository based upon models. This repository should be capable of solving the dependencies between several components and work with already existing repositories to access the needed artifacts transparently. This repository will also be easily expandable, enabling the creation of modules that support new kinds of dependencies or other existing repository technologies. The proposed solution will work with OSGi components and use OSGi itself.
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Paper Nr: 141
Title:

CLIENT-TIER VALIDATION OF DYNAMIC WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Hideo Tanida, Masahiro Fujita, Mukul Prasad and Sreeranga P. Rajan
Abstract: Web applications pervade all aspects of human activity today. Rapid growth in the scope, penetration and user-base of web applications, over the past decade, has meant that web applications are substantially bigger, more complex and sophisticated than ever before. This places even more demands on the validation process for web applications. This paper presents a case study of the validation of Ajax web Applications, where a combination of dynamic crawling-based model generation and back-end model checking is used to comprehensively validate the client-tier of the web application. Our experience shows that such an approach is not only practical in the context of applications of such size and complexity but can provide greater automation and better coverage than current industrial validation practices based on testing. A couple of experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 28
Title:

KNOWING SOFTWARE ENGINEER’S PERSONALITY TO IMPROVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Luis G. Martínez, Juan R. Castro, Guillermo Licea, Antonio Rodríguez-Díaz and Carlos F. Alvarez
Abstract: Nowadays organizations work to improve their software development process, with a purpose to reduce costs, improve quality and increase planning reliability. That is why decision making pertaining to role assignment in software engineering developing projects is one of the most important factors that affect the software development process in organizations. We should not only consider individual’s abilities and capabilities for better team performance but also consider knowing their personality traits to carry out the most suitable role in an effective working team. Through compilation of studies with RAMSET (Role Assignment Methodology for Software Engineering Teams) methodology some personalities and typologies have been identified to perform certain type of roles, thus helping us build a better, cohesive and less conflictive team. Our methodology based on personality has revealed appropriate and adequate personality patterns for assignment of best advisable performing roles in software development, according not only to capabilities of people and role demands but also taking into consideration personality traits, thus showing that knowing software engineer’s personality can improve software development process.
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Paper Nr: 36
Title:

FEASIBLE DYNAMIC RECONFIGURATIONS OF PETRI NETS - Application to a Production System
Authors:

Mohamed Khalgui, Olfa Mosbahi, Jiafeng Zhang, Zhiwu Li and Atef Gharbi
Abstract: The paper deals with dynamic automatic reconfigurations of Control Systems to be classically modelled by Petri nets. Three different forms can be applied at run-time to reconfigure such systems: Addition/Removal of places, Addition/Removal/Update of transitions or finally the simple change of the initial marking. We define three formal modules allowing reconfigurations of the system's Petri nets: changer_places to dynamically change places of the model, changer_transitions to dynamically reconfigure transitions, and changer_marking to modify the initial markings of places. To guarantee a correct behavior of this architecture according to user requirements, we apply a model checking by using the useful tool SESA for the verification of CTL-based properties of the proposed modules and also of the system. The paper is applied to a Real Benchmark Production System.
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Paper Nr: 37
Title:

ALIGNMENT OF OPEN SOURCE TOOLS WITH THE NEW ISO 25010 STANDARD - Focus on Maintainability
Authors:

Emanuel Irrazábal, Javier Garzás and Esperanza Marcos
Abstract: Nowadays, quality and especially software product quality is becoming a hot topic in the context of Software Engineering. In this context, measures provide the basis for the improvement and, in particular, code measures provide direct visibility of product quality. Nevertheless, some organizations cannot afford these tools. Several studies have revealed that applying quality models in Small and Medium-Sized enterprises (SMEs) is a very challenging task. Related to this, open-source tools emerge as the answer to provide with the technical support to collect the information needed to assess the quality of software assets. In this work, we review how existing open-source tools fulfill the needs for quality measures raised when you want to assess product quality according to the new ISO/IEC 25010 standard, which has introduced changes in the characteristics of model quality over the previous model. We have focused on the characteristic of maintainability because of its historical significance and its direct impact on total costs.
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Paper Nr: 39
Title:

PROCESS FRAMEWORK FOR EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT - Solving of Emergency Situations by Way of Business Processes
Authors:

Tomáš Ludík and Jaroslav Ráček
Abstract: The paper deals with an effective solving of emergency situations by using the Process Management. Based on current approaches, there is defined an innovative process framework for emergency management which is described from the methodological and architecture view. The methodology describes the procedures how to deploy processes of emergency management on the specific architecture based on emergency management requirements. The overall quality assurance is ensured by continuous verification, validation and optimization. The application of the process framework for emergency management is showed on a case study, which describes an accident of a vehicle transporting dangerous goods. The case study illustrates the deployment of emergency processes up to terrain case studies.
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Paper Nr: 50
Title:

BEYOND DESIGN PATTERNS - Improving Software Design with Pluggable Units
Authors:

Fernando Barros
Abstract: Design patterns provide solutions to recurrent problems and they have been extensively used in software development. However, patterns favor a distinction based on small design differences leading to the creation of a large number of solutions. Additionally, patterns are often hard to integrate making it difficult to develop applications based in pattern composition. In this paper we exploit the ability of independent and pluggable software units (PUs) to provide a unifying representation of design patterns. Preliminary results demonstrate that patterns can effectively be represented by PUs using a reduced set of constructs. In particular we show that patterns considered to belong to different categories are the same using a representation based on PUs. This is the case of the Observer and Composite patterns, that are considered as belonging to the behavioral and structural category, respectively.
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Paper Nr: 53
Title:

HURDLES IN MULTI-LANGUAGE REFACTORING OF HIBERNATE APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Hagen Schink, Martin Kuhlemann, Gunter Saake and Ralf Lämmel
Abstract: Different programming languages can be involved in the implementation of a single software application. In these software applications, source code of one programming language interacts with code of a different language. By refactoring an artifact of one programming language, the interaction of this artifact with an artifact written in another programming language may break. We present a study on refactoring an software application that contains artifacts of different languages.
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Paper Nr: 62
Title:

INTER-MODEL CONSISTENCY BETWEEN UML STATE MACHINE AND SEQUENCE MODELS
Authors:

Yoshiyuki Shinkawa
Abstract: UML state machine diagram and sequence diagram represent a system or software from contrastive two viewpoints, namely part and whole. If these diagrams depict the same system, they must be consistent from each other. However, UML does not provide us with an appropriate way to evaluate the consistency between the models drawn by these different diagrams. This paper reveals the interrelationships between state machine and sequence diagrams based on the ordering of method invocations, which determine the behavior of them. Focusing on these relationships, two criteria are introduced to evaluate the consistency. The evaluation is performed using Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) so that both diagrams are expressed and compared in the same form, with the same syntax and semantics.
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Paper Nr: 72
Title:

OPERATIONALIZATION OF LEARNING SCENARIOS ON EXISTENT LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS - The Moodle Case-study
Authors:

Aymen Abedmouleh, Pierre Laforcade, Lahcen Oubahssi and Christophe Choquet
Abstract: Despite the increasing number of Technology Enhanced Learning platforms (eg. MOODLE) and their wide spreading, the operationalization of learning scenarios is still a problem for teachers. We aim to facilitate their implementation on existent platforms. We propose an approach based on the formalization of the implicit instructional design domain language embedded by these Learning Management Systems. It consists to identify and formalize this specific language in order to use it as a mean of communication with external design tools without losing the semantic of the designed scenarios. The originality of our approach relies in performing the scenarios operationalization by the development of a communication API based on the formalized language of the platform. Our proposal is also based on the application of theories and practices from the Domain Specific Modeling domain in order to formalize the domain language, to specify some graphical languages on top of it, and to help in the development of dedicated graphical editors. This paper details the implementation of our proposal (API and first editor) on the MOODLE platform.
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Paper Nr: 75
Title:

PROPERTY DRIVEN PROGRAM SLICING REFINEMENT
Authors:

Sukriti Bhattacharya and Agostino Cortesi
Abstract: A slice is usually computed by analyzing how the effects of a computation are propagated through the code, i.e., by inferring dependencies. The aim of this paper is to further refine the traditional slicing technique by combining it with a static analysis in Abstract Interpretation based framework. This results into a deeper insight on the strong relation between slicing and property based dependency.
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Paper Nr: 85
Title:

UNRESTRICTED AND DISJOINT OPERATIONS OVER MULTI-STACK VISIBLY PUSHDOWN LANGUAGES
Authors:

Stefan D. Bruda and Tawhid Bin Waez
Abstract: Visibly pushdown languages (VPL) were proposed as a formalism for specifying and verifying complex, recursive systems such as application software. However, VPL are unsuitable for compositional specification, as they are not closed under shuffle. Multi-stack visibly pushdown languages (MVPL) express naturally concurrent constructions. Concurrency cannot be expressed compositionally however, for MVPL are not closed under shuffle either. MVPL operations also restrict rigidly the input alphabets, which hinders the specification of dynamic threads; if we remove these restrictions MVPL loose almost all their closure properties. We find however a natural renaming process that yields disjoint MVPL operations. These operations eliminate the mentioned restrictions and creates closure under shuffle. This effort opens the area of MVPL-based compositional specification and verification.
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Paper Nr: 99
Title:

MULTI-PLATFORM MODEL-DRIVEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT OF WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Ulrich Wolffgang
Abstract: We present the generator frameworkWASL, which supports model-driven development of web applications. It enables the modeling of data, navigation, business logic, and presentation logic. WASL supports the MDA by providing transformation definitions from a computation-independent model (CIM) to a platform-independent model (PIM) and then to a platform-specific model (PSM). An important aspect of our approach is that we provide a separate DSL for each target platform in order to separate concerns between PIM and PSM and to be able to address platform-specific aspects. Currently, the frequently used platforms Java, PHP, and Python are supported.
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Paper Nr: 106
Title:

DETECTING EXECUTION AND HTML ERRORS IN ASP.NET WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Mehmet Erdal Özkınacı and Aysu Betin Can
Abstract: Dynamic web applications are becoming widespread nearly in every area. ASP.NET is one of the popular development technologies in this domain. The errors in these web applications can reduce the credibility of the site and cause possible loss of a number of clients. Therefore, testing these applications becomes significant. We present an automated tool to test ASP.NETweb applications against execution errors and HTML errors that cause displaying inaccurate and incomplete information. Our tool, called Mamoste, adapts concolic testing technique which interleaves concrete and symbolic execution to generate test inputs dynamically. Mamoste also considers page events as inputs which cannot be handled with concolic testing. We have performed experiments on a subset of a heavily used ASP.NET application of a government office. We have found 366 HTML errors and a faulty component which is used almost every page in this application. In addition, Mamoste discovered that a common user control is misused in several dynamically generated pages.
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Paper Nr: 117
Title:

AN IDENTIFICATION METHOD OF RELATED GROUP THREADS FOR A RECENT BUG THREAD BY PEAK CHARACTERISTICS OF SIMILARITIES
Authors:

Yuuki Imanara, Kota Itakura, Masaki Samejima and Masanori Akiyoshi
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem to identify the related group threads that has dependent relationships with recent bug threads. Because most of recent bug threads have no dependent relationships with group threads, basic approach based on similarity regards them as having dependent relationships wrongly. In this paper, we propose an identification method of related group threads by peak characteristics of similarities. The proposed method removes recent bug threads that have no dependent relationships by Support Vector Machine based on vectors representing peak characteristics of similarities between the recent bug thread and group threads. The application result shows that the precision rate is improved by 49% and the recall rate is kept 76% on average using the proposed method.
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Paper Nr: 135
Title:

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ASPECTS OF OUT-OF-CORE DATA MANAGEMENT FOR PLANETARY TERRAIN
Authors:

Cody J. White, Sergiu M. Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris and Jr.
Abstract: Rendering terrain on a planetary scale can quickly become a large problem. Many challenges arise when attempting to render terrain over a spherical body as well as deal with the large amount of data that needs to be used to accurately display the terrain of a planet. Most research in the area of terrain rendering is specific to a given region of a planet, therefore needing few datasets for a proper rendering. However, since planets are made up of larger areas, a different approach needs to be taken in order to display high-detail terrain around a viewer while sorting through the large amount of planetary data available. Additionally, since modern desktops have a relatively small amount of memory, a system to swap data from the hard drive into graphics processing unit (GPU) memory must be created. Therefore, we present the software design for a data caching mechanism which can efficiently swap only the data around a viewer into and out of the GPU memory in real-time. We also present a prototype of the software which achieves efficient framerates for high-quality views of a planet’s surface while minimizing the time it takes to find data centered around a viewer and display it to the screen.
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Paper Nr: 150
Title:

TEST GENERATION FROM BOUNDED ALGEBRAIC SPECIFICATIONS USING ALLOY
Authors:

Francisco Rebello de Andrade, João Pascoal Faria and Ana C. R. Paiva
Abstract: Algebraic specification languages have been successfully used for the formal specification of abstract data types (ADTs) and software components, and there are several approaches to automatically derive test cases that check the conformity between the implementation and the algebraic specification of a software component. However, existing approaches do not assure the coverage of conditional axioms and conditions embedded in complex axioms. In this paper, we present a novel approach and a tool to automatically derive test cases from bounded algebraic specifications of ADTs, assuring axiom coverage and of all minterms in its full disjunctive normal form (FDNF). The algebraic specification is first translated into the Alloy modelling language, and the Alloy Analyzer tool is used to find model instances for each test goal (axiom and minterm to cover), from which test cases in JUnit are extracted.
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Paper Nr: 157
Title:

FAILURE PREDICTION USING THE COX PROPORTIONAL HAZARD MODEL
Authors:

Pekka Abrahamsson, Ilenia Fronza and Jelena Vlasenko
Abstract: Crashes of software systems may have disruptive, and sometimes tragic effects on users. Being able to forecast such failures is extremely important, even when the failures are inevitable – at least recovery or rescue actions can be taken. In this paper we present a technique to predict the failure of running software systems. We propose to use log messages to predict failures running devices that read log files of running application and warns about the likely failure of the system; the prediction is based on the Cox Proportional Hazards (PH) model that has been applied successfully in various fields of research. We perform an initial validation of the proposed approach on real-world data.
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Paper Nr: 159
Title:

A GENERIC API FOR THE INTEGRATION OF RBS IN AN ESB
Authors:

David Haase, Karl-Heinz Krempels and Christoph Terwelp
Abstract: The implementation of business processes using Rule-based Systems requires efficient deployment of Rulebased Applications. This requires a system control interface for a Rule-based System to configure the Rulebased System and its input and output interfaces for a given application. Todays only proprietary interface are provided by Rule-based Systems based on their specific knowledge representation and implementation language. This paper presents a generic interface for the integration of a Rule-based System in an Enterprise Service Bus. The new Rule-based System interface extends the interoperability and flexibility of Rule-based Applications based on a proposed description standard for Rule-based Applications and their service interfaces.
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Paper Nr: 171
Title:

MODGRAPH - A Transformation Engine for EMF Model Transformations
Authors:

Sabine Winetzhammer, Thomas Buchmann and Bernhard Westfechtel
Abstract: Model-driven software engineering aims at increasing productivity by replacing conventional programming with the development of high-level executable models. However, current technology focuses on structural models, while behavioral modeling is still neglected. The transformation engine ModGraph intends to fill this gap. ModGraph complements the Eclipse Modeling Framework with graphical transformation rules from which executable code is generated. An operation defined in an Ecore model is specified by a model transformation rule which is compiled into a Java method calling EMF operations. In this way, ModGraph complements the capabilities of EMF which would compile operations into empty Java methods. The net result is an environment which provides comprehensive support for executable models.
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Paper Nr: 173
Title:

DYNAMIC LANGUAGES AS MODELING NOTATIONS IN MODEL DRIVEN ENGINEERING
Authors:

Xiaoping Jia and Chris Jones
Abstract: There has been a gradual but steady convergence of dynamic programming languages with modeling languages. Modern dynamic languages such as Groovy and Ruby provide for the creation of domain-specific languages that can provide a level of abstraction comparable to that of modeling languages such as UML. This convergence makes dynamic languages suitable as modeling languages but with benefits that traditional modeling languages do not provide. One area that can benefit from this convergence is model driven engineering. By using a dynamic language as an augmentation to MDE’s traditional UML notation, it is possible to create models that are executable, exhibit flexible type checking, and which provide a smaller cognitive gap between business users, modelers and developers.
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Paper Nr: 178
Title:

BlueState - A Metamodel-based Execution Framework for UML State Machines
Authors:

Alfredo Ortigosa and Carlos Rossi
Abstract: Most of the tools that generate code from UML state machines present a series of drawbacks, such as the lack of conformity to the UML specification or the difficulty of integrating them in a real process of software development and maintenance. In this work, we show how to overcome these drawbacks using BlueState, a framework we have developed based on class metamodels. BlueState, apart from code generation, includes debugging and real-time visual monitoring modules. The framework has been designed to be independent of the modeling tool and makes it possible to generate code in different target languages.
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Paper Nr: 183
Title:

ASSISTING REFACTORING TOOL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH REFACTORING CHARACTERIZATION
Authors:

Raúl Marticorena, Carlos López, Javier Pérez and Yania Crespo
Abstract: Tool support for refactoring is widespread nowadays. The most widely known IDEs include refactoring support, and many refactoring-specific tools are also available. Developers are aware of refactoring activities and they do refactor their applications even manually or in an assisted way. For the users of refactoring tools, the current state of the art is well documented in refactoring catalogs, where objectives, motivation, mechanisms, etc. are defined. There are also available collections of criteria to detect refactoring opportunities; compilations of guidelines to help decide when and how to apply refactorings. However, refactoring tool implementors can not only base their work on the documentation available in refactoring catalogs because they do not offer clear guidelines on how to build the tools to automate these refactorings. Implementing refactoring tools without any guidance, involves reasoning about which will be the better plan to implement refactoring operations in the tool, their complexity or their graphical interface design, etc. This paper introduces a refactoring characterization, and proposes how it can help refactoring tool implementors on making decisions.
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Paper Nr: 192
Title:

A BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE IN META-MODELING
Authors:

Saïd Assar, Sana Damak Mallouli and Carine Souveyet
Abstract: Meta-models are essential artifacts for specifying and reasoning on models and on methods. Traditionally, meta-modeling follows the “data” perspective and only the structural part of a model is represented. The “process” and “behavior” perspectives are neglected or partly represented, and for a process meta-model, such specifications express its enactment and execution semantics. From a Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME) point of view, such specifications are necessary for enacting the process part of a method when specified. In this paper, we defend the position that in process meta-modeling, it is essential to include the behavior perspective, and that event-based meta-modeling can help in expressing, graphically and at high level of abstraction, the executable semantics of a process modeling notation. We illustrate this approach through the construction of event-based meta-models for the intention oriented Map notation.
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Paper Nr: 201
Title:

MODEL DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEXT-AWARE SERVICES USING PARAMETERIZED TRANSFORMATION
Authors:

Slimane Hammoudi
Abstract: Context-aware development has been an emergent subject of many research works in ubiquitous computing. Few of them propose Model Driven Development (MDD) as an approach for context-aware application development. Many focus on context capture and adaptation by the use of legacy architectures and others artefacts to bind context with application logic. This work proposes a new approach called COMODE (Context Aware Model Driven Development) which advocates Model Driven Development to promote reuse, adaptability and interoperability for context-aware application development on service platforms. In this paper we focus on the transformation issue and propose a parameterized transformation as a new approach for model driven development of context-aware services.
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Paper Nr: 206
Title:

MODELLING QUALITY ATTRIBUTES IN FEATURE MODELS IN SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINE ENGINEERING
Authors:

Guoheng Zhang, Huilin Ye and Yuqing Lin
Abstract: In software product line engineering, product configuration is the process of selecting the desired features from a feature model based on customers’ functional requirements. The quality attribute assessments for a configured product are neglected in most existing product configuration approaches. As we know, the key issue of assessing quality attributes for a configured product is to measure the interdependencies between functional features and quality attributes. To address this issue, we have proposed a quantitative-based approach to establish the interdependencies based on analytic hierarchical process (AHP) in our previous work. In this paper, we supplement our previous work from two aspects: first, we adapt non-functional requirement (NFR) framework to identify quality attributes for a software product line and extend current feature models to represent the identified quality attributes; second, we develop an evaluation method to check the consistency of domain experts’ judgments to ensure the effectiveness of our approach. A simplified tourist guide software product line is used as an example to illustrate our approach.
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Paper Nr: 23
Title:

FROM SOFTWARE-AS-A-GOOD TO SAAS: CHALLENGES AND NEEDS - Developing a Tool supported Methodology for the Migration of Non-SaaS Applications to SaaS
Authors:

Leire Orue-Echevarria Arrieta, Juncal Alonso Ibarra, Jan Gottschick and Hannes Restel
Abstract: For all software vendors, but especially small and medium ones and in the current downturn economic situation with such a high competition, businesses that are not prepared to migrate the offerings of their software solutions to the form of online-services not only miss the opportunity to acquire new customers but they also run the risk of losing their existing customers towards new competitors. This transition from a software-as-a-good approach to a software-as-a-service one, is not trivial at all, and there exists a real demand for proven methods to perform the transition from traditional software products to the service concept. Based on this premise, the objective of this position paper is to provide software organizations with a stepwise procedure, methods and tools to migrate non-SaaS applications into SaaS, taking into account not only technical and technological issues but also issues related to business models and how to monetize the final solution. The solution presented here is a theoretical approach that is currently being validated in eight use cases in the Basque Country.
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Paper Nr: 40
Title:

A FRAMEWORK FOR DEFINING SIMULATORS WITH WHICH TO TRAIN GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Miguel J. Monsor, Aurora Vizcaíno and Mario Piattini
Abstract: The teaching and training of Global Software Development (GSD) entails several well-known difficulties, of which the problem of establishing environments in which students can learn by practicing in realistic scenarios is commonly reported. In this paper we propose an educational framework that uses simulation to train future participants to confront the principal problems encountered in GSD (cultural, language and communication problems). Our framework therefore provides support for the design of these simulations by means of a tool that trains its users in the typical problems that may occur during interactions between distributed members. The simulations place learners in realistic GSD scenarios in which they will interact with virtual participants, thus permitting them to confront the collaborative, organizational and technical problems of GSD.
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Paper Nr: 55
Title:

LESSONS LEARNED IN APPLYING MDE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Francisca Rosique, Pedro Sánchez, Manuel Jiménez and Diego Alonso
Abstract: Home Automation (HA) systems represent a domain of interest to evaluate the benefits and difficulties of adopting the well known Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach. This is due to the existence of determining factors in the development of such systems that makes MDE applicable with some considerations. This article presents the lessons learned after the definition of a methodology and the implementation of a set of tools to support the MDE-base development of HA systems. In particular, the definition of a Domain Specific Language has made possible the generation of code although we have identified some peculiarities and differences from a classical MDE perspective. These results can be extrapolated to other domains with similar characteristic.
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Paper Nr: 58
Title:

A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW ON SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINE QUALITY
Authors:

Carmen Moraga, Mª Ángeles Moraga, Marcela Genero and Mario Piattini
Abstract: This paper provides a summary of a systematic literature review (SLR) which was performed to find out which quality characteristics have been seen as relevant in the literature, in the context of Software Product Lines (SPLs). This SLR, which encompasses works published between 01/01/1995 and 30/05/2008, identified 319 papers in 5 digital libraries, as well as 8 papers which were added by experts as grey literature. After analyzing the papers found, 43 were selected as primary studies. After an analysis of the 43 primary studies, we found that maintainability and reusability are the most relevant quality characteristics in this context. There is increasing interest in the evaluation and improvement of quality in the development of software which follows the SPL approach. In spite of this, no quality model specific to SPLs has yet been found which would meet with a consensus of general approval. For that reason, a standard quality model for SPLs is needed. Techniques for assessing and improving such characteristics must also be provided.
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Paper Nr: 71
Title:

COMPARISON OF SURFACE DATA - Exploring Real Samples Similarity for the Modelling of Engraving
Authors:

Jana Hájková and Jakub Kotásek
Abstract: The paper deals with the topic of real samples comparison. The whole research is processed as a part of the laser engraving modelling and simulation, for which real engraved and scanned samples are used as the input and which are further processed before their usage. All samples are represented as height maps, so we try to use MSE or PSNR computation for the comparison of samples. However, because of a special character of the samples, several problems have to be solved. Finally, the results for the whole set of data engraved into steel surface is presented and some interesting results are shown.
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Paper Nr: 78
Title:

AGENT-BASED FAULT MANAGEMENT OF EMBEDDED CONTROL SYSTEMS
Authors:

Atef Gharbi, Mohamed Khalgui, Jiafeng Zhang and Samir Ben Ahmed
Abstract: The paper deals with reconfigurable component-based embedded control systems to be safe when hardware or software faults occur at run-time. We define an agent-based architecture to handle automatic reconfigurations under well-defined conditions when run-time faults occur. We propose an implementation for the agent which maintains many queues to save run-time faults. This implementation aims to minimize the global waiting time of faults in queues. Multiple simulations are applied in the paper to find the best policy allowing an optimal reactivity of the system. We develop the tool "SimulatorAgent" to encode this approach that we apply to a Benchmark Production System.
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Paper Nr: 82
Title:

ALIGNMENT OF MEASUREMENT AND BUSINESS GOALS - A Systematic Literature Review
Authors:

Belen Blasco, Marcela Genero and Mario Piattini
Abstract: Organizations are currently concerned about the importance of establishing software measurement programs. They do not, however, obtain all the benefit expected from them. This is, in some cases, owing to the lack of alignment between these measurement programs and organizations’ business goals. The objective of this paper is to attempt to identify all existing works concerning the alignment of measurement programs and business goals, with the aim of identifying future work lines. This has been done by carrying out a systematic literature review that provides 26 primary studies, found in six digital libraries until January 2010. These studies were classified according to: the technique or techniques used in them, whether they propose a measurement method or also include a list of measures, the existence of support tools, and the validation of the proposal. After analyzing these papers, we discovered that the techniques most frequently used are GQM and BSC, and also that the majority of the papers propose a measurement method and are validated with real experiences.
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Paper Nr: 87
Title:

FORMAL MODELING OF BEHAVIORAL PROPERTIES TO SUPPORT CORRECT BY DESIGN PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE ARCHITECTURAL STYLES
Authors:

Ikbel Krichen, Imen Loulou and Ahmed Hadj Kacem
Abstract: We propose in this paper a formal modeling approach of behavioral properties of publish/subscribe architectural styles. We extend P/S-CoM formal approach that concentrates only on correctly design the structures of publish/subscribe styles and deals with dynamic views. We put the emphasis on the state notion for component types. Moreover, we focus on behavioral properties including lossless of exchanged events, delivery semantics and ordering of notifications. These properties are coded in Z notation.
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Paper Nr: 98
Title:

AN IMPLEMENTATION FRAMEWORK FOR COMPONENT-BASED APPLICATIONS WITH REAL-TIME CONSTRAINTS - Extensions for Achieving Component Distribution
Authors:

Francisco Sánchez-Ledesma, Juan A. Pastor, Diego Alonso and Francisca Rosique
Abstract: Reactive system design requires the integration of structural and behavioural requirements with temporal ones (along with V&V activities) to describe the application architecture. We have adopted the Model-Driven Software Development approach to address these problems globally: from the definition of the application architecture to the generation of both code and analysis models. An Object Oriented framework was developed in order to ease the generation of code, as well as to provide the required properties for the final application (specifically, temporal behaviour). This paper describes how distribution support was added to the framework in a regular way without disrupting its design, and allowing users to integrate communication overload in timing analysis.
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Paper Nr: 162
Title:

ENERGY AWARENESS NEEDS A RETHINKING IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Hagen Höpfner and Christian Bunse
Abstract: Energy efficiency and -awareness are buzzwords in various areas of information and communication technology and are at the core backbone of GreenIT. Computing centers aim for reducing energy consumption in order to save money and carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, GreenIT labels are perfect selling points for computer equipment. Especially battey-powered and mobile devices must consider software’s energy consumption in order to prolong their uptime, while keeping the desired or agreed quality of service (QoS). Even if energy awareness regarding hardware has been researched intensively for a couple of years, the analysis of the impact of software on energy consumption is rather novel. We claim that the development of energy-efficient and -aware software systems require a careful re-examination of the many paradigms in software development.
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Paper Nr: 181
Title:

DEPIVOT – A SOFTWARE PACKAGE TO DESIGN AND EVALUATE CENTER-PIVOT SYSTEMS
Authors:

M. I. Valín, M. R. Cameira, C. Pedras, P. R. Teodoro, J. M Gonçalves and L. S. Pereira
Abstract: This paper presents a simulation model aimed at center-pivot design and support assessing the performance of systems under operation: DEPIVOT (Design and Evaluation of center PIVOT). The software code was developed in Visual Basic and includes an Access database. DEPIVOT allows considering performance criteria for design and to iteratively search better system solutions. The model has two main components: A. the design of new systems and B. the evaluation of operating systems. The first component starts with the agronomic design aiming the calculation of the system flow rate; this is followed by the hydraulic design: (a) computes friction head losses along the lateral; (b) the creation of the sprinkler chart; and (c) the validation of the sprinkler chart. The second component requires field data to calculate performance indicators, such as distribution uniformity (DU) and the coefficient of uniformity (CU).
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Paper Nr: 196
Title:

COOPERATION OF CPU AND GPU PROGRAMS FOR REAL-TIME 3D MAP BUILDING
Authors:

Yonghyun Jo, Hanyoung Jang, Yeonho Kim, Joon-Kee Cho, Hyoung-Ki Lee, Young Ik Eom and JungHyun Han
Abstract: This paper presents how the CPU and GPU programs coordinate in the context of 3D map modeling for a mobile home service robot. In this study, the representation of the environment is given as point clouds, and each scan of point clouds is quite efficiently processed using the parallel processing capability of GPU. Then, the result is read back to CPU for incrementally constructing the map. Due to the coordination between the CPU and GPU, a 3D map can be built at real time. This paper presents the software architecture of the CPU-GPU coordination, the GPU algorithm, and its performance gain.
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Paper Nr: 197
Title:

QUALITY OF TRANSFORMATIONS PROVIDING INTEROPERABILITY IN SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE MODEL-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Liliana Dobrica
Abstract: This paper defines the quality of model to model transformations based on a set of concerns addressed by an user and a developer. The user is a software architect that benefits of this quality during the design and evaluation of software architecture models. Then the paper performs an analysis of the quality on a recent approach of interoperability of tools and languages in a model-driven development environment. The key technique used to achieve interoperability stays in the alignment of various forms of metamodels. A special focus of discussion is on several aspects, such as the model transformation correctness, the management of the elements possibly lost while transforming or the back propagation of changes performed in the generated model to the original model.
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Area 3 - Distributed Systems

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 30
Title:

HERMES: A PERVASIVE SYSTEM FOR MEMORY SUPPORT AND AMBIENT ASSISTED LIVING
Authors:

Alex Conconi, Fabio Cattaneo, Aristodemos Pnevmatikakis, John Soldatos, Sebastian Prost and Manfred Tscheligi
Abstract: As sensors and other pervasive computing technologies are increasingly penetrating ambient assisted living applications researchers, engineers and application architects are starving for tools, techniques and frameworks for building and integrating added-value applications. In this paper we present HERMES, the architecture and implementation of a pervasive computing platform, which supports the development of ambient assisted living applications for the ageing society, with a particular emphasis on memory aids and cognitive training. The platform is integrated in the sense that it enables combined support for memory aid and cognitive training applications. It is also accessible via ergonomic interfaces developed on top of multi-touch surface devices. Furthermore, the platform is modular and extensible since it provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for the flexible development of additional applications. Along with the middleware architecture of the platform we also present representative trial deployments, which manifest that the presented platform is an attractive option for building pervasive applications for the ageing society.
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Paper Nr: 91
Title:

EXPLORATION OF TECHNOLOGIES FOR AUTONOMIC DEPENDABLE SERVICE PLATFORMS
Authors:

Eila Ovaska, Liliana Dobrica, Anu Purhonen and Marko Jaakola
Abstract: A city is smart if it can provide ambient services for citizens and especially for professionals who have to tackle emergency situations, including small and wide scale accidents and incidents. These ambient services embody intelligence of autonomic systems based on heterogeneous execution platforms enhanced with ser-vices that provide mechanisms for self-adaptation of dependable applications. This paper explores enabling technologies of autonomic dependable service platforms from three viewpoints: i) architectural options, ii) ontology models for services, context and dependability, and iii) modeling methods and practices for achieving high quality service platforms and intelligent applications. The main findings are summarized as a set of research items that need to be carried out for achieving an autonomic dependable service platform.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 35
Title:

PREDICTION OF VIDEO QUALITY OVER IEEE802.11 WIRELESS NETWORKS UNDER SATURATION CONDITION
Authors:

Xijie Liu and Tarek N. Saadawi
Abstract: In IEEE 802.11 wireless channel, and under the assumption of ideal channel, packets are lost when it exceeds the maximum retry attempt. Such packet losses lead to degradation in the transmitted video quality. This paper provides an analytical approach to estimate the video quality distortion due to the packet losses in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. The analytical approach is based on the use of two-state Markov chain model combined with the ITU-T Recommendation G.1070 for video quality objective measurements. Our approach provides a relationship between the design parameters of IEEE 802.11 wireless channels and the required video quality.
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Paper Nr: 54
Title:

STATE INDEPENDENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FOR DISTRIBUTED GRIDS
Authors:

Aysan Rasooli and Douglas G. Down
Abstract: In practice, a scheduling algorithm should consider multiple objectives. Typically, there are two kinds of objectives. The first is the performance of the system in terms of quantities related to the completion time of tasks, the second is the amount of state information required, which is often measured in terms of quantities such as communications costs. These two objectives are often in tension with one another. In this work, we introduce a scheduling algorithm which simultaneously addresses the objectives listed above namely, minimizing completion times, while requiring zero dynamic state information. Using simulation, we show the promising performance of our algorithm, and its robustness with respect to errors in parameter estimates.
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Paper Nr: 66
Title:

ACCURATE PACKET TIMESTAMPING ON LINUX PLATFORMS FOR PRECISE CAPACITY ESTIMATION - An Implementation of a Highly Accurate Timestamping System Embedded in the Linux Kernel and its Application to Capacity Estimation
Authors:

David Montoro-Mouzo, Josemaría Malgosa-sanahuja, Pedro Piñero-Escuer, Juan Pedro Muñoz-Gea and Pilar Manzanares-Lopez
Abstract: In this work, a tool based on packet-dispersion techniques for remotely measuring link capacities is presented. For implementing these techniques, a highly accurate packet timestamping system is presented. This system is fully integrated in the Linux kernel which makes possible to measure extremely exact packet-arrival times. The logic of the measurement system is integrated into a GUI, which reduces the comlexity of using the tool. Finally, the results of a measurement experiment for testing the developed tool are shown, and the lines of future work are exposed.
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Paper Nr: 122
Title:

CLOUD COMPUTING KEEPS FINANCIAL METRIC COMPUTATION SIMPLE
Authors:

Joan Navarro, Ainhoa Azqueta-Alzuaz, Pablo Murta Baião Albino and José Enrique Armendáriz-Iñigo
Abstract: Cloud computing—implemented by tool suites like Amazon S3, Dynamo, or Hadoop—has been designed to overcome classical constraints of distributed systems (i.e. poor scale out, low elasticity, and static behaviour) and to provide high scalability when dealing with large amounts of data. This paper proposes the usage of Hadoop functionalities to efficiently (1) process financial data and (2) detect and correct errors from data repositories; in particular, the work is focused on the database SABI. There is a set of operations that performed with the distributed computation paradigm may increase the calculation performance.
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Paper Nr: 125
Title:

MODELING SYSTEM POWER CONSUMPTION CONSIDERING DVFS AND THERMAL EFFECT
Authors:

Hyeong S. Kim, Frank Yong-Kyung Oh, Hyeonsang Eom and Heon Y. Yeom
Abstract: Increasing energy efficiency for a single system or data center is gaining much interest among IT operators and researchers. There has been lots of research focused on improving energy efficiency by analyzing existing systems and proposing a new system architecture. The most fundamental part of improving energy efficiency is to accurately and efficiently measure the power consumed by the servers. In this paper, we model the power consumption of a single server with resource utilization considering two factors, DVFS and thermal effect.
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Paper Nr: 139
Title:

A MULTI-AGENT SIMULATION PLATFORM APPLIED TO THE STUDY OF URBAN TRAFFIC LIGHTS
Authors:

Raul Cajias, Antonio González-Pardo and David Camacho
Abstract: The Multi-Agent system paradigm allows the development of complex software platforms to be used in a wide range of real-world scenarios. One of the most successful areas these technologies have been applied are in the simulation and optimization of complex systems. Traffic simulation/optimization problems are a specially suitable target for such a platform. This paper proposes a new Multi-Agent simulation platform, where agents are based on a Swarm model (lightweight agents with very low autonomy or proactivity). Using this framework, simulation designers are free to configure road networks of arbitrary complexity, by customizing road width, geometry and intersection with other roads. To simulate different traffic flow scenarios, vehicle trajectories can be defined by choosing start and end locations and providing traffic generation functions for each one trajectory defined. Finally, how many vehicles are generated at each time step can be determined by a time series function. The domain of traffic simulation has been selected to investigate the effect of traffic light configuration on the flow of vehicles in a road network. The experimental results from this platform show a strong correlation between traffic light behavior and the flow of traffic through the network that affects the congestion of the road.
Paper Nr: 177
Title:

SOFTWARE VERSIONING IN THE CLOUD - Towards Automatic Source Code Management
Authors:

Filippo Gioachin, Qianhui Liang, Yuxia Yao and Bu-Sung Lee
Abstract: With the introduction of cloud computing and Web 2.0, many applications are moving to the cloud environment. Version control systems have also taken a first step towards this direction. Nevertheless, existing systems are either client-server oriented or completely distributed, and they don’t match exactly the nature of the cloud. In this paper we propose a new cloud version control system focusing on the requirements imposed by cloud computing, that we identified as: concurrent editing, history rewrite, accountability, scalability, security, and fault tolerance. Our plan is to tackle these issues in a systematic way, and we present in this paper an overview of the solutions organized in three separate layers: access API, logical structure, and physical storage.
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Paper Nr: 194
Title:

REST ON ROUTERS? - Preliminary Lessons for Language Designers, Framework Architects and App Developers
Authors:

Joe Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer and George K. Thiruvathukal
Abstract: In this position paper, we provide a preliminary assessment of hardware and software solution stack choices available to developers of resource-oriented web services on commodity embedded devices. As part of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on air and water quality in a major urban ecosystem, we are developing an information infrastructure amounting to a role-based hierarchy of individually addressable, interconnected resources, ranging from sensors, analyzers, and other monitoring devices to aggregators and publishers. This infrastructure follows the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural pattern and integrates non-networked or non-RESTful monitoring devices through RESTful proxy resources running on low-cost, low-energy, possibly wireless, always-on embedded servers. Commodity wireless routers running a suitable embedded Linux distribution are a good choice for this purpose, and we have started to survey the landscape of supported solution stacks, including programming languages and RESTful frameworks: Not only were our preferred, familiar choices unavailable for medium-end routers, but we had to develop our own lightweight REST layer for lower-end routers. Given the growing popularity of embedded Linux devices, however, we argue that programming language designers and framework architects should support them to a much greater extent than they do now. In addition, as the demand for green computing grows, we argue that memory- and processor-efficient languages and frameworks become increasingly important.
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Paper Nr: 198
Title:

IMPROVING E-HEALTH SECURITY THROUGH TRUST NEGOTIATION

Authors:

Mahmoud Elkhodr, Seyed Shahrestani and Hon Cheung
Abstract: To achieve higher levels of efficiency and to improve the quality of care, remote monitoring systems for elderly offer interesting solutions. The data collected by the monitoring system are transmitted to the healthcare provider and stored on the healthcare provider’s server in the form of patients’ Electronic Health Records (EHR). It is important to secure the transmission of the patient’s EHR between the healthcare provider server and the mobile device being used by the healthcare professional, as their communication is normally via unsecure networks, such as the Internet. The approaches proposed in this study ensure that patients’ EHRs are only disclosed to the authorized healthcare professionals, on the registered devices and at the appropriate locations. To achieve these security requirements, building on the strengths of Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, a trust negotiation approach is proposed. For verification purposes, a mobile application is also constructed. The experimental works confirm that by applying the proposed approach, significant improvements in the security of the remote health monitoring systems can be achieved.
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Paper Nr: 202
Title:

A SEMANTIC APPROACH FOR WEB WIDGET MASHUP
Authors:

Jinan Fiaidhi, Adam McLellan and Sabah Mohammed
Abstract: The current status of the most popular web widget formats was examined with regard to composition of existing widgets into more complex mashups. A prototype was created demonstrating the creation of a mashup in web widget format using other web widgets as components. A search tool was developed which crawls and indexes in semantic format the metadata of web widgets found in a public repository. This tool provides a web widget interface to find other web widgets, and serves as the first pre-requisite tool for further work in this area. A likely path towards further results in this area is discussed.
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Paper Nr: 203
Title:

INITIAL EXPERIENCE IN MOVING KEY ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT FUNCTIONS TO SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES
Authors:

David B. Dennis, Konstantin Läufer and George K. Thiruvathukal
Abstract: We discuss our initial experience with the transition from conventional technology to social networking sites and other cloud-backed sites for three core business functions of two academic departments, of computer science and history, at a mid-size private university: course management, research and administrative collaboration, and community engagement. We first discuss the social/cultural context that informs our technology choices, as well as the evolution of the technology choices themselves. Then, we identify the targeted department functions and their actors. Next, we describe the past and present technical architectures used to support these functions. We conclude with a discussion of our preliminary experience with this transition and to what extent our experience can be generalized into a blueprint that can be adopted by other organizations.
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Paper Nr: 20
Title:

WIRELESS COMMUNICATION - As an Innovation Technology for SMEs
Authors:

Lenka Landryová, Miroslav Mahdal and Marek Babiuch
Abstract: This short paper briefly describes results of our research and a new application creation as a part of our project work. One of the goals specified in the project is to develop simplified support tools for SMEs, which facilitate processes both within the SME and externally with its partners, suppliers or customers. An application for a mobile phone was developed, which is able to send data regarding the status of a monitored object into an operator's centre. The cell phone either uses its own sensor, such as a GPS unit, etc., from which data are sent directly to a central operator station or the ability to connect other wireless stations to a mobile phone and send data from extra sensors such as motion, pressure, humidity, temperature sensors, etc. The connection to a mobile phone is provided by Bluetooth wireless technology. Furthermore, the paper suggests an example of how this application may improve a small company operation and service-production processes.
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Paper Nr: 26
Title:

TELMA - An Evolutive Distributed Application for In-Orbit Satellites Support
Authors:

Patrick Pleczon, Eva Bonnin and Laurent Desplas
Abstract: Satellites In-Orbit Support is a complex activity requiring the daily thorough analysis of thousands of parameters. Performing this activity for the growing fleet of satellites delivered by Astrium, the space EADS subsidiary and leading European Satellite company, featured the development of a new generation processing environment: TELMA (standing for TELeMetry Access). This paper describes TELMA and provides a detailed view of the technical choices that structured this system. First, it describes the notion of satellite telemetry and the needs of the In-Orbit Support (IOS) team. Then TELMA software architecture is detailed as well as system deployment aspects. This paper also provides lessons learnt about the development and deployment of the software. Finally, a status of the current version of TELMA is presented and perspectives are drawn.
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Paper Nr: 63
Title:

GROUPING FOR THE CRITERIA BASED DATA BROADCAST IN WIRELESS MOBILE COMPUTING
Authors:

John Tsiligaridis
Abstract: Data broadcasting in wireless communication technology can provide mobile financial with location based services. Data can be reached in any time and place. The server fetches the requests and broadcasts the data to the air. The broadcast problem including the plan design is considered. A criteria based algorithm can discover the creation of a full or empty slot Broadcast Plan (BP) with equal spacing of repeated instances of items. This last property can guarantee the creation of a regular BP (RBP) and enable the servers use a single or a number of channels so that the users can catch their items avoiding their devices’ waste of energy. Moreover, the Grouping Dimensioning Algorithm (GDA) based on integrated relations can guarantee the discrimination of services using a minimum number of channels. The server broadcasting capability is increased for a single channel operation by the use of the HOL waiting time group (HOL-WTG) scheduler, providing service priority along with bandwidth adjustment, diminishing the waste of bandwidth, and minimizing the number of rounds. This proposed work can enrich the server infrastructure for self-monitoring, self-organizing and channel availability as well. Simulation experiments are provided.
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Paper Nr: 94
Title:

REAL-TIME TRACKING AND INCIDENCES MANAGEMENT - Improving the Transportation of Industrial Equipment through an ICT Solution
Authors:

Asier San Nicolás, Ignacio Angulo, Asier Perallos and Nekane Sainz
Abstract: This paper describes an ICT solution for real-time tracking and fleet management which can be applied in distribution of industrial equipments, in order to improve the traceability of such goods. The solution includes a support sys-tem for the driver that is capable of reporting the route that has to be followed and notifying incidences that occur during the trip, resolving them as soon as possible. A first prototype has been developed and its functionality validated through a simple test case. In addition, future actions to improve the system are shown.
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Paper Nr: 112
Title:

LOCATION BASED USER MODELING IN ADAPTIVE MOBILE LEARNING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS
Authors:

Efthimios Alepis, Maria Virvou and Katerina Kabassi
Abstract: Recently it has been widely acknowledged that the incorporation of advanced information technologies in the areas of ecological informatics may provide significant assets towards social environmental awareness. In this paper we present a sophisticated mobile learning system which offers environmental educational information to users based on their current geographical location. The system adapts its content according to the user’s personal characteristics and to the user’s mobile device. The adaptation of the user’s interface is accomplished through the incorporation of a well known decision making model, namely the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The resulting prototype system is called m-AWARE and is targeted to people of all ages, providing easily accessible information about our environment for environmental awareness purposes.
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Paper Nr: 127
Title:

DYNAMIC DISTRIBUTED STORAGE ARCHITECTURE ON SMART GRIDS
Authors:

Joan Navarro, José Enrique Armendáriz-Iñigo and August Climent
Abstract: Most of the power network services such as voltage control, asset management, or flow monitoring are implemented within a centralized paradigm. Novel distributed power generation techniques—eolian fields or local solar panels—are decentralizing this generation paradigm and forcing companies to change their traditional centralized infrastructure. This implies that intelligence and data sources are now spread over the whole network. Smart grids may enable to manage such a change although any standard architecture to deploy them on a power network exists. This challenges researchers to design and implement a new distributed storage system able to offer different levels of consistency and replication depending on the physical location of the smart sensor and according to the network needs. This paper reviews the requirements of smart grids and presents a new dynamic storage architecture following the flavor of cloud computing. This architecture is based on a variant of the primary copy scheme and is suitable to store all needed data and enable smart grids to solve the required functions in a distributed way. Moreover, it is able to offer high scalability and a consistency level similar to the one required by wireless sensor networks.
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Paper Nr: 164
Title:

RESEARCH ON HETEREGENEOUS DATA FOR RECOGNIZING THREAT
Authors:

Deris Stiawan, Abdul Hanan Abdullah and Mohd Yazid Idris
Abstract: The information increasingly large of volume dataset and multidimensional data has grown rapidly in recent years. Inter-related and update information from security communities or vendor network security has present of content vulnerability and patching bug from new attack (pattern) methods. It given a collection of datasets, we were asked to examine a sample of such data and look for pattern which may exist between certain pattern methods over time. There are several challenges, including handling dynamic data, sparse data, incomplete data, uncertain data, and semistructured/unstructured data. In this paper, we are addressing these challenges and using data mining approach to collecting scattered information in routine update regularly from provider or security community.
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Paper Nr: 169
Title:

ENHANCED GRID RESOURCE SELECTION MECHANISM
Authors:

Adil Yousif, Abdul Hanan Abdullah, Muhammad Shafie Abd Latiff and Mohammed Bakri Bashir
Abstract: Resources in grid systems are heterogeneous, geographically distributed, belong to different administrative domains and apply different management policies. To manage resources in grid computing, efficient resource selection mechanism is required. In traditional non-reserved resource selection mechanisms, there is no guarantee that the job completion time will be as expected. On the other hand, in the reserved bidding process, conventional resource selection mechanisms waste providers resources and hence affect the overall grid system performance. We propose a new grid resource selection mechanism to achieve performance enhancement in the resource allocation process.
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Paper Nr: 175
Title:

WORKFLOW COMPOSITION AND DESCRIPTION TOOL
Authors:

Binh Minh Nguyen, Viet Tran and Ladislav Hluchy
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new approach for creating workflow. The workflow is represented as sequence of tasks with explicitly defined input/output data. Parallelism between tasks is implicitly defined by the data dependence. The workflows described in our approach are easily converted to other format. Nested and parameterized workflows are also supported.
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Paper Nr: 186
Title:

CLOUD-X - Remote Desktops and Applications through Web Browsers
Authors:

Edgar Fabián Hernández-Ventura and Jorge Buenabad-Chávez
Abstract: Cloud computing is gaining general acceptance and we believe it will broaden its user base significantly once users can run their favourite applications in the Cloud through web browsers and with the same interface that each such application is used in a desktop or laptop computer. This paper presents CloudX, a new architecture based on web browser techonologies for the X Window system. X Window is the de facto standard for window display in Unix-like operating systems. CloudX translates X Window commands to web browser display commands using AJAX and SVG (Scalar Vector Graphics) technologies. CloudX does not require any extension to the X Window system nor any plugin to the web browser.
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Area 4 - Data Management

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 132
Title:

USING UTF-8 TO EXTRACT MAIN CONTENT OF RIGHT TO LEFT LANGUAGE WEB PAGES
Authors:

Hadi Mohammadzadeh, Franz Schweiggert and Gholamreza Nakhaeizadeh
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new and simple approach to extract the main content of Right to Left language web pages. Independence to DOM tree and HTML tags is one of the most important features of the proposed algorithm. In practice, HTML tags have been written in English and we know that the English character set is located in the interval [0,127]. In most languages which are written from Right-to-Left (R2L) such as the Arabic language, however, a definite interval of the Unicode character set is used that is certainly not in this interval. In the first phase of our approach, we apply this distinction to separate the R2L characters from the English ones. Then for each HTML file, we determine the density of the R2L characters and the density of Non-R2L characters. That part of the HTML file with high density of the R2L characters and low density of the Non-R2L characters contains the main content of the web page with high accuracy. The proposed algorithm has been tested, evaluated and compared with the last main content extraction approach on 2166 selected web pages.
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Paper Nr: 136
Title:

HYBRID WIKIS: EMPOWERING USERS TO COLLABORATIVELY STRUCTURE INFORMATION
Authors:

Florian Matthes, Christian Neubert and Alexander Steinhoff
Abstract: Wikis are increasingly used for collaborative enterprise information management since they are flexibly applicable and encourage the contribution of knowledge. The fact that ordinary wiki pages contain pure text only limits how the information can be processed or made accessible to users. Semantic wikis promise to solve this problem by capturing knowledge in structured form and offering advanced querying capabilites. However, it is not obvious for business users, how they can benefit from providing semantic annotations which are not familiar to them and often difficult to enter. In this paper, we first introduce the concepts of hybrid wikis, namely attributes, type tags, attribute suggestions, and attribute definitions with integrity constraints. Business users interact with these concepts using a familiar user interface based on forms, spreadsheet-like tables, and auto-completion for links and values. We then illustrate these concepts using an example scenario with projects and persons and highlight key implementation aspects of a Java-based hybrid wiki system (Tricia). The paper ends with the description of practical experiences gained in two usage scenarios, a comparison with related work and an outlook on future work.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 101
Title:

SEMANTIC-LITE RETRIEVAL ON IMPRECISE AND INCOMPLETE NATURAL QUERIES USING CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS
Authors:

Thinh Nhat Phan, Tho Thanh Quan, Thien Cong Pham and Nguyen Tuong Huynh
Abstract: Many attempts have been made on processing natural queries on relational databases, because this feature should render users virtually no boundary on expression search requests. Recently, research trends on this field have moved from compositional semantics into SQL-oriented processing on natural queries. However, this approach still suffers the problem of imprecise and incomplete information which often occurs when users submit their queries casually in practical situations. In this paper, we show an approach on translating the natural queries into conceptual graphs using semantic information captured by a domain ontology. Due to the well-structured representation of conceptual graph, we can resolve the impreciseness and retrieve the incompleteness when occurring. Experimental results have shown that our approach is quite promising.
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Paper Nr: 140
Title:

RANGE NAMES - A Risky Practice in Spreadsheet Development?
Authors:

Ruth McKeever and Kevin McDaid
Abstract: The use of range names to improve spreadsheet development is advocated by both academics and practitioners, however there is a clear absence of supporting scientific evidence. This paper describes the latest in a series of experiments that examine the impact of range name structures on spreadsheet reliability, and formula development time. The aim of this paper is to compare the reliability of simple spreadsheet formulas developed by intermediate users through both cell references and range names. The results are consistent with the findings of previous experiments that, contrary to widespread opinion, the use of range names does not improve the quality of spreadsheets.
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Paper Nr: 163
Title:

TRENDS OF SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES AND BUSINESS SUPPORT
Authors:

Soon Jae Kwon, Jin Sung Kim and Emy Elyanee Mustapha
Abstract: The successful expansion of web services made it more complex and required more interventions from users. Many researchers have tried to improve the comprehension ability of computers in supporting an intelligent web service. One approach is by enriching the information with machine understandable semantics. They applied ontology design, intelligent reasoning and other logical representation schemes to design an infrastructure of the semantic web. Semantic web is considered as an intelligent access to understanding, transforming, storing, retrieving, and processing the information gathered from heterogeneous, distributed web resources. The purpose of this study is to investigate the research trends on semantic web applications.
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Paper Nr: 165
Title:

TWO ALGORITHMS FOR LOCATING ANCESTORS OF A LARGE SET OF VERTICES IN A TREE
Authors:

Oleksandr Panchenko, Arian Treffer, Hasso Plattner and Alexander Zeier
Abstract: A lot of tree-shaped data exists: XML documents, abstract syntax trees, hierarchies, etc. To accelerate query processing on trees stored in a relational database a pre-post-ordering can be used. It works well for locating ancestors of a single or few vertices because pre-post-ordering avoids recursive table access. However, it is slow if it comes to locating ancestors of hundreds or thousands of vertices because ancestors of each of the input vertices are located sequentially. In this paper, two novel algorithms (sort-tilt-scan and single-pass-scan) for solving this problem are proposed and compared with a näıve approach. While the sort-tilt-scan improves the performance by a constant factor, the single-pass-scan achieves a better complexity class. The performance gain is achieved because of a single table scan which can locate all result vertices by a single run. Using generated data, this paper demonstrates that the single-pass-scan is orders of magnitude faster than the näıve approach.
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Paper Nr: 195
Title:

INTRODUCING ASPECTS AND SERVICES BASED ADAPTABILITY IN SPARQL REQUEST
Authors:

Valérie Monfort, Hanen Abbes and Wassim Jaziri
Abstract: Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are broadly used by companies to gain in flexibility. Web service is the fitted technical solution used to support SOA by providing interoperability and loose coupling. First research works allowed us developing genuine middleware based on a new paradigm called aspect based services to dynamically adapt services orchestration. This approach can also be used for SPARQL (Protocol and RDF Query Language) requests to dynamically access Web services ontologies. According to these pre requisites, this paper presents our approach, current and future research works.
Paper Nr: 65
Title:

LAMB - A Lexical Analyzer with Ambiguity Support
Authors:

Luis Quesada, Fernando Berzal and Francisco J. Cortijo
Abstract: Lexical ambiguities may naturally arise in language specifications. We present Lamb, a lexical analyzer that captures overlapping tokens caused by lexical ambiguities. This novel technique scans through the input string and produces a lexical analysis graph that describes all the possible sequences of tokens that can be found within the string. The lexical graph can then be fed as input to a parser, which will discard any sequence of tokens that does not produce a valid syntactic sentence. In summary, our approach allows a context-sensitive lexical analysis that supports lexically-ambiguous language specifications.
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Paper Nr: 86
Title:

A QUANTITATIVE EXAMINATION OF THE IMPACT OF FEATURED ARTICLES IN WIKIPEDIA
Authors:

Antonio J. Reinoso, Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Rocío Muñoz-Mansilla and Israel Herraiz
Abstract: This paper presents a quantitative examination of the impact of the presentation of featured articles as quality content in the main page of several Wikipedia editions. Moreover, the paper also presents the analysis performed to determine the number of visits received by the articles promoted to the featured status. We have analyzed the visits not only in the month when articles awarded the promotion or were included in the main page, but also in the previous and following ones. The main aim for this is to assess the attention attracted by the featured content and the different dynamics exhibited by each community of users in respect to the promotion process. The main results of this paper are twofold: it shows how to extract relevant information related to the use of Wikipedia, which is an emerging research topic, and it analyzes whether the featured articles mechanism achieve to attract more attention.
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Paper Nr: 154
Title:

SEMANTIC-BASED COMPOSITION OF MODULAR ONTOLOGIES APPLIED TO WEB QUERY REFORMULATION
Authors:

Manel Elloumi-Chaabene, Nesrine Ben Mustapha, Hajer Baazaoui-Zghal, Antonio Moreno and David Sánchez
Abstract: When a Web query is submitted and relevant documents are not found, users are faced with the difficult task of reformulating the query. It may be argued that ontologies can be useful to automate the query reformulation process, taking advantage of the domain knowledge. This paper proposes a novel way of building a modular ontology that may be suitable for this task, composed of interrelated modules focused on specific topics. We propose to use well-known Web-based semantic relatedness measures to improve the content and structure of the modular ontology. Some experiments on query reformulation based on the obtained ontology modules show satisfactory results.
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Paper Nr: 168
Title:

EFFICIENT N-BYTE SLACK SPACE HASHING IN RETRIEVING AND IDENTIFYING PARTIALLY RECOVERED DATA
Authors:

Ireneusz Jozwiak and Michal Kedziora
Abstract: This paper describes modification of slack space block hashing algorithm which improves performance in the handling with process of identification of recovered data. In our research we relied on hash block algorithm and present improvements which allow increase efficiency by analyzing time reduction. N-Byte Slack Space Hashing is especially useful in data recovery process where due to a file system limitations, it is possible to recover only fragments of data which was erased and partially overwritten. The Algorithm is faster than block hashing and allows to identify partially erased files using modified hash sets.
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Paper Nr: 176
Title:

A CLAIM TO INCORPORATE FUNCTIONAL DEPENDENCIES IN DEVELOPMENT TOOLS - Benchmarking and Checking Functional Dependencies Algorithms
Authors:

Manuel Enciso Garcia-Oliveros, Angel Mora Bonilla, Pablo Cordero and Rosario Baena
Abstract: In this work we summarize the state of the art in the use of database functional dependencies. We compare the low impact that it has in the commercial environment with its successful acceptation in the academic environment. Particularly we remark that there does not exists any commercial development tool which uses the information provided by functional dependencies and this useful information is also deprecated by the database management systems. As a result of this, large database designs have to be re-built a few years after their establishment. In this work we identify the reasons which causes this situation and we propose a guideline to wide spread the effective use of Functional Dependencies in commercial design and tools.
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Area 5 - Knowledge-Based Systems

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 11
Title:

POSSIBILISTIC METHODOLOGY FOR THE EVALUATION OF CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHMS
Authors:

Olgierd Hryniewicz
Abstract: In the paper we consider the problem of the evaluation and comparison of different classification algorithms. For this purpose we apply the methodology of statistical tests for the multinomial distribution. We propose to use two-sample tests for the comparison of different classification algorithms, and one-sample goodness-of-fit tests for the evaluation of the quality of classification. We restrict our attention to the case of the supervised classification when an external ‘expert’ evaluates the correctness of classification. The results of the proposed statistical tests are interpreted using possibilistic indices of dominance introduced by Dubois and Prade.
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Paper Nr: 14
Title:

MINING INFLUENCE RULES OUT OF ONTOLOGIES
Authors:

Barbara Furletti and Franco Turini
Abstract: A method for extracting new implicit knowledge from ontologies by using an inductive/deductive approach is presented. By analyzing the relationships that already exist in an ontology, we are able to return the extracted knowledge as weighted If-Then Rules among concepts. The technique, that combines data mining and link analysis, is completely general and applicable to whatever domain. Since the output is a set of “standard” If-Then Rules, it can be used to integrate existing knowledge or for supporting any other data mining process. An application of the method to an ontology representing companies and their activities is included.
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Paper Nr: 21
Title:

THE CLASSIFICATION OF TIME SERIES UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SCALED NOISE
Authors:

P. Kroha and K. Kröber
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an improvement of a method for market time series’ classification based on fuzzy and fractal technology. Usually, the older values of time series will be cut off at a specific time point. We investigated the influence of the fractal features on the classification result. We compared a normal time series representation, a representation having a smaller box dimension (achieved by exponential smoothing), and a representation having a greater box dimension (achieved by addind scaled noise). We used different types of noises and scales to improve the classification result. Our application concerns time series of stock prices. The market performance of those approaches is analyzed, discussed, and compared with the system without the scaled noise component.
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Paper Nr: 73
Title:

RECOMMENDING DOCUMENTS VIA KNOWLEDGE FLOW-BASED GROUP RECOMMENDATION
Authors:

Chin-Hui Lai, Duen-Ren Liu and Ya-Ting Chen
Abstract: Recommender systems can mitigate the information overload problem and help workers retrieve knowledge based on their preferences. In a knowledge-intensive environment, knowledge workers need to access task-related codified knowledge (documents) to perform tasks. A worker’s document referencing behaviour can be modelled as a knowledge flow (KF) to represent the evolution of his/her information needs over time. Document recommendation methods can proactively support knowledge workers in the performance of tasks by recommending appropriate documents to meet their information needs. However, most traditional recommendation methods do not consider workers’ knowledge flows and the information needs of the majority of a group of workers with similar knowledge flows. A group’s needs may partially reflect the needs of an individual worker that cannot be inferred from his/her past referencing behaviour. Thus, we leverage the group perspective to complement the personal perspective by using a hybrid approach, which combines the KF-based group recommendation method (KFGR) with the user-based collaborative filtering method (UCF). The proposed hybrid method achieves a trade-off between the group-based and the personalized method by integrating the merits of both methods. Our experiment results show that the proposed method can enhance the quality of recommendations made by traditional methods.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 10
Title:

MODELING AWARENESS OF AGENTS USING POLICIES
Authors:

Amir Talaei-Khoei, Pradeep Ray, Nandan Parameswaran and Ghassan Beydoun
Abstract: In addition to cooperation, research in disaster management exposes the need for policy awareness to recognize relevant information in enhancing cooperation. Intelligent software agents have previously been employed for problem solving in disaster situations but without incorporating how the agents can create or model awareness. This paper presents an awareness based modelling method, called MAAP, to maintain awareness of software agents of a given set of policies. The paper presents preliminary results indicating that the use of policies as a source of awareness, as facilitated by MAAP, is a potentially effective method to enhance cooperation.
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Paper Nr: 41
Title:

A HYBRID CLASSIFIER WITH GENETIC WEIGHTING
Authors:

Benjamín Moreno-Montiel and Renè MacKinney-Romero
Abstract: This paper presents the results obtained when classifying a group of artificial and real world data, using a Hybrid Classifier with Genetic Weighting (HCGW). The algorithm proposed is an ensemble based system, it combines several types of classifiers: Naive Bayes, K-Means, k-Nearest Neighbours, C4.5, Decision Tables and ADTree, using a voting criterion for weighted majority to combine the individual classifications of each classifier, assigning the weights for each classifier using a genetic algorithm. We performed tests on data with different tools for Data Mining, like SIPINA, TANAGRA and WEKA, to have a good comparison with the proposed algorithm. Using standard measures such as accuracy, HCGW obtained better performance against different implementations, from those tools, including traditional Ensemble Algorithms.
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Paper Nr: 46
Title:

A NEW METHOD FOR LEARNING THE SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES
Authors:

Catalina-Lucia Cocianu, Luminita State and Panayiotis Vlamos
Abstract: According to the theory of SVMs, while traditional techniques for pattern recognition are based on the attempt to optimize the performance in terms of the empirical risk, SVMs minimize the structural risk, that is, the probability of misclassifying yet-to-be-seen patterns for a fixed but unknown probability distribution of data. The most distinguished and attractive features of this classification paradigm are the ability to condense the information contained by the training set and the use of families of decision surfaces of relatively low Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension. In this paper we propose a heuristic learning algorithm of gradient type for training a SVM and analyze its performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency when applied to linear separable data. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our learning method, several tests were performed against the Platt’s SMO method, and the conclusions are formulated in the final section of the paper.
Paper Nr: 88
Title:

AN EMBODIED CONVERSATIONAL AGENT FOR COUNSELLING ABORIGINES - Mr. Warnanggal
Authors:

Manolya Kavakli, Tarashankar Rudra and Manning Li
Abstract: Aboriginal people are the most neglected community in Australia. Although the trauma induced through oppression and genocide by the settlers is long gone, the deep scar still manifests through the consequences that are painfully apparent in their community. One of the consequences of past neglect and torture is the excessive consumption of alcohol and use of illegal substances. This has compounded the agony of aboriginal people to incomprehensible proportions and forced a sizable population into a grinding cycle of poverty and disease. Our paper proposes a novel approach to provide personalized counselling services to the aboriginal people by developing an interactive virtual sociologist as an embodied conversational agent. The system will simulate the role of a real sociologist in advising on strategies to overcome their addiction to alcohol and substance use and hence enjoy the fruits of prosperity with the rest of the Australian community.
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Paper Nr: 90
Title:

TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN SPORTS EVENT MANAGEMENT - Context Analysis of Malaysian Biannual Games with CommonKADS
Authors:

Azizul Rahman Abdul Ghaffar, Ghassan Beydoun, Jun Shen and Will Tibben
Abstract: Context Analysis (CA) is typically used as an early phase preceding the development of a knowledge-based systems in order to indicate how the system should interact with its environment and the various stakeholders. We undertake a detailed context analysis of business processes of the Malaysian Games (MG) to highlight blind spots of the process and enable the identification of an initial sports event knowledge management (KM) framework. Firstly, our CommonKADS driven analysis highlights how we can improve the business process and enable the organization to develop, distribute and apply its knowledge resources effectively. Secondly, the paper highlights specific features about the domain of sports events management and accordingly presents a set of recommendations to extend the CA of CommonKADS to improve its applicability to Sports Events Management in general.
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Paper Nr: 97
Title:

A METAHEURISTICS BASED SIMULATION TOOL TO OPTIMIZE DEMAND RESPONSIVE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Eneko Osaba, Pablo Fernandez, Roberto Carballedo and Asier Perallos
Abstract: Public passenger transport is an important area that affects our quality of life. The design of routes and frequencies of such systems is very important to ensure their economic viability. The work presented in this paper focuses on the design of a software tool that assists in the creation of routes and schedules of passenger transport systems. For this, we have developed an application that is based on evolutionary computing techniques to simulate passenger demand and adjust the routes and frequency of the services to meet those demands. The result of work done is a software tool, and a metaheuristic algorithm that can be used for solving optimization problems.
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Paper Nr: 105
Title:

INCONSISTENCY-TOLERANT ELIMINATIONS OF INTEGRITY VIOLATIONS
Authors:

Hendrik Decker
Abstract: Violated integrity constraints should be repaired by eliminating the violations. However, it may be unfeasible to eliminate all violations. We show that it is possible to eliminate some but not necessarily all violations, i.e., to tolerate remaining inconsistencies, while preserving the consistent parts of the database.
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Paper Nr: 146
Title:

DOMAIN ONTOLOGY GENERATION USING LMF STANDARDIZED DICTIONARY STRUCTURE
Authors:

Feten Baccar Ben Amar, Bilel Gargouri and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou
Abstract: The present paper proposes a methodology for generating core domain ontology from LMF standardized dictionary (ISO-24613). It consists in deriving the ontological entities systematically from the explicit information, taking advantage of the LMF dictionary structure. Indeed, such finely-structured source incorporates multi-domain lexical knowledge of morphological, syntactic and semantic levels, lending itself to ontological interpretations. The basic feature of the proposed methodology lies in the proper building of ontologies. To this end, we have integrated a validation stage into the suggested process in order to maintain the coherence of the resulting formalized ontology core during this process. Furthermore, this methodology has been implemented in a rule-based system, whose high-performance is shown through an experiment carried out on the Arabic language. This choice is explained not only by the great deficiency of work on Arabic ontology building, but also by the availability within our research team of an LMF standardized Arabic dictionary.
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Paper Nr: 166
Title:

A SEMANTIC APPROACH TO THE EXTRACTION OF FEATURE TERMS
Authors:

Manuela Angioni and Franco Tuveri
Abstract: Understanding the meaning of a text depends on the knowledge the reader has about the topic addressed in a document, starting from the most complex concept to the simplest one. The representation of the knowledge is generally performed by ontologies, semantic networks, or typified by statistical algorithms able to organize the contents according to rules based on frequency of terms or synsets. The Opinion Mining is a way to go beyond text categorization through the analysis of the opinions related to a specific topic: a product, a service, a tourist location, etc. In this paper we propose to apply our experience in the semantic analysis of textual resources to the Opinion Mining task, with the aim to propose a different approach to the extraction of feature terms, performing a contextualisation by means of semantic categorisation, a semantic net of concept and by a set of qualities associated to the sense expressed by adjectives and adverbs.
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Paper Nr: 180
Title:

A SITUATION-DEPENDENT SCENARIO GENERATION FRAMEWORK FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT SKILL-UP SIMULATOR
Authors:

Koichi Iwai, Masanori Akiyoshi, Masaki Samejima and Hiroshi Morihisa
Abstract: This paper addresses a new framework aiming situation-dependent scenario generation for project management skill-up simulator. Project management is inherently human-centric activities, and research work for education has been done by using simulation. Project management covers several aspects on software development such as planning, scheduling, progress management and negotiation. We especially focus on the progress management phase to provide high fidelity of project status and well-configured learning situation towards pedagogical achievement. First three design principles are argued for such viewpoints. Second simple but fully functional project modeling is proposed for simulating essential aspects of Q(uality), C(ost) and D(elivery) criteria. Third situation-dependent scenario generation is described with “Events” and “Trigger control of trouble events”. The proposed framework is implemented and shows effective scenario generation when having a trainee’s interactive operations.
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Paper Nr: 51
Title:

METHOD FOR AN AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF A SEMANTIC-LEVEL CONTEXTUAL TRANSLATIONAL DICTIONARY
Authors:

Dmitry Kan
Abstract: In this paper we demonstrate the semantic feature machine translation (MT) system as a combination of two fundamental approaches, where the rule-based side is supported by the functional model of the Russian language and the statistical side utilizes statistical word alignment. The MT system relies on a semantic-level contextual translational dictionary as its key component. We will present the method for an automatic generation of the dictionary where disambiguation is done on a semantic level.
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Paper Nr: 59
Title:

COMPARATION OF OWL ONTOLOGIES REASONERS - Testing Cases with Pellet and Jena
Authors:

José R. Hilera, Luis Fernández-Sanz and Adela Díez
Abstract: This article describes the results of an evaluation process of four OWL reasoners: Pellet and other three included in Jena framework (OWL Default, OWL Mini, and OWL Micro). A simple ontology about programming languages has been used for the validation process carried out by reasoners and a Java program has been developed for testing different cases: reasoning over the original ontology model and testing different possible inference situations.
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Paper Nr: 184
Title:

AN ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH FOR THE ACTIVITY IN AN AUTOMATIC CONTROL FACULTY
Authors:

Liliana Dobrica, Alexandra Suzana Cernian and Anca Bertesteanu
Abstract: The current work aims at offering a new, ontology-based approach for organizing and retrieving the information about the educational offer and the activity of the department of Automatic Control of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science at the University Politehnica of Bucharest. The project is divided into 2 main phases. The first phase consists of creating an ontology which contains information about the disciplines, the teachers, the teaching resources, the research and publication activity in our faculty, while the second phase consists of developing an application for exploring and querying this ontology in a controlled natural language.
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