ICSOFT 2008 Abstracts

Area 1 - Distributed and Paralled Systems
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Information Systems and Data Management
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 3 - Knowledge Engineering
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 4 - Programing Languages
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 5 - Software Engineering
Full Papers Short Papers

Area 1 - Distributed and Paralled Systems

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 73
Title:

BEHAVIOR CHARACTERIZATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A HYBRID P2P FILE SHARING SYSTEM
Authors:

Juan P. Muñoz-Gea, Josemaría Malgosa-sanahuja, Pilar Manzanares-Lopez, Juan Carlos Sánchez-aarnoutse and Joan Garcia-haro
Abstract: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks show a set of distinctive features which increase the need to previously simulate the new proposals. In order to perform an adequate evaluation of a P2P application, it is necessary a real characterization of the queries behavior and the node dynamism. After validating the new P2P algorithm by means of simulation, developers have the possibility to prove a real P2P application instance in an emulated environment. In each step, the detected errors or misbehaviors are appropriately corrected. The main contribution of this paper is twofold: first, to adequately characterize the real behavior of P2P overlay networks (including dynamic and static aspects) and second, evaluate a real P2P overlay network under the above constraints using one of the most popular (high level and user friendly) simulation frameworks.
Download
Paper Nr: 146
Title:

REPLICATION IN SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES
Authors:

Michael Ameling, Marcus Roy and Bettina Kemme
Abstract: Multi-tier architectures have become the main building block in service-oriented architecture solutions with stringent requirements on performance and reliability. Replicating the reusable software components of the business logic and the application dependent state of business data is a promising means to provide fast local access and high availability. However, while replication of databases is a well explored area and the implications of replica maintenance are well understood, this is not the case for data replication in application servers where entire business objects are replicated, Web Service interfaces are provided, main memory access is much more prevalent, and which have a database server as a backend tier. In this paper, we introduce possible replication architectures for multi-tier architectures, and identify the parameters influencing the performance. We present a simulation prototype that is suitable to integrate and compare several replication solutions. We describe in detail one solution that seems to be the most promising in a wide-area setting.
Download
Paper Nr: 178
Title:

STRATEGIES FOR OPTIMIZING QUERYING THIRD PARTY RESOURCES IN SEMANTIC WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Albert Weichselbraun
Abstract: One key property of the Semantic Web is its support for interoperability. Combining knowledge sources from different authors and locations yields refined and better results. Current Semantic Web applications only use a limited amount of particularly useful and popular information providers like Swoogle, geonames, etc. for their queries. As more and more applications facilitating Semantic Web technologies emerge, the load caused by these applications is expected to grow, requiring more efficient ways for querying external resources. This research suggests an approach for query optimization based on ideas originally proposed by McQueen for optimal stopping in business economics. Applications querying external resources are modeled as decision makers looking for optimal action/answer sets, facing search costs for acquiring information, test costs for checking the acquired information, and receiving a reward depending on the usefulness of the proposed solution. Applying these concepts to the information system domain yields strategies for optimizing queries to external services. An extensive evaluation compares these strategies to a conventional coverage based approach, based on real world response times taken from three different popular Web services.
Download
Paper Nr: 349
Title:

PERFORMANCE AND COMPLEXITY EVALUATION OF MULTI-PATH ROUTING ALGORITHMS FOR MPLS-TE
Authors:

Khodor Abboud, A. Toguyeni and A. Rahmani
Abstract: This paper discusses and evaluates the behaviour of a DS-TE algorithm (DiffSev aware MPLS traffic Engineering) called PEMS, and a dynamic multipath routing algorithm for load balancing (LBWDP), applied on a huge topology that correspond to real network. To clarify network topologies and routing algorithms that are suitable for MPLS Traffic Engineering, we evaluate them from the viewpoint of network scalability and end-to-end quality. We characterize typical network topologies and practical routing algorithms. Using a network topology generated by BRITE, that has many alternative paths, can provide a real simulation of the internet and a good evaluation for the end-to-end quality and the network use. In this paper, we first review MPLS-TE, DiffServ and load balancing. We then discuss the general issues of designing for a lot of DS-TE and load balancing algorithms. Based on our works, a generic procedure for deploying and simulating these algorithms is proposed. We also discuss the results and a comparison between the algorithms. Putting these together, we present a practical issue of Traffic Engineering, load balancing and a working solution for DS-TE in the Internet.
Download
Paper Nr: 359
Title:

PIPELINED PARALLELISM IN MULTI-JOIN QUERIES ON HETEROGENEOUS SHARED NOTHING ARCHITECTURES
Authors:

Mohamad AL HAJJ HASSAN and Mostafa Bamha
Abstract: Pipelined parallelism was largely studied and successfully implemented, on shared nothing machines, in several join algorithms in the presence of ideal conditions of load balancing between processors and in the absence of data skew. The aim of pipelining is to allow flexible resource allocation while avoiding unnecessary disk input/output for intermediate join results in the treatment of multi-join queries. The main drawback of pipelining in existing algorithms is that communication and load balancing remain limited to the use of static approaches (generated during query optimization phase) based on hashing to re-distribute data over the network and therefore cannot solve data skew problem and load imbalance between processors on heterogeneous multi-processor architectures where the load of each processor may vary in a dynamic and unpredictable way. In this paper, we present a new parallel join algorithm allowing to solve the problem of data skew while guaranteeing perfect balancing properties, on heterogeneous multi-processor Shared Nothing architectures. The performance of this algorithm is analyzed using the scalable portable BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) cost model.
Download
Paper Nr: 406
Title:

ADAPTING GRID SERVICES FOR URGENT COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Jason Cope and Henry Tufo
Abstract: Emerging urgent computing tools can quickly allocate computational resources for the execution of time critical jobs. Grid applications and workflows often use Grid services and service-oriented architectures. Currently, urgent computing tools cannot allocate or manage Grid services. In this paper, we evaluate a service-oriented approach to Grid service access and provisioning for urgent computing environments. Our approach allows resource providers to define urgent computing resources and Grid services at a much finer granularity than previously possible. It accommodates new urgent computing resource types, requires minimum reconfiguration of existing services, and provides adaptive Grid service management tools. We evaluate our service-oriented, urgent computing approach by applying our tools to Grid services commonly used in urgent computing work-flows and evaluate management policies through our urgent service simulator.
Download
Short Papers
Paper Nr: 132
Title:

USING MESSAGE PASSING FOR DEVELOPING COARSE-GRAINED APPLICATIONS IN OPENMP
Authors:

WlOdzimierz Bielecki and Marek Palkowski
Abstract: A technique for extracting coarse-grained parallelism in loops is presented. It is based on splitting a set of dependence relations into two sets. The first one is to be used for generating code scanning slices while the second one permits us to insert send and receive functions to synchronize the slices execution. Codes of send and receive functions based on both OpenMP and POSIX locks functions are presented. A way of proper inserting and executing send and receive functions is demonstrated. Using agglomeration and free-scheduling are discussed for the purpose of improving program performance. Results of experiments are presented.
Download
Paper Nr: 213
Title:

TECHNICAL CLASSIFICATION OF RUNTIME ENVIRONMENTS FOR MOBILE APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Sören Blom, Matthias Book, Volker Gruhn, Ruslan Hrushchak and André Köhler
Abstract: This paper surveys the current state and the future of runtime environments suitable for developing Rich Internet Applications for mobile clients. We compare the main characteristics of established technologies and promising new developments, and assess their future potential. Furthermore, we consider middleware products that provide an additional support layer solving typical mobility problems such as distribution, connectivity, performance, reliability, etc.
Download
Paper Nr: 215
Title:

A HYBRID DIAGNOSTIC-RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM FOR AGENT EXECUTION IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
Authors:

Andrew Costa, Carlos J. Pereira de Lucena, Viviane Silva and Paulo Alencar
Abstract: Open multi-agent systems are societies with autonomous and heterogeneous agents that can work together to achieve similar or different goals. Agents executing in such systems may not be able to achieve their goals due to failures during system execution. This paper’s main goals are to understand why such failures occurred and what can be done to remediate the problem. The distributed, dynamic and open nature of multi-agent systems calls for a new form of failure handling approach to address its unique requirements, which involves both diagnosing specific failures and recommending alternative plans for successful agent execution and goal attainment. In this paper, we discuss solutions to the main challenges of creating a system that can perform diagnoses and provide recommendations about agent executions to support goal attainment, and propose a hybrid diagnostic-recommendation framework that provides support for methods to address such challenges.
Download
Paper Nr: 258
Title:

AN EXTENDED MASTER WORKER MODEL FOR A DESKTOP GRID COMPUTING PLATFORM (QADPZ)
Authors:

Monica Vlădoiu and Zoran Constantinescu
Abstract: In this paper we first present briefly QADPZ, an open source platform for heterogeneous desktop grid computing, which enables users from a local network (organization-wide) or Internet (volunteer computing) to share their resources. Users of the system can submit compute-intensive applications to the system, which are then automatically scheduled for execution. The scheduling is made based on the hardware and software requirements of the application. Users can later monitor and control the execution of the applications. Each application consists of one or more tasks. Applications can be independent, when the composing tasks do not require any interaction, or parallel, when the tasks communicate with each other during the computation. QADPZ uses a master worker-model that is improved with some refined capabilities: push of work units, pipelining, sending more work-units at a time, adaptive number of workers, adaptive timeout interval for work units, and use of multithreading, to be presented further in this paper. These improvements are meant to increase the performance and efficiency of such applications.
Download
Paper Nr: 288
Title:

THREATS TO THE TRUST MODEL OF MOBILE AGENT PLATFORMS
Authors:

Michail Fragkakis and Nikolaos Alexandris
Abstract: This paper intends to present the ways in which mobile agent architectures address important threats concerning their trust model, by comparing the behaviour of four major mobile agent platforms. The conclusions drawn are then used to point out deficiencies of current technology and highlight issues that need to be addressed by future research.
Download
Paper Nr: 353
Title:

OPTIMIZING SKELETAL STREAM PROCESSING FOR DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Authors:

Michael Poldner and Herbert Kuchen
Abstract: Algorithmic skeletons intend to simplify parallel programming by providing recurring forms of program structure as predefined components. We present a new distributed task parallel skeleton for a very general class of divide and conquer algorithms for MIMD machines with distributed memory. Our approach combines skeletal internal task parallelism with stream parallelism. This approach is compared to alternative topologies for a task parallel divide and conquer skeleton with respect to their aptitude of solving streams of divide and conquer problems. Based on experimental results for matrix chain multiplication problems, we show that our new approach enables a better processor load and memory utilization of the engaged solvers, and reduces communication costs.
Download
Paper Nr: 357
Title:

AN EXTENSION OF PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE FOR MOBILE SENSOR NETWORKS
Authors:

Hiroki Saito
Abstract: The miniaturization of computing, sensing and wireless communication devices enable the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). One of interesting research in sensor networks is utilizing moving nodes. The benefit of the moving sensor nodes is to measure wide-ranging area by small number of nodes. Despite of the rapid development of the network protocols in mobile sensor nodes, the application platforms for moving sensor nodes have not been much discussed. In this context, Publish/subscribe model is one of reasonable solution with sensor networks. Publish/subscribe model has become a prevalent paradigm for delivering data/events from publishers (data/event producers) to subscribers (data/event consumers) across large-scale distributed network. In sensor networks, a user who is interested in the specific location and attributes can send subscription to the system to receive all desired events. This paper proposes a novel schema that allows us to control sensor nodes for location-based publish/subscribe system. In our schema, sensor nodes can be deployed to the most effective location for event delivery.
Download
Paper Nr: 392
Title:

TOWARDS A MULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Tiago Garcia and Luís Morgado
Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach that integrates multi-agent system architectures and service oriented architectures to address web application modelling and implementation. An adaptation of the common three tier architecture is used, with the intervening entities being agents and multi-agent societies. To address the specificity of web applications subsystems, three distinct agent types are proposed, each with specific concerns. A model driven approach is proposed to concretize the mapping between agent based and service based layers.
Download
Paper Nr: 423
Title:

ALIGNING AGENT COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS - A Pragmatic Approach
Authors:

Maricela Bravo and Martha Coronel
Abstract: Nowadays, there is a clear trend in using common ontologies for supporting communication interoperability between multiple heterogeneous agents over Internet. An important task that must be solved before implementing ontology-based solutions is the identification of semantic relations to establish alignments between communication primitives. A frequent methodology for aligning different communication primitives consists of processing definitions provided by human developers based on syntactical classification algorithms and semantic enhancement of concepts. We think that the information provided by human developers represents an important source for classification. However, to obtain real semantics, we believe that a better approach would analyze the usage of the primitive in the communication protocol. In this paper we present a pragmatic approach for aligning communication primitives, considering their usage in the protocol. To evaluate our solution we compare the resulting relations and show that our approach provides more accuracy for relating communication primitives.
Download
Paper Nr: 512
Title:

JAVA NIO FRAMEWORK - Introducing a High-performance I/O Framework for Java
Authors:

Ronny Standtke and Ulrich Ultes-Nitsche
Abstract: A new input/output (NIO) library that provides block-oriented I/O was introduced with Java v1.4. Because of its complexity, creating network applications with the Java NIO library has been very difficult and build-in support for high-performance, distributed and parallel systems was missing. Parallel architectures are now becoming the standard in computing and Java network application programmers need a framework to build upon. In this paper, we introduce the Java NIO Framework, an extensible programming library that hides most of the NIO library details and at the same time provides support for secure and high-performance network applications. The Java NIO Framework is already used by well-known organizations, e.g. the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and is running successfully in a distributed computing framework that has more than 1000 nodes.
Download
Paper Nr: 377
Title:

BUILDING SCALABLE DATA MINING GRID APPLICATIONS - An Application Description Schema and Associated Grid Services
Authors:

Vlado Stankovski and Dennis Wegener
Abstract: Grid-enabling existing stand-alone data mining programs, data and other resources, such as computational servers, is motivated by the possibility for their sharing via local and wide area networks. Expected benefits are improved effectiveness, efficiency, wider access and better use of existing resources. In this paper, the problem of how to grid enable a variety of existing data mining programs, is investigated. The presented solution is a simple procedure, which was developed under the DataMiningGrid project. The actual data mining program, which is a batch-style executable, is uploaded on a grid server and an XML document that describes the program is prepared and registered with the underlying grid information services. The XML document conforms to an Application Description Schema, and is used to facilitate discovery and execution of the program in the grid environment. Over 20 stand-alone data mining programs have already been grid enabled by using the DataMiningGrid system. By using Triana, a workflow editor and manager which represents the end-user interface to the grid infrastructure, it is possible to combine grid enabled data mining programs and data into complex data mining applications. Grid-enabled resource sharing may facilitate novel, scalable, distributed data mining applications, which have not been possible before.
Download
Paper Nr: 493
Title:

THE FUTURE OF MULTIMEDIA DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS - IPTV Frameworks
Authors:

Oscar Martinez Bonastre, Lucas Lopez and Antonio Peñalver
Abstract: As distributed systems scale up and are deployed into increasingly sensitive settings, demand is rising for a new generation of communications middleware in support of application-level computing. Thus, knowledge of distributed systems and communications middleware has become essential in today's computing environment. Additionally, multimedia distributed systems are confronting a wide range of challenges associated with limits of the prevailing service oriented architectures and platforms. In this position paper, authors seek that the future of multimedia distributed systems will pass through new techniques to stream data at high rates to groups of recipients, e.g., collaboration systems, computer gaming, embedded control systems and other media delivery systems. In order to be more specific with promising applications for the future of multimedia distributed systems, authors have selected a hot topic like Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). Authors present Tele-ed IPTV, i.e., an author’s tool they have developed to distribute multimedia content to TV sets. This position paper argues that future of multimedia distributed systems will pass through IPTV frameworks which interconnect systems that previously have been relatively incompatible.
Download
Paper Nr: 500
Title:

NORMATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS - Integrating Physical and Virtual under the One Umbrella
Authors:

Anton Bogdanovych, Simeon Simoff and Francesc Esteva
Abstract: The paper outlines a normative approach to the design of distributed applications that must consistently integrate a number of environments (i.e. form-based interfaces, 3D Virtual Worlds, physical world). The application of the described ideas is illustrated on the example of a fish market, which is an application that can simultaneously be accessed by the people from the physical world, people using form-based interfaces and people embodied in a 3D Virtual World as avatars. The Normative Virtual Environments approach in this case allows for maintaining a consistent causal connection amongst all these environments.
Download

Area 2 - Information Systems and Data Management

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 102
Title:

A TOOL FOR MANAGING DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE IN INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEMS
Authors:

Panayiotis Kyriakou, Ioannis Hatzilygeroudis and John Garofalakis
Abstract: Domain knowledge (DK) is a basic part of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). DK usually includes information about the concepts the ITS is dealing with and the teaching material itself, which can be considered as a set of learning objects (LOs). LOs are described by a data set called learning object metadata. Concepts are usually organized in a network, called a concept network or map. Each concept is associated with a number of LOs. In this paper, we present a tool for managing both types of information in DM: creating and editing (a) a concept network and (b) learning object metadata. Additionally, the tool can produce corresponding XML descriptions for each learning object metadata. Existing tools do not offer all the above capabilities.
Download
Paper Nr: 114
Title:

GENERATION OF ERP SYSTEMS FROM REA SPECIFICATIONS
Authors:

Nicholas P. Schultz-Møller, Christian Hølmer and Michael R. Hansen
Abstract: We present an approach to the construction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, which is based on the Resources, Events and Agents (REA) ontology. Though this framework deals with processes involving exchange and flow of resources, the conceptual models have high-level graphical representations describing what the major entities are rather than how they engage in computations. We show how to develop a declarative, domain-specific language on the basis of REA, and for this language we have developed a tool which automatically can generate running web-applications. A main contribution is a proof-of-concept result showing that business-domain experts can, using a declarative, REA-based domain-specific language, generate their own applications without worrying about implementation details. In order to have a well-defined domain-specific language, a formal model of REA has been developed using the specification language Object-Z. This formalization led to clarifications as well as the introduction of new concepts. The compiler for our language is written in Objective CAML and as implementation platform we used Ruby on Rails. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of whole construction of a running application on the basis of a REA specification.
Download
Paper Nr: 114
Title:

GENERATION OF ERP SYSTEMS FROM REA SPECIFICATIONS
Authors:

Nicholas P. Schultz-Møller, Christian Hølmer and Michael R. Hansen
Abstract: We present an approach to the construction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, which is based on the Resources, Events and Agents (REA) ontology. Though this framework deals with processes involving exchange and flow of resources, the conceptual models have high-level graphical representations describing what the major entities are rather than how they engage in computations. We show how to develop a declarative, domain-specific language on the basis of REA, and for this language we have developed a tool which automatically can generate running web-applications. A main contribution is a proof-of-concept result showing that business-domain experts can, using a declarative, REA-based domain-specific language, generate their own applications without worrying about implementation details. In order to have a well-defined domain-specific language, a formal model of REA has been developed using the specification language Object-Z. This formalization led to clarifications as well as the introduction of new concepts. The compiler for our language is written in Objective CAML and as implementation platform we used Ruby on Rails. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of whole construction of a running application on the basis of a REA specification.
Download
Paper Nr: 140
Title:

A PROCESS ENGINEERING METHOD BASED ON ONTOLOGY AND PATTERNS
Authors:

Charlotte Hug, Agnès Front and Dominique Rieu
Abstract: Many different process meta-models offer different viewpoints of a same information system engineering process: activity oriented, product oriented, decision oriented, context oriented and strategy oriented. However, the complementarity between their concepts is not explicit and there is no consensus about the concepts themselves. This leads to inadequate process meta-models with organization needs, so the instantiated models do not correspond to the specific demands and constraints of the organizations or projects. Nevertheless, method engineers should be able to build process meta-models according to the specific organization needs. We propose a method to build unified, fitted and multi-viewpoints process meta-models. The method is composed of two phases and is based on a process domain ontology and patterns.
Download
Paper Nr: 158
Title:

COMPRESSED DATABASE STRUCTURE TO MANAGE LARGE SCALE DATA IN A DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

B.M. M. Alom, Frans Henskens and Michael Hannaford
Abstract: Loss-less data compression is attractive in database systems as it may facilitate query performance improvement and storage reduction. Although there are many compression techniques which handle the whole database in main memory, problems arise when the amount of data increases gradually over time, and also when the data has high cardinality. Management of a rapidly evolving large volume of data in a scalable way is very challenging. This paper describes a disk based single vector large data cardinality approach, incorporating data compression in a distributed environment. The approach provides substantial storage performance improvement compared to other high performance database systems. The compressed database structure presented provides direct addressability in a distributed environment, thereby reducing retrieval latency when handling large volumes of data.
Download
Paper Nr: 194
Title:

RELAXING CORRECTNESS CRITERIA IN DATABASE REPLICATION WITH SI REPLICAS
Authors:

José E. Armendáriz-Iñigo, Jose R. Gonzalez de Mendivil, José Ramón Garitagoitia, José Ramón Juárez-Rodríguez, Francesc D. Muñoz-Escoí and Luis Irún-briz
Abstract: The concept of Generalized Snapshot Isolation (GSI) has been recently proposed as a suitable extension of conventional Snapshot Isolation (SI) for replicated databases. In GSI, transactions may use older snapshots instead of the latest snapshot required in SI, being able to provide better performance without significantly increasing the abortion rate when write/write conflicts among transactions are low. We study and formally proof a sufficient condition that replication protocols with SI replicas following the deferred update technique must obey to achieve GSI. They must provide global atomicity and commit update transactions in the very same order at all sites. However, as this is a sufficient condition, it is possible to obtain GSI by relaxing certain assumptions about the commit ordering of certain update transactions.
Download
Paper Nr: 254
Title:

ITAIPU DATA STREAM MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - A Stream Processing System with Business Users in Mind
Authors:

Azza Abouzied, Jacob Slonim and Michael McAllister McAllister

Abstract: Business Intelligence (BI) provides enterprise decision makers with reliable and holistic business information. Data Warehousing systems typically provide accurate and summarized reports of the enterprise’s operation. While this information is valuable to decision makers, it remains an after-the-fact analysis. Just-in-time, finer-grained information is necessary to enable decision makers to detect opportunities or problems as they occur. Business Activity Monitoring is the technology that provides right-time analysis of business data. The purpose of this paper is to describe the requirements of a BAM system, establish the relation of BAM to a Data Stream Management System (DSMS) and describe the architecture and design challenges we faced building the Itaipu system: a DSMS developed for BAM end-users.
Download
Paper Nr: 269
Title:

FORMATIVE USER-CENTERED USABILITY EVALUATION OF AN AUGMENTED REALITY EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
Authors:

Costin Pribeanu, Alexandru Balog and Dragos Daniel Iordache
Abstract: The mix of real and virtual requires appropriate interaction techniques that have to be evaluated with users in order to avoid usability problems. Formative usability aims at finding usability problems as early as possible in the development life cycle and is suitable to support the development of novel interactive systems. This work presents an approach to user-centered evaluation of a Biology scenario developed on an Augmented Reality educational platform. The evaluation has been carried on during and before a summer school held within the ARiSE research project. The basic idea was to perform usability evaluation twice. In this respect, we conducted user testing with a small number of students during a summer school in order to get a fast feedback from users having good knowledge in Biology. Then, we repeated the user testing in different conditions and with a relatively larger number of representative users. In this paper we describe both experiments and compare the usability evaluation results.
Download
Paper Nr: 293
Title:

EVALTOOL - A Flexible Environment for the Capability Assessment of Software Processes
Authors:

Tomás Martínez-Ruiz, Eduardo León-Pavón, Félix García Rubio, Mario Piattini and Francisco Pino
Abstract: Software process improvement is an important aspect in achieving capable processes, and so organizations are obviously concerned about it. However, to improve software process it is necessary to assess it in order to check its weaknesses and strengths. The assessment can be performed according to a given assessment process or any other and the processes of the organization can also use one particular process model or any other. The goal of this work is to provide an environment that allows us to carry out assessments that are in accord with various different process assessment models, on several process reference models. We have developed an environment composed of two components; one of these generates the database schema for storing the process reference model and assessment information and the other one assesses the process with reference to this information, generating results in several formats, to make it possible to interpret data. With this environment, assessment of software process is an easy task, whichever assessment process is used, and regardless of the process model used in the organization.
Download
Paper Nr: 348
Title:

DATABASE VERSION CONTROL - A Software Configuration Management Approach to Database Version Control
Authors:

Stephen M. Kearney and Konstantina Lepinioti
Abstract: This paper introduces a database configuration management tool, called DBVersion, that provides database developers with many of the benefits of source code control systems and integrates with software configuration tools such as Subversion. While there has been a lot of research in software configuration management and source code control, little of the work has investigated database configuration issues. DBVersion’s main contribution is to allow database developers to use working practices such as version control, branching and concurrent working that have proved successful in traditional software development.
Download
Short Papers
Paper Nr: 72
Title:

FUZZY TIME MANIPULATION IN A RELATIONAL DB
Authors:

Nicolás Marín, Juan Miguel Medina, Olga Pons and Carmen Garrido
Abstract: Temporal Databases (TDB) have as a primary aim to offer a common framework to those DB applications that need to store or handle temporal data of different nature or source, since they allow to unify the concept of time from the point of view of its meaning, its representation and its manipulation. Up to now, most of the efforts have been devoted to extend the relational model in order to be adapted to the new way of inserting, deleting and updating the DB, together with the integrity constraints involved. In this paper we deal with these problems when the time is imprecisely expressed by means of a fuzzy interval of dates. Along the text, we will see how the delete and the insert operations can be carried out and how different types of queries to such a fuzzy temporal database are solved.
Download
Paper Nr: 81
Title:

NOTES ON THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF TMINER - Design and Use of a Component-based Data Mining Framework
Authors:

Fernando Berzal, Juan Carlos Cubero and Aida Jimenez
Abstract: This paper describes the rationale behind some of the key design decisions that guided the development of the TMiner component-based data mining framework. TMiner is a flexible framework that can be used as a stand-alone tool or integrated into larger Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. TMiner is a general-purpose component-based system designed to support the whole KDD process into a single framework and thus facilitate the implementation of complex data mining scenarios.
Download
Paper Nr: 116
Title:

ASPY - An Access-Logging Tool for JDBC Applications
Authors:

Alejandro Torrentí-Román, Leticia Pascual-Miret, Luis Irún-briz, Stefan Beyer and F. D. Muñoz-Escoí
Abstract: When different developer teams collaborate in the design and implementation of a large and distributed application, some care should be taken regarding the access to persistent data, since different components might use their own transactions and they might collide quite often, generating undesired blocking intervals. Additionally, when third-party libraries are used, they can provide unclear descriptions of their functionality and programmers might mistakingly use some of their operations. An access logger can be useful in both cases, registering the sentences actually sent to the database and the results of said sentences. Aspy is a tool of this kind, developed as a JDBC-driver wrapper for Java applications. It is able to save in a file the list of calls received by the JDBC driver, registering their parameters, starting time, completion time and either their obtained results or their raised exceptions. With such information, it is easy to identify common errors in database accesses and the set of transactions involved in blocking situations due to poor application design. We discuss three different techniques that were used for implementing Aspy, comparing their pros and cons.
Download
Paper Nr: 154
Title:

AUTONOMOUS DATA QUALITY MONITORING AS A PROPERTY OF CODA ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
Authors:

Tereska Karran
Abstract: Organisations are driven to meet data quality standards by both external pressures and by internal quality processes. However, it is difficult to add these to existing systems as part of enterprise architecture. Moreover, where business intelligence is delivered autonomously, it is difficult to implement efficient data quality processes. We discuss the value of making data quality part of enterprise architecture using CODA and outline how this can be implemented by adding autonomous processing to specific architectural elements.
Download
Paper Nr: 157
Title:

STORING SEMISTRUCTURED DATA INTO RELATIONAL DATABASE USING REFERENCE RELATIONSHIP SCHEME
Authors:

B.M. M. Alom, Frans Henskens and Michael Hannaford
Abstract: The most dominant data format for data processing on the Internet is the semistructured data form termed XML. XML data has no fixed schema; it evolved, and is self describing which results in management difficulties compared to, for example, relational data. This paper presents a reference relationship scheme that encompasses parent and child reference relations to store XML data in a relational view, and that provides improved of storage performance. We present an analytical analysis that compares the scheme with other standard methods of conversion from XML to relational forms. A relational to XML data conversion algorithm that translates the relational data into original XML data form is also presented.
Download
Paper Nr: 162
Title:

DETERMINING SEVERITY AND RECOMMENDATIONS IN PROCESS NON-CONFORMANCE INSTANCES
Authors:

Sean Thompson and Torab Torabi
Abstract: We have seen a variety of frameworks and methodologies aimed at dealing with non-conformance in processes presented in the literature. These methodologies seek to find discrepancies between process reference models and data returned from instances of process enactments. These range from methodologies aimed at preventing deviations and inconsistencies involved in workflow and process support systems to the mining and comparison of observed and recorded process data. What has not been presented in the literature thus far is a methodology for explicitly discerning the severity of instances of non-conformance once they are detected. Knowing how severe an instance of non-conformance might be, and therefore an awareness of the possible consequences this may have on the process outcome can be helpful in maintaining and protecting the process quality. Subsequently, a mechanism for using this information to provide some kind of recommendation or suggested remedial actions relating to the non-conformance for process improvement has also not been explored. In this paper we present a framework to address both these issues. A case study is also presented to evaluate the feasibility of this framework.
Download
Paper Nr: 201
Title:

TOWARDS A COMBINED APPROACH TO FEATURE SELECTION
Authors:

Camelia Lemnaru and Rodica Potolea
Abstract: Feature selection is an important step in any data mining process, for many reasons. In this paper we consider the improvement of the prediction accuracy as the main goal of a feature selection method. We focus on an existing 3-step formalism, including a generation procedure, evaluation function and validation procedure. The performance evaluations have yielded that no individual 3-tuple (generation, evaluation and validation procedure) can be identified such that it achieves best performance on any dataset, with any learning algorithm. Moreover, the experimental results suggest the possibility of tackling a combined approach to the feature selection problem. So far we have experienced with the combination of several generation procedures, but we believe that the evaluation functions can also be successfully combined.
Download
Paper Nr: 203
Title:

A COOPERATIVE AND DISTRIBUTED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Authors:

C. Noviello, Mango Furnari Mario and P. Acampa
Abstract: In this paper the authors address some methodological and technical issues on managing collections of digital documents published on the web by many different stakeholders. To cope with this kind of problems the notions of document, cooperative knowledge community and content knowledge authority are introduced. Then the architecture of a distributed and cooperative content management system is presented. A set of methodologies and tools for organizing the documents space around the notion of contents community were developed. Each content provider will publish a set of data model interpreters to collect, organize and publish through a set of cooperative content management system nodes glued together by a web semantic oriented middleware. These methodologies and software were deployed setting up a prototype to connect about 100 museums spread on the territory of Campania (Italy).
Download
Paper Nr: 238
Title:

INTERTRASM - A Depth First Search Algorithm for Mining Intertransaction Association Rules
Authors:

Dan Ungureanu and Alexandru Boicea
Abstract: In this paper we propose an efficient method for mining frequent intertransaction itemsets. Our approach consists in mining maximal frequent itemsets (MFI) by extending the SmartMiner algorithm for the intertransaction case. We have called the new algorithm InterTraSM (Inter Transaction Smart Miner). Because it uses depth first search the memory needed by the algorithm is reduced; a strategy for passing tail information for a node combined with a dynamic reordering heuristic lead to improved speed. Experiments comparing InterTraSM to other existing algorithms for mining frequent intertransaction itemsets have revealed a significant gain in performance. Further development ideas are also discussed.
Download
Paper Nr: 307
Title:

MODELLING KNOWLEDGE FOR DYNAMIC SERVICE DEPLOYMENT - Autonomic Networks Modelling
Authors:

Gladys Diaz
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the modelling aspects in autonomic networks, especially concerning the knowledge level. We treat the specification and modelling of different notions in the context the dynamic deployment of services. We propose a new and extensible object-oriented information model to represent the various concepts involved in this context. Our information model enables us to represent the notions of service, resource and profile and also to deal with the management of networks resources. UML is used to represent our model. We also present an initial view of the knowledge that is needed to manage the resource allocations and distribution of services.
Download
Paper Nr: 310
Title:

A CASE STUDY ON DOMAIN ANALYSIS OF SEMANTIC WEB MULTI-AGENT RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS
Authors:

Roberval Mariano, Rosario Girardi, Adriana Leite, Lucas Drumond and D’Jefferson Maranhão
Abstract: The huge amount of data available on the Web and its dynamic nature is the source of an increasing demand of information filtering applications such as recommender systems. The lack of semantic structure of Web data is a barrier for improving the effectiveness of this kind of applications. This paper introduces ONTOSERS-DM, a domain model that specifies the common and variable requirements of Recommender Systems based on the ontology technology of the Semantic Web, using three information filtering approaches: content-based, collaborative and hybrid filtering. ONTOSERS-DM was modeled under the guidelines of MADEM, a methodology for Multi-Agent Domain Engineering, using the ONTOMADEM tool.
Download
Paper Nr: 320
Title:

WORKING TIME USAGE AND TRACKING IN A SMALL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION
Authors:

Lasse Harjumaa, Tytti Pokka, Heidi Moisanen and Jukka Sirviö
Abstract: This paper represents a study of working time usage in a small software development organization. The purpose of the study was twofold. First, we wanted to understand how software developers in the organization work and second, we wanted to explore the attitudes they had toward different types of time tracking approaches. The aim was to provide practical suggestions of appropriate methods and tools for monitoring the developers’ time. According to the results, working with computer tools occupies the overwhelming majority of the working time although manual tasks and interruptions take some of the time. Even though the developers in the case company do not feel threatened by time monitoring, they do not either feel that monitoring is necessary, which is interesting and challenging from the project management viewpoint. We suggest that the case company should establish a lightweight, tool-based time tracking process and trains the developers to use the system and report their working time accurately.
Download
Paper Nr: 338
Title:

TOWARDS COMPACT OPERATOR TREES FOR QUERY INDEXING
Authors:

Hagen Höpfner and Erik Buchmann
Abstract: Application areas like semantic caches or update relevancy checks require query based indexing: They use an algebra representation of the query tree to identify reusable fragments of former query results. This requires compact query representations, where semantically equivalent (sub-)queries are expressed with identical terms. It is challenging to obtain such query representations: Attributes and relations can be renamed, there are numerous ways to formulate equivalent selection predicates, and query languages like SQL allow a wide range of alternatives for joins and nested queries. In this paper we present our first steps towards optimizing SQL-based query trees for indexing. In particular, we use both existing equivalence rules and new transformations to normalize the sub-tree structure of query trees. We optimize selection and join predicates, and we present an approach to obtain generic names for attributes and table aliases. Finally, we discuss the benefits and limitations of our intermediate results and give directions for future research.
Download
Paper Nr: 339
Title:

EFFICIENT SUPPORT COUNTING OF CANDIDATE ITEMSETS FOR ASSOCIATION RULE MINING
Authors:

Li-Xuan Lin, Don-Lin Yang, Chia-Han Yang and Jungpin Wu
Abstract: Association rule mining has gathered great attention in recent years due to its broad applications. Some influential algorithms have been developed in two categories: (1) candidate-generation-and-test approach such as Apriori, (2) pattern-growth approach such as FP-growth. However, they all suffer from the problems of multiple database scans and setting minimum support threshold to prune infrequent candidates for process efficiency. Reading the database multiple times is a critical problem for distributed data mining. Although more new methods are proposed, like the FSE algorithm that still has the problem of taking too much space. We propose an efficient approach by using a transformation method to perform support count of candidate itemsets. We record all the itemsets which appear at least one time in the transaction database. Thus users do not need to determine the minimum support in advance. Our approach can reach the same goal as the FSE algorithm does with better space utilization. The experiments show that our approach is effective and efficient on various datasets.
Download
Paper Nr: 346
Title:

USING THE STOCHASTIC APPROACH FRAMEWORK TO MODEL LARGE SCALE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES
Authors:

Nabil Benayadi, Le G. Marc and Philippe Bouché
Abstract: Modelling manufacturing process of complex products like electronic ships is crucial to maximize the quality of the production. The Process Mining methods developed since a decade aims at modelling such manufacturing process from the timed messages contained in the database of the supervision system of this process. Such process can complex making difficult to apply the usual Process Mining algorithms. This paper proposes to apply the Stochastic Approach framework to model large scale manufacturing processes. A series of timed messages is considered as a sequence of class occurrences and is represented with a Markov chain from which models are deduced with an abductive reasoning. Because sequences can be very long, a notion of process phase based on a concept of class of equivalence is defined to cut up the sequences so that a model of a phase can be locally produced. The model of the whole manufacturing process is then obtained with the concatenation of the model of the different phases. The paper presents the application of this method to model the electronics chips manufacturing process of the STMicroelectronics Company (France).
Download
Paper Nr: 373
Title:

ONTOLOGY-BASED MEDIATION OF OGC CATALOGUE SERVICE FOR THE WEB - A Virtual Solution for Integrating Coastal Web Atlases
Authors:

Yassine Lassoued, Dawn Wright, Luis Bermudez and Omar Boucelma
Abstract: In recent years significant momentum has occurred in the development of Internet resources for decision makers and scientists interested in the coast. Chief among these has been the development of coastal web atlases (CWAs). While multiple benefits are derived from these tailor-made atlases (e.g., speedy access to multiple sources of coastal data and information), the potential exists to derive added value from the integration of disparate CWAs, to optimize decision making at a variety of levels and across themes. This paper describes the development of a semantic mediator prototype to provide a common access point to coastal data, maps and information from distributed CWAs. The prototype showcases how ontologies and ontology mappings can be used to integrate different heterogeneous and autonomous atlases, using the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Catalogue Services for the Web.
Download
Paper Nr: 374
Title:

USING BITSTREAM SEGMENT GRAPHS FOR COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF DATA FORMAT INSTANCES
Authors:

Michael Hartle, Friedrich-Daniel Möller, Slaven Travar, Benno Kröger and Max Mühlhäuser
Abstract: Manual development of format-compliant software components is complex, time-consuming and thus error-prone and expensive, as data formats are defined in semi-formal, textual specifications for human engineers. Existing approaches on a formal description of data formats remain at high-level descriptions and fail to describe phenomena such as compression or fragmentation that are especially common in Multimedia file formats. As a step-stone towards the description of data formats as a whole, this paper presents Bitstream Segment Graphs as a complete model on data format instances and presents an example PNG where a complete model on data format instances is required.
Download
Paper Nr: 385
Title:

H-INDEX CALCULATION IN ENRON CORPUS
Authors:

Anton Timofieiev, Vaclav Snasel and Jiri Dvorsky
Abstract: Development of modern technologies is expanded with communications possibilities. Electronic systems of communications make possible overcoming traditional barriers of communication, for example, such as distance. On their basis there are new types of communities which any more have no geographical restrictions. Increasing popularity of electronic communities among which projects LiveJournal, LiveInternet, and also projects popular in Russian-speaking part Internet Mamba, MirTesen, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, etc., makes as never earlier actual questions on working out of techniques of research of similar social networks. However communications of members of such communities only by means of electronic communications create difficulties at definition of such communities. In this paper we describe method for measurement of the importance of particular people within the community. The method is based on h-index calculation. Approach is demonstrated on Enron corpus.
Download
Paper Nr: 405
Title:

MODEL FOR PEDAGOGICAL INDEXATION OF TEXTS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING
Authors:

Mathieu Loiseau, Georges Antoniadis and Claude Ponton
Abstract: In this communication we propose to expose the main pedagogical ressource description standards limitations for the description of raw ressources, through the scope of pedagogical indexation of texts for language teaching. To do so we will resort to the testimony of language teachers reagarding their practices. We will then propose a model supposed to exceed these limitations. This model is articulated around the notion of text facet, which we introduce here.
Download
Paper Nr: 418
Title:

TOOL OF THE INTELLIGENCE ECONOMIC: RECOGNITION FUNCTION OF REVIEWS CRITICS - Extraction and Linguistic Analysis of Sentiments
Authors:

Grzegorz Dziczkowski and Katarzyna Wegrzyn-Wolska
Abstract: This paper describes the part of recommender system designed for movies’ critics recognition. Such a system allows the automatic collection, evaluation and rating of critics and opinions of the movies. First the system searches and retrieves texts supposed to be movies’ reviews from the Internet. Subsequently the system carries out an evaluation and rating of movies’ critics. Finally the system automatically associates a numerical mark to each critic. The goal of system is to give the score of critics associated to the users’ who wrote them. All of this data are the input to the cognitive engine. Data from our base allow making correspondences which are required for cognitive algorithms to improve advanced recommending functionalities for e-business and e-purchases websites. Our sesystem uses three different methods for classifying opinions from reviews critics. In this paper we describe the part of system which is based on automatically identifying opinions using natural language processing knowledge.
Download
Paper Nr: 421
Title:

EVALUATING SCHEDULES OF ITERATIVE/INCREMENTAL SOFTWARE PROJECTS FROM A REAL OPTIONS PERSPECTIVE
Authors:

Vassilis Gerogiannis, ANDROKLIS MAVRIDIS, Pandelis Ipsilandis and Ioannis Stamelos
Abstract: In an iterative/incremental software project, software is built in a sequence of iterations with each of them providing certain parts of the required functionality. To better manage an incremental delivery plan, iterations are usually performed during pre-specified time boxes. In a previous work, we addressed the problem of optimizing the schedule of incremental software projects which follow an iterative, timeboxing process model (TB projects). We approached scheduling as a multi criteria decision problem that can be formulated by a linear programming model aimed to overcome some “rigid” simplifications of conventional timeboxing, where durations of time boxes and stages are equal and a priori fixed. In this paper, we move this decision making process one step forward by applying real options theory to analyze the investment risks associated with each alternative scheduling decision. We identify two options in a TB project. The first is to stall (abandon) the development at a pre-defined iteration, while the second is to continue (expand) development and deliver the full functionality. Thus, we provide the manager the flexibility to decide the most profitable (valued) combination of delivered functionalities, at a certain iteration, under favourable or unfavourable conditions.
Download
Paper Nr: 424
Title:

A COMPLETENESS-AWARE DATA QUALITY PROCESSING APPROACH FOR WEB QUERIES
Authors:

Sandra Sampaio and Pedro R. Falcone Sampaio

Abstract: Internet Query Systems (IQS) are information systems used to query the World Wide Web by finding data sources relevant to a given query and retrieving data from the identified data sources. They differ from traditional database management systems in that data to be processed need to be found by a search engine, fetched from remote data sources and processed taking into account issues such as the unpredictability of access and transfer rates, infinite streams of data, and the ability to produce partial results. Despite the powerful query functionality provided by internet query systems when compared to traditional search engines, their uptake has been slow partly due to the difficulty of assessing and filtering low quality data resulting from internet queries. In this paper we investigate how an internet query system can be extended to support data quality aware query processing. In particular, we illustrate the metadata support, XML-based data quality measurement method, algebraic query processing operators, and query plan structures of a query processing framework aimed at helping users to identify, assess, and filter out data regarded as of low completeness data quality for the intended use.
Download
Paper Nr: 428
Title:

EXTENSIONS TO THE OLAP FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS ANALYSIS
Authors:

Emiel Caron and Hennie Daniels
Abstract: In this paper, we describe extensions to the OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) framework for business analysis. This paper is part of our continued work on extending multi-dimensional databases with novel functionality for diagnostic support and sensitivity analysis. Diagnostic support offers the manager the possibility to automatically generate explanations for exceptional cell values in an OLAP database. This functionality can be built into conventional OLAP databases using a generic explanation formalism, which supports the work of managers in diagnostic processes. The objective is the identification of specific knowledge structures and reasoning methods required to construct computerized explanations from multi-dimensional data and business models. Moreover, we study the consistency and solvability of OLAP systems. These issues are important for sensitivity analysis in OLAP databases. Often the analyst wants to know how some aggregated variable in the cube would have been changed if a certain underlying variable is increased ceteris paribus (c.p.) with one extra unit or one percent in the business model or dimension hierarchy. For such analysis it is important that the system of OLAP aggregations remains consistent after a change is induced in some variable. For instance, missing data, dependency relations, and the presence of non-linear relations in the business model can cause a system to become inconsistent.
Download
Paper Nr: 19
Title:

NBU ADVANCED e-LEARNING SYSTEM
Authors:

Petar Atanasov
Abstract: This paper introduces the design and implementation of information solution especially designed for the purposes of e-Learning at New Bulgarian University. The described architecture combines the best of modern technologies and theoretical foundations. In addition is examined the close future plans on researching for creation of data repository with semantic file system and its relation with the system.
Download
Paper Nr: 47
Title:

COMPARISION OF K-MEANS AND PAM ALGORITHMS USING CANCER DATASETS
Authors:

Parvesh Kumar and Siri Krishan Wasan
Abstract: Data mining is a search for relationship and patterns that exist in large database. Clustering is an important datamining technique . Because of the complexity and the high dimensionality of gene expression data, classification of a disease samples remains a challenge. Hierarchical clustering and partitioning clustering is used to identify patterns of gene expression useful for classification of samples. In this paper, we make a comparative study of two partitioning methods namely k-means and PAM to classify the cancer dataset.
Download
Paper Nr: 148
Title:

FINE-GRAINED PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND MONITORING USING ASPECTS - A Case Study on the Development of Data Mining Techniques
Authors:

Fernando Berzal, Juan Carlos Cubero and Aida Jimenez
Abstract: This paper illustrates how aspect-oriented programming techniques support the I/O performance evaluation and monitoring of alternative data mining techniques. Without having to modify the source code of the system under analysis, aspects provide an unintrusive mechanism to perform this kind of analysis, letting us probe a system implementation so that we can identify potential bottlenecks.
Download
Paper Nr: 151
Title:

AUTONOMOUS NEWS PERSONALISATION (ANP)
Authors:

Mohammedsharaf Alzebdi and Tereska Karran
Abstract: This research explores some of the directions for improving the performance of personalised web usage mining applications. The study uses ANP (Autonomous News Personalisation) to provide personalised news to online newsreaders according to their interests. This is achieved within an intelligent web browser which monitors users' behaviour while browsing. Web usage mining techniques are applied at the site's access log files. These are first pre-processed, and then data-mined using specific algorithms to extract the interests of each user. User profiles are created and maintained to store users' interests. User interests within the profile are ranked according to their reading frequency of news items ranked according to category and location. Profiles are refined continuously and adapt to users' behaviour. Besides being adaptive and completely autonomous, the system is expected to improve on existing performance in news retrieval and to provide higher level personalisation. A system prototype has been implemented and tested using SQL Server 2005 to pre-process logs, data-mine cleaned data, and maintain user profiles. The main system tasks can be demonstrated with further work to address all the issues.
Download
Paper Nr: 252
Title:

A MEDICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM TO MANAGE A CANCER DATABASE
Authors:

André C. Ferrizzi, Toni Jardini, Leandro R. Costa, Jucimara Colombo, Paula Rahal, Carlos Roberto Valêncio, Edmundo Carvalho Mauad, Lígia Maria Kerr and Geraldo Santiago Hidalgo
Abstract: Cancer is the second main cause of death in Brazil, and according to statistics disclosed by INCA – National Cancer Institute 466,730 new cases of the disease are forecast for 2008. The storage and analysis of tumour tissues of various types and patients' clinical data, genetic profiles, characteristics of diseases and epidemiological data may provide more precise diagnoses, providing more effective treatments with higher chances for the cure of cancer. In this paper we present a Web system with a client-server architecture, which manages a relational database containing all information relating to the tumour tissue and their location in freezers, patients, medical forms, physicians, users, and others. Furthermore, it is also discussed the software engineering used to developing the system.
Download
Paper Nr: 252
Title:

A MEDICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM TO MANAGE A CANCER DATABASE
Authors:

André C. Ferrizzi, Toni Jardini, Leandro R. Costa, Jucimara Colombo, Paula Rahal, Carlos Roberto Valêncio, Edmundo Carvalho Mauad, Lígia Maria Kerr and Geraldo Santiago Hidalgo
Abstract: Cancer is the second main cause of death in Brazil, and according to statistics disclosed by INCA – National Cancer Institute 466,730 new cases of the disease are forecast for 2008. The storage and analysis of tumour tissues of various types and patients' clinical data, genetic profiles, characteristics of diseases and epidemiological data may provide more precise diagnoses, providing more effective treatments with higher chances for the cure of cancer. In this paper we present a Web system with a client-server architecture, which manages a relational database containing all information relating to the tumour tissue and their location in freezers, patients, medical forms, physicians, users, and others. Furthermore, it is also discussed the software engineering used to developing the system.
Download
Paper Nr: 265
Title:

GLOBAL OBJECT INTEGRATION INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPLEMENTING SOA WITH DATA MANAGEMENT - Perspectives of Creation
Authors:

Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Yuri Vakhromeev and Pavel A. Pyatih
Abstract: The paper considers a way of data-centric object integration supplementing SOA with data management. The key aim of the proposed approach is to provide unlimited scalability of object integration into one object space, having the classic typification mechanism, the general security and transaction management. Declarative publishing of objects in the space make it possible to read, refer and modify any of them in the general way, in secure and transactional manner in spite of where they are stored actually (RDBMS, XML, etc.).
Download
Paper Nr: 270
Title:

COOPERATIVE NEGOTIATION FOR THE PROVISIONS BALANCING IN A MULTI-AGENT SUPPLY CHAIN SYSTEM FOR THE CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Hayfa Zgaya, David Tang and S. Hammadi
Abstract: Since a few years, logistics has become a performance criterion for the organizations success. So the Supply Chain (SC) study is adopted more and more for the competitiveness of companies development. In previous works we proposed an approach, which aims to reduce an emerging phenomenon of the demand amplification, called the Bullwhip Effect. In this paper, we present a model, based on the proposed approach, for a Cooperative Negotiation for the Provision Balancing in a SC system. The studied SC is a hierarchical system dedicated to the Crisis Management. A Multi-Agent architecture is then proposed to design this distributed chain through interactive software agents. The results of simulation, presented in this paper, prove the importance of the interaction between the SC entities for the Provisions Balancing.
Download
Paper Nr: 311
Title:

VEGETATION INDEX MAPS OF ASIA TEMPORALLY SPLINED FOR CONSISTENCY THROUGH A HIGH PERFORMANCE AND GRID SYSTEM
Authors:

Shamim Akhter, Kento Aida and Yann Chemin
Abstract: Vegetation Index Map provides the crop density information over a precise region. Remote Sensing (RS) images are at the basis of creating such map, while the decision-maker requirement stands for Vegetation Index Maps at various in-country administrative levels. However, RS image includes data noises due to influence of haze or cloud especially in the rainy season. Temporally Splined procedure such as Local Maximum Fitting (LMF) can be applied on RS images for ensuring the data consistency. Running the LMF procedure with single computer takes impractical amount of processing time (approx. 150 days) for Asia regional RS image (46 bands/dates, 3932 rows, 11652 columns). Importing the LMF on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms provides with a time optimization mechanism, and LMF has been implemented in cluster computers for this very purpose. A single cluster LMF processing timing still did not perform within an acceptable time range. In this paper, the LMF processing methodology to reduce processing time by combining the parallelization of data and task together on multi-cluster Grids is presented.
Download
Paper Nr: 323
Title:

DEVELOPING AND DEPLOYING DYNAMIC APPLICATIONS - An Architectural Prototype
Authors:

Georgios Voulalas and Georgios Evangelidis
Abstract: In our previous research we have presented a framework for the development and deployment of web-based applications. This paper elaborates on the core components (functional and data) that implement the generic, reusable functionality. Code segments of the components are presented, along with a short sample application. In addition, we introduce some changes that are mainly driven by usability and performance improvements, and are in adherence with the principal rules of the framework’s operation. Those changes enable us to extend the applicability of the framework to other families of applications, apart from web-based business applications.
Download
Paper Nr: 342
Title:

A SENSE-MAKING APPROACH TO AGILE METHOD ADOPTION
Authors:

Ian Owens, David Sammon and John McAvoy
Abstract: As is often argued in the diffusion of innovation literature, the adoption of innovations can be hindered by the learning required to successfully deploy the technology or methodology. This paper reports on a research in progress to develop a novel approach to Agile method adoption and introduces the use of sense-making workshops to facilitate improved understanding of the issues concerning Agile adoption.
Download
Paper Nr: 364
Title:

APPLYING PROBABILISTIC MODELS TO DATA QUALITY CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Adriana Marotta and Raul Ruggia
Abstract: This work focuses on the problem of managing quality changes in Data Integration Systems, in particular those which are generated due to quality changes at the sources. Our approach is to model the behaviour of sources and system data quality, and use these models as a basic input for DIS quality maintenance. In this paper we present techniques for the construction of quality behaviour models, as well as an overview of the general mechanism for DIS quality maintenance.
Download
Paper Nr: 367
Title:

TOWARDS ONLINE COMPOSITION OF PMML PREDICTION MODELS
Authors:

Diana Gorea
Abstract: The paper presents a general context in which composition of prediction models can be achieved within the boundaries of an online scoring system called DeVisa. The system provides its functionality via web services and stores the prediction models represented in PMML in a native XML database. A language called PMQL is defined, whose purpose is to process the PMML models and to express consumers’ goals and the answers to the goals. The composition of prediction models can occur either implicitly within the process of online scoring, or explicitly, in which the consumer builds or trains a new model based on the existing ones in the DeVisa repository. The main scenarios that involve composition are adapted to the types of composition allowed in the PMML specification, i.e sequencing and selection.
Download
Paper Nr: 370
Title:

HYBRID SYSTEM FOR DATA CLASSIFICATION OF DNA MICROARRAYS WITH GA AND SVM
Authors:

Mónica Miguélez Rico, Juan Luis Pérez, Juan Ramón Rabuñal and Julian Dorado
Abstract: This paper proposes a Genetic Algorithm (GA) combined with Support Vector Machine (SVM) for selecting and classifying data from DNA microarrays, with the aim of differentiate healthy from cancerous tissue samples. The proposed GA, by using a SVM fitness function, enables the selection of a group of genes that represent the absence or the presence of cancerous tissue. The proposed method is tested with a group data related to a widely known cancer disease, the breast cancer. The comparison shows that the results obtained with these combined techniques are better than other techniques.
Download
Paper Nr: 407
Title:

RBF NETWORK COMBINED WITH WAVELET DENOISING FOR SARDINE CATCHES FORECASTING
Authors:

Nibaldo Rodriguez, Broderick Crawford and Eleuterio Yañez
Abstract: This paper deals with time series of monthly sardines catches in the north area of Chile. The proposed method combines radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) with wavelet denoising algorithm. Wavelet denoising is based on stationary wavelet transform with hard thresholding rule and the RBFNN architecture is composed of linear and nonlinear weights, which are estimated by using the separable nonlinear least square method. The performance evaluation of the proposed forecasting model showed that a 93% of the explained variance was captured with a reduced parsimony.
Download
Paper Nr: 444
Title:

A NOVEL METADATA BASED META-SEARCH ENGINE
Authors:

Jianhan Zhu, Dawei Song, Marc Eisenstadt and Cristi Barladeanu
Abstract: We present a novel meta-search engine called DYNIQX for metadata based cross search in order to study the effect of metadata in collection fusion. DYNIQX exploits the availability of metadata in academic search services such as PubMed and Google Scholar etc for fusing search results from heterogeneous search engines. Furthermore, metadata from these search engines are used for generating dynamic query controls such as sliders and tick boxes etc for users to filter search results.
Download
Paper Nr: 497
Title:

A DESCRIPTION METHOD FOR MULTI-AGENT SIMULATION MODEL UTILIZING TYPICAL ACTION PATTERNS OF AGENTS
Authors:

Enomoto Taiki, Hatakeyama Go, Masanori Akiyoshi and Norihisa Komoda
Abstract: Recently, there are various proposals on tool for multi-agent simulation. However, in such simulation tools, analysts who do not have programming skill spend a lot of time to develop programs because notation of simulation models is not defined sufficiently and programming language is varied on tools. To solve this problem, a programming environment that defines the notation of simulation model based on graph representation is proposed. However, in this environment, we still need to write programs about a flow of event and contents of agents’ action and effect. So, we propose a description method for multi-agent simulation model utilizing typical action patterns of agents. In this method, users write about designs of contents of event based on typical action patterns which are “interrogative (4W1H) and verbs”, and designs of a flow of event. In this paper, we executed experiments that compare time needed for examinees to generate programs by a conventional method and our programming environment. Experimental result shows the time to generate programs by utilizing our programming environment less than that by utilizing a conventional one.
Download
Paper Nr: 502
Title:

TURKISH QUESTION ANSWERING - Question Answering for Distance Education Students
Authors:

Burcu Yurekli, Ahmet Arslan, Hakan Senel and Ozgur Yilmazel
Abstract: This paper reports on our progress towards building a Turkish Question Answering System to be used by distance education students of Anadolu University. We have converted 205 electronic books in PDF format to text, extracted metadata from these documents. Currently we provide search capabilities over these documents. Details on problems we faced, and solutions we came up with are provided. We also outline our plan for continuing and implementing a full Question Answering system for this domain. We also present ways to automatically evaluate our system.
Download

Area 3 - Knowledge Engineering

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 253
Title:

IMPROVING QUALITY OF RULE SETS BY INCREASING INCOMPLETENESS OF DATA SETS - A Rough Set Approach
Authors:

Jerzy Grzymala-Busse and Witold J. Grzymala-Busse
Abstract: This paper presents a new methodology to improve the quality of rule sets. We performed a series of data mining experiments on completely specified data sets. In these experiments we removed some specified attribute values, or, in different words, replaced such specified values by symbols of missing attribute values, and used these data for rule induction while original, complete data sets were used for testing. In our experiments we used the MLEM2 rule induction algorithm of the LERS data mining system, based on rough sets. Our approach to missing attribute values was based on rough set theory as well. Results of our experiments show that for some data sets and some interpretation of missing attribute values, the error rate was smaller than for the original, complete data sets. Thus, rule sets induced from some data sets may be improved by increasing incompleteness of data sets. It appears that by removing some attribute values, the rule induction system, forced to induce rules from remaining information, may induce better rule sets.
Download
Paper Nr: 291
Title:

MODELING PROCESSES FROM TIMED OBSERVATIONS
Authors:

Marc Le Goc, Emilie Masse and Corinne Curt
Abstract: This paper presents a modelling approach of dynamic process for diagnosis that is compatible with the Stochastic Approach framework for discovering temporal knowledge from the timed observations contained in a database. The motivation is to define a multi-model formalism that is able to represent both the knowledge of these two sources. The aim is to model the process at the same level of abstraction that an expert uses to diagnose the process. The underlying idea is that at this level of abstraction, the model is simple enough to allow an efficient diagnosis. The proposed formalism represents the knowledge in four models: a structural model defining the components and the connection relations of the process, a behavioural model defining the states and the transitions states of the process, a functional model containing the logical relations between the values of the process’s variables, which are defined in the perception model. The models are linked with the process’s variables. This point facilitates the analysis of the consistency of the four models and is the basis of the corresponding knowledge modelling methodology. The formalism and the methodology is illustrated with the model of a hydraulic dam of Cublize (France).
Download
Paper Nr: 335
Title:

ONTOLOGY FOR SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT - A Knowledge Management Framework for Software Configuration Management
Authors:

Nikiforos Ploskas, Michael Berger, Jiang Zhang, Lars Dittmann and Gert-Joachim Wintterle
Abstract: This paper describes a Knowledge Management Framework for Software Configuration Management, which will enable efficient engineering, deployment, and run-time management of reconfigurable ambient intelligent services. Software Configuration Management (SCM) procedures are commonly initiated by device agents located in the users gateways. The Knowledge Management Framework makes use of Ontologies to represent knowledge required to perform SCM and to perform knowledge inference based on Description Logic reasoning. The work has been carried out within the European project COMANCHE that will utilize ontology models to support SCM. The COMANCHE ontology has been developed to provide a standard data model for the information that relates to SCM, and determine (infer) which SW Services need to be installed on the devices of users.
Download
Paper Nr: 417
Title:

ON THE DETECTION OF NOVEL ATTACKS USING BEHAVIORAL APPROACHES
Authors:

Salem Benferhat and Karim TABIA
Abstract: During last years, behavioral approaches, representing normal/abnormal activities, have been widely used in intrusion detection. However, they are ineffective for detecting novel attacks involving new behaviors. This paper first analyzes and explains this recurring problem due on one hand to inadequate handling of anomalous and unusual audit events and on other hand to insufficient decision rules which do not meet behavioral approach objectives. We then propose to enhance the standard classification rules in order to fit behavioral approach requirements and detect novel attacks. Experimental studies carried out on real and simulated htt p traffic show that these enhanced decision rules allow to detect most novel attacks without triggering higher false alarm rates.
Download
Paper Nr: 417
Title:

ON THE DETECTION OF NOVEL ATTACKS USING BEHAVIORAL APPROACHES
Authors:

Salem Benferhat and Karim TABIA
Abstract: During last years, behavioral approaches, representing normal/abnormal activities, have been widely used in intrusion detection. However, they are ineffective for detecting novel attacks involving new behaviors. This paper first analyzes and explains this recurring problem due on one hand to inadequate handling of anomalous and unusual audit events and on other hand to insufficient decision rules which do not meet behavioral approach objectives. We then propose to enhance the standard classification rules in order to fit behavioral approach requirements and detect novel attacks. Experimental studies carried out on real and simulated htt p traffic show that these enhanced decision rules allow to detect most novel attacks without triggering higher false alarm rates.
Download
Paper Nr: 440
Title:

PRUNING SEARCH SPACE BY DOMINANCE RULES IN BEST FIRST SEARCH FOR THE JOB SHOP SCHEDULING PROBLEM
Authors:

María R. Sierra and José R. Varela Arias
Abstract: Best-first graph search is a classic problem solving paradigm capable of obtaining exact solutions to optimization problems. As it usually requires a large amount of memory to store the effective search space, in practice it is only suitable for small instances. In this paper, we propose a pruning method, based on dominance relations among states, for reducing the search space. We apply this method to an A∗ algorithm that explores the space of active schedules for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem with makespan minimization. The A∗ algorithm is guided by a consistent heuristic and it is combined with a greedy algorithm to obtain upper bounds during the search process. We conducted an experimental study over a conventional benchmark. The results show that the proposed method is able to reduce both the space and the time in searching for optimal schedules so as it is able to solve instances with 20 jobs and 5 machines or 9 jobs and 9 machines. Also, the A∗ is exploited with heuristic weighting to obtain sub-optimal solutions for larger instances.
Download
Short Papers
Paper Nr: 34
Title:

A COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT BASED ON THE REUSE OF PROCESS ASSETS
Authors:

Fuensanta Medina-Dominguez, Javier Saldaña Ramos, José A. Mora-Soto, Ana Sanz Esteban and Maria-Isabel Sanchez-Segura
Abstract: In order to allow software organizations to reuse their know-how, the authors have defined product patterns artefact. This know-how can be used in combination with software engineering best practices to improve the quality and productivity of their software projects, as well as reduce projects cost. This paper describes the structure of the Process Assets Library (PAL), and the framework developed to encapsulate the know-how in organizations. The PIBOK-PB (Process improvement based on knowledge - pattern based) tool uses the proposed PAL to access the knowledge encapsulated in the product patterns, and to execute software projects more efficiently. This paper also describes PIBOK-PB’s features and compares similar tools in the market.
Download
Paper Nr: 61
Title:

KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATIONS OF CONSTRAINTS FOR PATIENT SPECIFIC IOL-DESTINATION
Authors:

Klaus P. Scherer
Abstract: A knowledge based system is a computer program, which simulates the problem solving process of a human, who is an expert in this discipline. In the medical area there exist a lot of expert system components for diagnosis of different diseases. In the ophthalmology, after a cataract surgical incision, the human lens is removed and an artificial intraocular lens (IOL) is implanted. Because of many preconditions (patient situation, operation technologies and IOL specifics) a knowledge based system is developed to support the decision process of the IOL destination under the related (sometimes contradictory) constraints. A computer aided IOL destination and decision support for a patient related individual optimized lens system can help to enhance the life style of the bresbyope human. In comparison to classical software systems the heuristic knowledge from the surgeons (aggregated over many years by research and clinical praxis) can be regarded and user specific communication with the software system and an explanation part is available for the decision making process. Useful representations of the situation are formalised knowledge representation methods.
Download
Paper Nr: 91
Title:

APPLICATION OF GENETIC PROGRAMMING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING EMPIRICAL DATA MODELLING
Authors:

Athanasios Tsakonas and Georgios Dounias
Abstract: Research in software engineering data analysis has only recently incorporated computational intelligence methodologies. Among these approaches, genetic programming retains a remarkable position, facilitating symbolic regression tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the genetic programming paradigm, in two major software engineering duties, effort estimation and defect prediction. We examine data domains from both the commercial and the scientific sector, for each task. The proposed model is proved superior to past literature works.
Download
Paper Nr: 163
Title:

TERM KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION USING THE STRUCTURE OF HEADLINE SENTENCESFROM INFORMATION EQUIPMENTS OPERATING MANUALS
Authors:

Makoto Imamura, Yasuhiro Takayama, Masanori Akiyoshi and Norihisa Komoda
Abstract: This paper proposes a method for automatically extracting term knowledge such as case relations and IS-A relations between words in the headline sentences of operating manuals for information equipments. The proposed method acquires term knowledge by the following iterative processing: the case relation extraction using correspondence relations between surface cases and deep cases; the case and IS-A relation extraction using compound word structures; the IS-A relation extraction using correspondence between the case structures in the hierarchical headline sentences. The distinctive feature of our method is to extract new case relations and IS-A relations by comparison and matching the case relations extracting from the super and sub headline sentences using the headline hierarchy. We have confirmed that the proposed method has achieved 92.4% recall and 96.8% precision for extracting case relations, and 93.9% recall and 89.9% precision for extracting IS-A relations from an operating manual of a car navigation system.
Download
Paper Nr: 218
Title:

APLYING THE KoFI METHODOLOGY TO IMPROVE KNOWLEDGE FLOWS IN A MANUFACTURING PROCESS
Authors:

Oscar M. Rodríguez-Elias, Alberto L. Morán, Jaqueline I. Lavandera, Aurora Vizcaino and Juan Pablo Soto
Abstract: Development of methods to integrate Knowledge Management (KM) in organizational processes is an open issue. KM should facilitate the flow of knowledge from where it is created or stored, to where it is needed to be applied. Therefore, an initial step towards the integration of KM in organizational processes should be the analysis of the way in which knowledge is actually flowing in these processes, and then, to propose alternatives to improve that flow. This paper presents the use of the Knowledge Flow Identification (KoFI) methodology as a means to improve a manufacturing process knowledge flow. Since KoFI was initially developed to analyze software processes, in this paper we illustrate how it can also be used in a manufacturing domain. The results of the application of KoFI are also presented, which include the design of a knowledge portal and an initial evaluation from its potential users.
Download
Paper Nr: 228
Title:

MINING ASSOCIATION - Correlations Among Demographic Health Indicators
Authors:

Subhagata Chattopadhyay, Pradeep Ray and Lesley Land
Abstract: Demographic health indicators such as crude birth rate, crude death rate, maternal mortality rate, infant mortality rate (IMR), Adult literacy rate and many others are usually considered measures of a country’s health status. These health indicators are often seen in an isolated manner rather than as a group of associated events. Conventional statistical techniques often fail to mine inter-relations among these indicators. This paper focuses on mining association-correlations among various demographic health indicators under child immunization program, skilled obstetric practice, and IMR using both statistical and Quantitative Association Rule (QAR) mining techniques. Relevant archived data from 10 countries located in the Asia-Pacific region are used for this study. Finally the paper concludes that association mining with QAR is more informative than that of statistical techniques. The reason may lie in its capability to generate the association rules using a 2-D grid-based flexible approach. Finally it is concluded that such an approach could be pioneering for engineering the hidden knowledge among various other health indicators.
Download
Paper Nr: 326
Title:

A PROTOPTYPE TO RECOMMEND TRUSTWORTHY KNOWLEDGE IN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
Authors:

Juan Pablo Soto, Aurora Vizcaino, Javier Portillo, Mario Piattini and Oscar M. Rodríguez-Elias
Abstract: Knowledge Management is a key factor in companies which have, therefore, started using strategies and systems to take advantage of its intellectual capital. However, employees frequently do not take advantage of the means to manage knowledge that companies offer them. For instance, employees often complain that knowledge management systems overload them with more work since they have to introduce information into these systems, or that this kind of tools floods them with too much knowledge which is not always relevant to them. In order to avoid these problems we have implemented a tool to recommend trustworthy knowledge sources in communities of practice. This tool is based on a multi-agent architecture in which agents attempt to help users to find the information which is most relevant to them. In order to do this, the agents use a trust model to evaluate how trustworthy a knowledge source (which may even be another agent) is.
Download
Paper Nr: 350
Title:

HOW TO SUPPORT SCENARIOS-BASED INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN - A Domain-Specific-Modeling Approach
Authors:

Pierre Laforcade, Boubekeur Zendagui and Vincent Barré
Abstract: Over recent years, Model-Driven-Engineering has attracted growing interest as much as a research domain as an industrial process that can be applied to various educational domains. This article aims to discuss and propose such an application for learning-scenario-centered instructional design processes. Our proposition is based on a 3-domain categorization for learning scenarios. We also discuss and explain why we think Domain-Specific Modeling techniques are the future new trend in order to support the emergence of communities of practices for scenario-based instructional design. The originality resides in the support we propose to help communities of practitioners in building specific Visual Instructional Design Languages with dedicated editors instead of providing them with yet another language or editor.
Download
Paper Nr: 496
Title:

INVERSE SIMULATION FOR RECOMMENDATION OF BUSINESS SCENARIO WITH QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE HYBRID MODEL
Authors:

Keisuke Negoro, Takeshi Nakazaki, Susumu Takeuchi and Masanori Akiyoshi
Abstract: In order to decide an effective management plan, managers often draw up and evaluate business scenarios. To make the evaluation, a simulation method on the qualitative and quantitative hybrid model represented as causal graph has been proposed. There is a strong need to get optimal input values for the target outputs in the simulation, but exhaustive search can not be realistically applied to it from considering the processing time. Therefore, we propose a quick search method for optimal input values cencerning the qualitative and quantitative hybrid simulation. Our approach is to get optimal values of input nodes by inverse propagation of effects from the value of target output nodes on the simulation model. However, it generates the contradiction that the value of a separated node in the causal graph decided from one of destination nodes is different from the value of the other destination nodes. Therefore, we re-execute the inverse propagation repeatedly from the nearest qualitative node connecting to a quantitative node for solving the contradiction. By experimental results about the proposed method, time could be reduced for reaching the solution. We also could confirm a certain level of accuracy about the solution.
Download
Paper Nr: 506
Title:

TRAINING BELIEVABLE AGENTS IN 3D ELECTRONIC BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS USING RECURSIVE-ARC GRAPHS
Authors:

Anton Bogdanovych, Simeon Simoff and Francesc Esteva
Abstract: Using 3D Virtual Worlds for commercial activities on the Web and the development of human-like sales assistants operating in such environments are ongoing trends of E-Commerce. The majority of the existing approaches oriented towards the development of such assistants are agent-based and are focused on explicit programming of the agents’ decision making apparatus. While effective in some very specific situations, these approaches often restrict agents’ capabilities to adapt to the changes in the environment and learn new behaviors. In this paper we propose an implicit training method that can address the aforementioned drawbacks. In this method we formalize the virtual environment using Electronic Institutions and make the agent use these formalizations for observing a human principle and learning believable behaviors from the human. The training of the agent can be conducted implicitly using the specific data structures called recursive-arc graphs.
Download
Paper Nr: 207
Title:

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FRACTAL DIMENSION AND SENSITIVITY INDEX OF PRODUCT PACKAGING
Authors:

Mayumi Oyama-higa and Teijun Miao
Abstract: Until now, the evaluation of product packaging has been performed subjectively since no other way existed. Previous research has also shown that people tend to prefer images with high fractal dimension. If so, then the fractal dimension of product package images should enable a determination of how preferable product packages would be, or function as an index to estimate whether product packages would attract attention. In this study, we calculated the fractal dimension for packages of 45 types of canned beer. We performed a comparative analysis using the standard deviation method to determine the degree to which the product packages influenced the potential customer’s impression of the product. The results showed that the fractal dimension is highly important to an objective evaluation.
Download
Paper Nr: 234
Title:

ON THE USE OF SYNTACTIC POSSIBILISTIC FUSION FOR COMPUTING POSSIBILISTIC QUALITATIVE DECISION
Authors:

Salem Benferhat, Hadja K. Haned, Mokhtari Aicha and Ismahane Zeddigha
Abstract: This paper describes the use of syntactical data fusion to computing possibilistic qualitative decisions. More precisely qualitative possibilistic decisions can be viewed as a data fusion problem of two particular possibility distributions (or possibilistic knowledge bases): the first one representing the beliefs of an agent and the second one representing the qualitative utility. The proposed algorithm computes a pessimistic optimal decisions based on data fusion techniques. We show that the computation of optimal decisions is equivalent to computing an inconsistency degree of possibilistic bases representing the fusion of agent’s beliefs and agent’s preferences.
Download
Paper Nr: 234
Title:

ON THE USE OF SYNTACTIC POSSIBILISTIC FUSION FOR COMPUTING POSSIBILISTIC QUALITATIVE DECISION
Authors:

Salem Benferhat, Hadja K. Haned, Mokhtari Aicha and Ismahane Zeddigha
Abstract: This paper describes the use of syntactical data fusion to computing possibilistic qualitative decisions. More precisely qualitative possibilistic decisions can be viewed as a data fusion problem of two particular possibility distributions (or possibilistic knowledge bases): the first one representing the beliefs of an agent and the second one representing the qualitative utility. The proposed algorithm computes a pessimistic optimal decisions based on data fusion techniques. We show that the computation of optimal decisions is equivalent to computing an inconsistency degree of possibilistic bases representing the fusion of agent’s beliefs and agent’s preferences.
Download
Paper Nr: 235
Title:

A COMPARISON STUDY OF TWO KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION TECHNIQUES APPLIED TO THYROID MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS DOMAIN
Authors:

Abdulhameed Abdulkafi and Aiman S. Gannous
Abstract: This study compares the performance of two famous methods used in knowledge acquisition and machine learning; the C4.5 (Quinlan 1986) algorithm for building the decision tree and the Backpropagation algorithm for training Multi layer feed forward neural network. This comparison will be based on the task of classifying thyroid diagnosis dataset. Both methods will be applied on the same data set and then study and discuss the results obtained from the experiments.
Download
Paper Nr: 247
Title:

INTEGRATION OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION DECISIONS INTO THE MDA FRAMEWROK
Authors:

Alti Adel and Smeda Adel
Abstract: Model Driven Development (MDD) is typically based on models which heavily lead the quality production of application’s architecture. This is because architectural decisions are often implicitly embedded in software engineering, therefore lacks first-class consideration. Architecture has been established as a key to develop software systems that meet quality expectations of their stakeholders. The explicit definition of architectural decisions, aims to well control the quality on the software development process. In this paper, we propose to extend the MDA framework by integrating decision aspects. We propose also an approach to use architectural decisions as a meta-model for the MDD process. Integration of architectural decisions allows architectural design to be defined explicitly and guides architects in creating systems with desirable qualities; and for MDA it extends the approach by integrating true decisional concerns into MDD process.
Download
Paper Nr: 343
Title:

AN ONTOLOGY IN ORTHOPEDIC MEDICAL FIELD
Authors:

Harold Vasquez, Ana Aguilera and Leonid Tineo
Abstract: At present time, Ontology is a powerful Knowledge Representation tool for Web Information Retrieval and Mining. In particular, lots of medical applications in the field of diagnosis and tele-health would take advantage of information sharing and publication on the Web with the use of Ontology. We are especially interested in the field of orthopedic pathologies of human march. There are several laboratories in the world working in this topic but they are not exploiting potential of the Web in theirs works, they are almost isolate in information management. We have already carried out mining in database from the Venezuelan Hospital Ortopédico Infantil, nevertheless, it is necessary to build an ontology in order to query and mine information from different laboratories in the world. We would like in the near future to apply fuzzy logic techniques and fuzzy querying over such information. In this paper, we present the building of an orthopedic medical ontology, to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported other in this specific field that we are interested on.
Download
Paper Nr: 391
Title:

KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN TRADITIONAL AND AGILE SOFTWARE PROCESSES
Authors:

Broderick Crawford, Claudio Leon de la Barra and José R. León
Abstract: The software development community has a wide spectrum of methodologies to implement a software project. In one side of the spectrum we have the more Traditional deterministic software development derived from Tayloristic management practices, and in the other side, are the Agile software development approaches. The Agile processes are people oriented rather than process oriented, unlike the Traditional processes they are adaptive and not predictive. Software development is a knowledge intensive activity and the Knowledge Creation and Sharing are crucial parts of the software development processes. This paper presents a comparison between Knowledge Sharing approaches of Agile and Tayloristic software development teams.
Download
Paper Nr: 394
Title:

CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING CAN HELP ANTS SOLVING HIGHLY CONSTRAINTED COMBINATORIAL PROBLEMS
Authors:

Broderick Crawford, Carlos Castro and Eric Monfroy
Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the resolution of Set Partitioning Problem. We try to solve it with Ant Colony Optimization algorithms and Hybridizations of Ant Colony Optimization with Constraint Programming techniques. We recognize the difficulties of pure Ant Algorithms solving strongly constrained problems. Therefore, we explore the addition of Constraint Programming mechanisms in the construction phase of the ants so they can complete their solutions. Computational results solving some test instances are presented showing the advantages to use this kind of hybridization.
Download
Paper Nr: 399
Title:

ARABIC TEXT CATEGORIZATION SYSTEM - Using Ant Colony Optimization-based Feature Selection
Authors:

Abdelwadood Moh’d A. Mesleh and Ghassan Kanaan
Abstract: Feature subset selection (FSS) is an important step for effective text classification (TC) systems. This paper describes a novel FSS method based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Chi-square statistic. The proposed method adapted Chi-square statistic as heuristic information and the effectiveness of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) text classifier as a guidance to better selecting features for selective categories. Compared to six classical FSS methods, our proposed ACO-based FSS algorithm achieved better TC effectiveness. Evaluation used an in-house Arabic TC corpus. The experimental results are presented in term of macro-averaging F1 measure.
Download
Paper Nr: 422
Title:

CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT ON SEARCH ENGINE KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION CAPABILITIES
Authors:

Pasquale Ardimento, Danilo Caivano, Maria T. Baldassarre, Marta Cimitile and Giuseppe Visaggio
Abstract: Continuous pressure on behalf of enterprises leads to a constant need for innovation. This involves exchanging results of knowledge and innovation among research groups and enterprises in accordance to the Open Innovation paradigm. The technologies that seem to be apparently attractive for exchanging knowledge are Internet and its search engines. Literature provides many discordant opinions on their efficacy, and to our best knowledge, no empirical evidence on the topic. This work starts from the definition of a Knowledge Acquisition Process, and presents a rigorous empirical investigation that evaluates the efficacy of the previous technologies within the Exploratory Search of Knowledge and of Relevant Knowledge according to specific requirements. The investigation has pointed out that these technologies are not effective for Explorative Search. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of other technologies to develop and analyze in order to overcome the weaknesses that this investigation has pointed out within the Knowledge Acquisition Process.
Download
Paper Nr: 422
Title:

CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT ON SEARCH ENGINE KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION CAPABILITIES
Authors:

Pasquale Ardimento, Danilo Caivano, Maria T. Baldassarre, Marta Cimitile and Giuseppe Visaggio
Abstract: Continuous pressure on behalf of enterprises leads to a constant need for innovation. This involves exchanging results of knowledge and innovation among research groups and enterprises in accordance to the Open Innovation paradigm. The technologies that seem to be apparently attractive for exchanging knowledge are Internet and its search engines. Literature provides many discordant opinions on their efficacy, and to our best knowledge, no empirical evidence on the topic. This work starts from the definition of a Knowledge Acquisition Process, and presents a rigorous empirical investigation that evaluates the efficacy of the previous technologies within the Exploratory Search of Knowledge and of Relevant Knowledge according to specific requirements. The investigation has pointed out that these technologies are not effective for Explorative Search. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of other technologies to develop and analyze in order to overcome the weaknesses that this investigation has pointed out within the Knowledge Acquisition Process.
Download
Paper Nr: 453
Title:

HUMAN RANDOM GENERATION AND ITS APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Mieko Tanaka-Yamawaki
Abstract: Human Random Generation (HURG) is a psychological test meant to detect the degree of mental fatigue, or the level of concentration of individual subject, by testing the flexibility of thinking, without relying on any equipment(Wagenaar, 1977). In early days, HURG was practiced in clinical psychology in order to detect advanced level of schizophrenia. Later, the development of powerful computers made us possible to detect subtle irregularity hidden in HURG taken from normal subjects. We have been studying the possibility of utilizing HURG for self-detection of dementia at early stage, by using various information theoretical techniques over several years including the pattern classification by means of hidden Markov model (HMM), correlation dimension frequently used to identify chaotic time series, and selection of index suitable to characterize short sequences. In this paper, we report our recent progress in developing a novel method of HURG by using the pattern recognition and the randomness measured in the data taken from the Inverse-Ten-Key on the mobile phone keyboards (MPK).
Download

Area 4 - Programing Languages

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 78
Title:

LANGUAGE-NEUTRAL SUPPORT OF DYNAMIC INHERITANCE
Authors:

José M. Redondo López, Francisco Ortín Soler and José Baltasar García Pérez-Schofield
Abstract: Virtual machines have been successfully applied in diverse scenarios to obtain several benefits. Application interoperability and distribution, code portability, and improving the runtime performance of programs are examples of these benefits. Techniques like JIT compilation have improved virtual machine runtime performance, becoming an adequate alternative to develop different types of software products. We have extended a production JIT-based virtual machine so they offer low-level support for structural reflection, in order to obtain the aforementioned advantages in dynamic languages implementation. As various dynamic languages offer support for dynamic inheritance, the next step in our research work is to enable this support in the aforementioned JIT-based virtual machine. Our approach enables dynamic inheritance in a language-neutral way, supporting both static and dynamic languages, so no language specification have to be modified to enable these features. It also enables static and dynamic languages to interoperate, since both types are now low-level supported by our machine.
Download
Paper Nr: 130
Title:

SCALA ROLES - A Lightweight Approach towards Reusable Collaborations
Authors:

Michael Pradel and Martin Odersky
Abstract: Purely class-based implementations of object-oriented software are often inappropriate for reuse. In contrast, the notion of objects playing roles in a collaboration has been proven to be a valuable reuse abstraction. However, existing solutions to enable role-based programming tend to require vast extensions of the underlying programming language, and thus, are difficult to use in every day work. We present a programming technique, based on dynamic proxies, that allows to augment an object’s type at runtime while preserving strong static type safety. It enables role-based implementations that lead to more reuse and better separation of concerns.
Download
Paper Nr: 204
Title:

A SOURCE CODE BASED MODEL TO GENERATE GUI - GUI Generation based on Source Code with Declarative Language Extensions
Authors:

Marco Monteiro, Paula Oliveira and Ramiro Gonçalves
Abstract: Due to data-driven application nature and its increasing complexity, developing its user interface can be a repetitive and time-consuming activity. Consequently, developers tend to focus more on the user interface aspects and less on business related code. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to graphical user interface development for data-driven applications, where the key concept is the generation of concrete graphical user interface from a source code based model. The model includes the original source code metadata and non-intrusive declarative language extensions that describes the user interface structure. Some Object Relational Mapping tools already use a similar concept to handle interoperability between the data layer and the business layer. Our approach applies the same concept to handle business and presentation layer interoperability. Also, concrete user interface implementation will be delegated to specialized software packages, developed by external entities, that provide complete graphical user interfaces services to the application. When applying our approach, we expect faster graphical user interface development, allowing developers to refocus on the source code and concentrate their efforts on application core logic.
Download
Paper Nr: 375
Title:

ENSURING SAFE USAGE OF BUFFERS IN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE C
Authors:

Milena Vujosevic-Janicic
Abstract: We consider the problem of buffer overflows in C programs. This problem is very important because buffer overflows are suitable targets for security attacks and sources of serious programs’ misbehavior. Buffer overflow bugs can be detected at run-time by dynamic analysis, and before run-time by static analysis. In this paper we present a new static, modular approach for automated detection of buffer overflows. Our approach is flow-sensitive and inter-procedural, and it deals with both statically and dynamically allocated buffers. Its architecture is flexible and pluggable — for instance, for checking generated correctness and incorrectness conditions, it can use any external automated theorem prover that follows SMT-LIB standards. The system uses an external and easily extendable knowledge database that stores all the reasoning rules so they are not hard-coded within the system. We also report on our prototype implementation, the FA D O tool, and on its experimental results.
Download
Short Papers
Paper Nr: 83
Title:

GENERIC TRAITS IN STATICALLY TYPED LANGUAGES - How to do It?
Authors:

Andreas Svendsen and Birger Møller-Pedersen
Abstract: Traits have been proposed as a code reuse mechanism for dynamically typed languages. The paper addresses the issues that come up when introducing traits in statically typed languages, such as Java. These issues can be resolved by introducing generic traits, but at some cost. The paper studies three different generic mechanisms: Java Generics, Templates and Virtual Types, by implementing them all by a preprocessor to Java. The three different approaches are tested by a number of examples. Based on this, the paper gives a first answer to which of the three generic mechanisms that are most adequate.
Download
Paper Nr: 83
Title:

GENERIC TRAITS IN STATICALLY TYPED LANGUAGES - How to do It?
Authors:

Andreas Svendsen and Birger Møller-Pedersen
Abstract: Traits have been proposed as a code reuse mechanism for dynamically typed languages. The paper addresses the issues that come up when introducing traits in statically typed languages, such as Java. These issues can be resolved by introducing generic traits, but at some cost. The paper studies three different generic mechanisms: Java Generics, Templates and Virtual Types, by implementing them all by a preprocessor to Java. The three different approaches are tested by a number of examples. Based on this, the paper gives a first answer to which of the three generic mechanisms that are most adequate.
Download
Paper Nr: 86
Title:

MODULAR CONCURRENCY - A New Approach to Manageable Software
Authors:

Peter Grogono and Brian Shearing
Abstract: Software systems bridge the gap between the information processing needs of the world and computer hardware. As system requirements grow in complexity and hardware evolves, the gap does not necessarily widen, but it undoubtedly changes. Although today’s applications require concurrency and today’s hardware provides concurrency, programming languages remain predominantly sequential. Concurrent programming is considered too difficult and too risky to be practiced by “ordinary programmers”. Software development is moving towards a paradigm shift, following which concurrency will play a fundamental role in programming. In this paper, we introduce an approach that we believe will reduce the difficulties of developing and maintaining certain kinds of concurrent software. Building on earlier work but applying modern insights, we propose a programming paradigm based on processes that exchange messages. Innovative features include scale-free program structure, extensible modular components with multiple interfaces, protocols that specify the form of messages, and separation of semantics and deployment. We suggest that it may be possible to provide the flexibility and expressiveness of programming with processes while bounding the complexity caused by nondeterminism.
Download
Paper Nr: 117
Title:

DSAW - A Dynamic and Static Aspect Weaving Platform
Authors:

Luis Vinuesa , Francisco Ortin, José M. Félix and Fernando Álvarez
Abstract: Aspect Oriented Software Development is an effective realization of the Separation of Concerns principle. A key issue of this paradigm is the moment when components and aspects are weaved together, composing the final application. Static weaving tools perform application composition prior to its execution. This approach reduces dynamic aspectation of running applications. In response to this limitation, dynamic weaving aspect tools perform application composition at runtime. The main benefit of dynamic weaving is runtime adaptability; its main drawback is runtime performance. Existing research has identified the suitability of hybrid approaches, obtaining the benefits of both methods in the same platform. Applying static weaving where possible and dynamic weaving when needed provides a balance between runtime performance and dynamic adaptability. This paper presents DSAW, an aspect-oriented system that supports both dynamic and static weaving homogeneously over the .Net platform. An aspect can be used to adapt an application both statically and dynamically, without needing to modify its source code. Moreover, DSAW is language and platform neutral, and source code of neither components nor aspects is required.
Download
Paper Nr: 117
Title:

DSAW - A Dynamic and Static Aspect Weaving Platform
Authors:

Luis Vinuesa , Francisco Ortin, José M. Félix and Fernando Álvarez
Abstract: Aspect Oriented Software Development is an effective realization of the Separation of Concerns principle. A key issue of this paradigm is the moment when components and aspects are weaved together, composing the final application. Static weaving tools perform application composition prior to its execution. This approach reduces dynamic aspectation of running applications. In response to this limitation, dynamic weaving aspect tools perform application composition at runtime. The main benefit of dynamic weaving is runtime adaptability; its main drawback is runtime performance. Existing research has identified the suitability of hybrid approaches, obtaining the benefits of both methods in the same platform. Applying static weaving where possible and dynamic weaving when needed provides a balance between runtime performance and dynamic adaptability. This paper presents DSAW, an aspect-oriented system that supports both dynamic and static weaving homogeneously over the .Net platform. An aspect can be used to adapt an application both statically and dynamically, without needing to modify its source code. Moreover, DSAW is language and platform neutral, and source code of neither components nor aspects is required.
Download
Paper Nr: 185
Title:

SEPARATING PROGRAM SEMANTICS FROM DEPLOYMENT
Authors:

Nurudeen Lameed and Peter Grogono
Abstract: Designing software to adapt to changes in requirements and environment is a key step for preserving software investment. As time passes, applications often require enhancements as requirements change or hardware environment changes. However, mainstream programming languages lack suitable abstractions that are capable of providing the needed flexibility for the effective implementation, maintenance and refactoring of parallel and distributed systems. Software must be modified to match today’s needs but must not place even greater strain on software developers. Hence, software must be specially designed to accommodate future changes. This paper proposes an approach that facilitates software development and maintenance. In particular, it explains how the semantics of a program can be separated from its deployment onto multiprocessor or distributed systems. Through this approach, software investment may be preserved when new features are added or when functionality does not change but the environment does.
Download
Paper Nr: 274
Title:

senseGUI – A DECLARATIVE WAY OF GENERATING GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACES
Authors:

Mariusz Trzaska
Abstract: A declarative way of creating GUIs is also known as model-based generation. Most of existing solutions require dedicated tools and quite complicated knowledge from the programmer. They also use special languages. In contrast, we propose a method which utilizes annotations existing in present programming languages. The method greatly improves generating common GUIs for popular languages. Annotations allow the programmer for marking particular parts of a source code defining class structures. Using such simple annotations, the programmer can describe basic properties of the desired GUI. In the simplest form it is enough just to mark attributes (or methods) for which widgets should be created. There is also a way to define more detailed description including labels, the order of items, different widgets for particular data items, etc. Using a generated form, the application user can create, edit and see instances of data objects. Our research is supported by a working prototype library called senseGUI (Java).
Download
Paper Nr: 145
Title:

ARIA LANGUAGE - Towards Agent Orientation Paradigm
Authors:

Mohsen Lesani and Niloufar Montazeri
Abstract: Agent oriented paradigm is one of the new contributions to the field of software engineering and has the potential to significantly improve current practice of the field. The paradigm should be elaborated both practically and conceptually. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, an agent oriented language called Aria and its compiler are proposed. Aria language is a superset of Java language and the compiler compiles a program in Aria to an equivalent program in Java. This enables Aria to fully integrate with and preserve all the existing knowledge and code in Java. Secondly, the three well-known object oriented principles of abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism are redefined for agent orientation. Two sample cases are presented: a chat room and an agent oriented MVC pattern.
Download
Paper Nr: 354
Title:

AN APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROGRAMMING SOFTWARE FOR DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS
Authors:

Vitaly Kutepov, Vasily Malanin and N. A. Pankov
Abstract: The problem of software development for distributed and parallel computing systems is considered in the paper. Its original issue is in extending our projecting work on parallel programming languages and operational tools for their realization on large scale computing systems.
Download

Area 5 - Software Engineering

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 134
Title:

VERIFICATION OF SCENARIOS USING THE COMMON CRITERIA
Authors:

Atsushi Ohnishi and Hiroya Itoga
Abstract: Software is required to comply with the laws and standards of software security. However, stakeholders with less concern regarding security can neither describe the behaviour of the system with regard to security nor validate the system’s behaviour when the security function conflicts with usability. Scenarios or use-case specifications are common in requirements elicitation and are useful to analyze the usability of the system from a behavioural point of view. In this paper, the authors propose both (1) a scenario language based on a simple case grammar and (2) a method to verify a scenario with rules based on security evaluation criteria.
Download
Paper Nr: 135
Title:

FROM UML TO ANSI-C - An Eclipse-based Code Generation Framework
Authors:

Mathias Funk, Alexander Nyβen and Horst Lichter
Abstract: Model-driven engineering has recently gained broad acceptance in the field of embedded and real-time software systems. While larger embedded and real-time systems, developed e.g. in aerospace, telecommunication, or automotive industry, are quite well supported by model-driven engineering approaches based on the UML, small embedded and real-time systems, as they can for example be found in the industrial automation industry, are still handled a bit novercal. A major reason for this is that the code generation facilities, being offered by most of the UML modeling tools on the market, do indeed support C/C++ code generation in all its particulars, but neglect the generation of plain ANSI-C code. However, this would be needed for small embedded and real-time systems, which have special characteristics in terms of hard time and space constraints. Therefore we developed a framework, which allows to generate ANSI conformant C code from UML models. It is built on top of Eclipse technology, so that it can be integrated easily with available UML modeling tools. Because flexibility and customizability are important requirements, the generation process consists of a model-to-model transformation between the UML source model and an intermediate ANSI-C model, as well as a final model-to-text generation from the intermediate ANSI-C model into C code files. This approach has several advantages compared to a direct code generation strategy.
Download
Paper Nr: 184
Title:

EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF EXECUTION TRACE SEGMENTATION IN REVERSE-ENGINEERING
Authors:

Philippe Dugerdil and Sebastien Jossi
Abstract: Reverse-engineering methods using dynamic techniques rests on the post-mortem analysis of the execution trace of the programs. However, one key problem is to cope with the amount of data to process. In fact, such a file could contain hundreds of thousands of events. To cope with this data volume, we recently developed a trace segmentation technique. This lets us compute the correlation between classes and identify cluster of closely correlated classes. However, no systematic study of the quality of the clusters has been conducted so far. In this paper we present a quantitative study of the performance of our technique with respect to the chosen parameters of the method. We then highlight the need for a benchmark and present the framework for the study. Then we discuss the matching metrics and present the results we obtained on the analysis of two very large execution traces. Finally we define a clustering quality metrics to identify the parameters providing the best results.
Download
Paper Nr: 210
Title:

RESOURCE SUBSTITUTION WITH COMPONENTS - Optimizing Energy Consumption
Authors:

Christian Bunse and Hagen Höpfner
Abstract: Software development for mobile systems is becoming increasingly complex. Beneath enhanced functionality, resource scarcity of devices is a major reason. The relatively high energy requirements of such systems are a limiting factor due to reduced operating times. Reducing energy consumption of mobile devices in order to prolong their operation time has thus been an interesting research topic in past years. Interestingly the focus has mostly been on hardware optimization, energy profiles, or techniques such as “Micro-Energy Harvesting“. Only recently, the impact of software on energy consumption by optimizing the use of resources has moved into the center of attention. Extensive wireless data transmissions, that are expensive, slow, and energy intensive can - for example - be reduced if mobile clients locally cache received data. Unfortunately, optimization at compile time is often inefficient since the optimal use of existing resources cannot really be foreseen. This paper discusses and applies novel strategies that allow systems to dynamically adapt at runtime. The focus is on resource substitution strategies that allow achieving a certain Quality-of-Service while sticking to a given energy limit.
Download
Paper Nr: 248
Title:

USER GUIDANCE OF RESOURCE-ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS
Authors:

João P. Sousa, Rajesh K. Balan, Vahe Poladian, David Garlan and Mahadev Satyanarayanan
Abstract: This paper presents a framework for engineering resource-adaptive software systems targeted at small mobile devices. The proposed framework empowers users to control tradeoffs among a rich set of service-specific aspects of quality of service. After motivating the problem, the paper proposes a model for capturing user preferences with respect to quality of service, and illustrates prototype user interfaces to elicit such models. The paper then describes the extensions and integration work made to accommodate the proposed framework on top of an existing software infrastructure for ubiquitous computing. The research question addressed here is the feasibility of coordinating resource allocation and adaptation policies in a way that end-users can understand and control in real time. The evaluation covered both systems and the usability perspectives, the latter by means of a user study. The contributions of this work are: first, a set of design guidelines for resource-adaptive systems, including APIs for integrating new applications; second, a concrete infrastructure that implements the guidelines. And third, a way to model quality of service tradeoffs based on utility theory, which our research indicates end-users with diverse backgrounds are able to leverage for guiding the adaptive behaviors towards activity-specific quality goals.
Download
Paper Nr: 251
Title:

FAULTS ANALYSIS IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS - Quantitative Estimation of Reliability and Resource Requirements
Authors:

Christian T. Sellberg, Michael R. Hansen and Paul Fischer
Abstract: We live in a time where we become ever more dependent on distributed computing. Predictable quantitative properties of reliability and resource requirements of these systems are of outmost importance. But today quantitative properties of these systems can only be established after the systems are implemented and released for test, at which point problems can be costly and time consuming to solve. We present a new method, a process algebra and simulation tool for estimating quantitative properties of reliability and resource requirements of a distributed system with complex behaviour hereunder complex fault-tolerance behaviour. The simulation tool allows tailored fault injection e.g. random failure and attacks. The method is based upon π-calculus (Milner, 1999) to which it adds a stochastic fail-able process group construct. Performance is quantitatively estimated using reaction rates (Priami, 1995). We show how to model and estimate quantitative properties of a CPU scavenging grid with fault-tolerance. To emphasize the expressiveness of our language called Gπ we provide design patterns for encoding higher-order functions, object-oriented classes, process translocation, conditional loops and conditional control flow. The design patterns are used to implement linked lists, higher-order list functions and binary algebra. The focus of the paper is on practical application.
Download
Paper Nr: 296
Title:

DESIGN ACTIVITIES FOR SUPPORTING THE EVOLUTION OF SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
Authors:

Dionisis X. Adamopoulos
Abstract: The advent of deregulation combined with new opportunities opened by advances in telecommunications technologies has significantly changed the paradigm of telecommunications services, leading to a dramatic increase in the number and type of services that telecommunication companies can offer. Building new advanced multimedia telecommunications services in a distributed and heterogeneous environment is very difficult, unless there is a methodology to support the entire service development process in a structured and systematic manner, and assist and constrain service designers and developers by setting out goals and providing specific means to achieve these goals. Therefore, in this paper, after a brief presentation of a proposed service creation methodology, its service design phase is examined in detail focusing on the essential activities and artifacts. In this process, the exploitation of important service engineering techniques and UML modelling principles is especially considered. Finally, alternative and complementary approaches for service design are highlighted and a validation attempt is briefly outlined.
Download
Paper Nr: 309
Title:

ORACLE SECUREILES - A Filesystem Architecture in Oracle Database Server
Authors:

Niloy Mukherjee, Amit Ganesh, Krishna Kuchithapadam and Sujatha Muthulingam
Abstract: Over the last decade, the nature of content stored on computer storage systems has evolved from being relational to being semi-structured, i.e., unstructured data accompanied by relational metadata. Average data volumes have increased from a few hundred megabytes to hundreds of terabytes. Simultaneously, data feed rates have also increased with increase in processor, storage and network bandwidths. Data growth trends seem to be following Moore's law and thereby imply an exponential explosion in content volumes and rates in the years to come. We introduce Oracle SecureFiles System, a storage architecture designed to provide highly scalable storage and access execution of unstructured and structured content as first-class objects within the Oracle relational database management system. Oracle SecureFiles breaks the performance barrier that has been keeping unstructured content out of databases. The architecture provides capability to maximize utilization of storage usage through compression and deduplication and preserves data management robustness through Oracle database server features such as transactional atomicity, durability, availability, read-consistent query-ability and security of the database management system.
Download
Paper Nr: 345
Title:

QUALITY AND VALUE ANALYSIS OF SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINE ARCHITECTURES
Authors:

Liliana Dobrica and Eila Niemelä
Abstract: The concern of a software product line architecture systematic analysis is how to take better advantage of views and analyze value and quality attributes in an organized and repetitive way. In this approach architecture descriptions evolve from the conceptual level to a more concrete level. Architecture analysis at the conceptual level provides a knowledge base of the domain architecture so as to perform a more comprehensive analysis of quality attributes at the concrete level description. Concrete architecture descriptions permit more relevant and accurate scenario-based analysis results for the development of quality attributes such as portability and adaptability.
Download
Paper Nr: 358
Title:

ON THE CLARIFICATION OF THE SEMANTICS OF THE EXTEND RELATIONSHIP IN USE CASE MODELS
Authors:

Miguel A. Laguna and José M. Marqués
Abstract: Use cases are a useful and simple technique to express the expected behavior of an information system in successful scenarios or in exceptional circumstances. The weakness of use cases has been always the vague semantics of the relationships, in particular the extend relationship. The main contribution of this article is an attempt to clarify the different interpretations that can be adopted. A major revision of the UML standard would be impractical, but the extension point concept could be completed, including minimum and maximum multiplicity attributes. Using these minor changes, the legal combination of base/extending use cases in the requirements models would be unequivocally defined. Therefore, the ambiguity of the original UML models would be removed.
Download
Paper Nr: 363
Title:

ANALYZING IMPACT OF INTERFACE IMPLEMENTATION EFFORTS ON THE STRUCTURE OF A SOFTWARE MARKET - OSS/BSS Market Polarization Scenario
Authors:

Oleksiy Mazhelis, Pasi Tyrväinen and Jarmo Matilainen
Abstract: A vertical software market is usually subject to the process of disintegration resulting in a market where different layers of software are provided by independent software vendors. However, as argued in this paper, the process of this vertical disintegration may be affected by high investments to software interface implementation and maintenance. Should the required efforts be large, the threshold for entering the market increases, thereby hampering the vertical disintegration process. This study examines the impact of the interface implementation efforts on the vertical market evolution in the case of the so-called operations support systems and business support systems (OSS/BSS) software, which are employed by the telecom operators in order to support their daily operations. The efforts are compared for two prototypical software vendors serving incumbent operators and new operators respectively. Total efforts are an order of magnitude larger in the former case. Furthermore, even if only latest network protocols are taken into account, the efforts are significantly larger in the former case, therefore requiring several times greater number of employees to implement them. Therefore, a conclusion is made that the OSS/BSS market is likely to polarize into the vertical submarket of large software vendors serving incumbent operators, and the submarket of small vendors serving young operators. The latter submarket, due to the lower entry threshold for new vendors is more likely to be vertically disintegrated.
Download
Paper Nr: 372
Title:

LOCALIZING BUGS IN PROGRAMS - Or How to Use a Program’s Constraint Representation for Software Debugging?
Authors:

Franz Wotawa
Abstract: The use of a program’s constraint representation for various purposes like testing and verification is not new. In this paper, we focus on the applicability of constraint representations to fault localization and discuss the underlying ideas. Given the source code of a program and a test case, which specifies the input parameters and the expected output, we are interested in localizing the root cause of the revealed misbehavior. We first show how programs can be compiled into their corresponding constraint representations. Based on the constraint representation we show how to compute root causes using constraint solver. Moreover, we discuss how the approach can be integrated with program assertions and unit tests.
Download
Paper Nr: 397
Title:

IMPROVING THE SECURITY OF MOBILE-PHONE ACCESS TO REMOTE PERSONAL COMPUTERS
Authors:

Alireza P. Sabzevar and João P. Sousa
Abstract: Cell phones are assuming an increasing role in personal computing tasks, but cell phone security has not evolved in parallel with this new role. In a class of systems that leverage cell phones to facilitate access to remote services, compromising a phone may provide the means to compromise or abuse the remote services. This paper presents the background to this class of systems, examines the threats they are exposed to, and discusses possible countermeasures. A concrete solution is presented, which is based on multi-factor authentication and an on-demand strategy for minimizing exposure. This solution is built on top of a representative off-the-shelf commercial product called SoonR. Rather than proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, this work enables end-users to manage the tradeoff between security assurances and the overhead of using the corresponding features. The contributions of this paper are a discussion of the problem and a set of guidelines for improving the design of security solutions for remote access systems.
Download
Paper Nr: 414
Title:

VISUAL ABSTRACT NOTATION FOR GUI MODELLING AND TESTING - VAN4GUIM
Authors:

Rodrigo M. Moreira and Ana R. Paiva
Abstract: This paper presents a new Visual Notation for GUI Modelling and testing (VAN4GUIM) which aims to hide, as much as possible, formalism details inherent to models used in model-based testing (MBT) approaches and to promote the use of MBT in industrial environments providing a visual front-end for modelling which is more attractive to testers than textual notation. This visual notation is developed as five different UML profiles and based on three notations/concepts: Canonical abstract Prototyping notation; ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) notation; and the Window Manager concept. A set of translation rules was defined in order to automatically perform conversion from VAN4GUIM to Spec#. GUI models are developed with VAN4GUIM notation then translated automatically to Spec# that can be then completed manually with additional behaviour not included in the visual model. As soon as a Spec# model is completed, it can be used as input to Spec Explorer (model-based testing tool) which generates test cases and executes those tests automatically.
Download
Short Papers
Paper Nr: 46
Title:

ELUSIVE BUGS, BOUNDED EXHAUSTIVE TESTING AND INCOMPLETE ORACLES
Authors:

William Howden
Abstract: Elusive bugs involve combinations of conditions that may not fit into any informal or intuitive testing scheme. One way to attack them is with Bounded Exhaustive Testing, in which all combinations of inputs for a bounded version of an application are tested. Studies of BET effectiveness for known bugs indicate that it is a promising approach. Because of the numbers of tests that are involved, BET normally depends on automated test generation and execution. This in turn requires the use of an automated oracle. In some cases the construction of a complete automated oracle would require the development of a second version of the application. This may be avoidable if incomplete oracles are used. Two classes of incomplete oracles are identified: necessity and sufficiency oracles. Examples are given of experiments using a necessity and a sufficiency oracle.
Download
Paper Nr: 150
Title:

TOWARDS A CLASSIFICATION SCHEME IN ORTHOGONAL DIMENSIONS OF REUSABILITY
Authors:

Markus Aulkemeier, Jürgen Heine, Emilio G. Roselló, JACINTO G. DACOSTA and Baltasar García Perez-Schofield
Abstract: The reuse of existing bits of code has emerged as a habitual practice in software engineering. Despite the lively interest that has been directed towards this field, the major part of existent literature and publications is based on concrete aspects and models of reuse what provides a fragmented and compartmentalized vision of this domain. No holistic and unifying proposal exists that sorts the reuse domain as a conceptual software characteristic in a comprehensive way. Related to this context, the present work contributes a three-dimensional sorting model for reusable software artefacts. The three dimensions are independence, contract specification and composition, identified as fundamental dimensions of reusable software artefacts.
Download
Paper Nr: 174
Title:

ADJUSTING ANALOGY SOFTWARE EFFORT ESTIMATION BASED ON FUZZY LOGIC
Authors:

Mohammad Azzeh, Daniel Neagu and Peter Cowling
Abstract: Analogy estimation is a well known approach for software effort estimation. The underlying assumption of this approach is the more similar the software project description attributes are, the more similar the software project effort is. One of the difficult activities in analogy estimation is how to derive a new estimate from retrieved solutions. Using retrieved solutions without adjustment to considered problem environment is not often sufficient. Thus, they need some adjustment to minimize variation between current case and retrieved cases. The main objective of the present paper is to investigate the applicability of fuzzy logic based software projects similarity measure to adjust analogy estimation and derive a new estimate. We proposed adaptation techniques which take into account the similarity between two software projects in terms of each feature. In earlier work, a similarity measure between software projects based on fuzzy C-means has been proposed and validated theoretically against some well known axioms such as: Normality, Symmetry, transitivity, etc. This similarity measure will be guided towards deriving a new estimate.
Download
Paper Nr: 200
Title:

RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT IN SYNERGY WITH PERSISTENCE FRAMEWORK
Authors:

Choo C. How and Sai P. Lee
Abstract: This paper proposes the concept, architecture, design and development of a rapid application development toolkit that will leverage on a persistence framework named PersistF, to subsequently provide an easy-to-use and customizable front-end web application development environment for software developers to perform rapid web application development. The proposed rapid application development toolkit consists of two main parts – RADEWeb and PersistF Configuration Wizard, to enable software developers not only to deliver their target web application within a shorter timeframe through an easy-to-use front-end environment, but also to achieve encapsulation of database access from the business objects of the web application.
Download
Paper Nr: 220
Title:

FUNCTION POINT SIZE ESTIMATION FOR OBJECT ORIENTED SOFTWARE BASED ON USE CASE MODEL
Authors:

Chamundeswari Arumugam and Babu Chitra
Abstract: Precise size estimation earlier in the software development life cycle has always been a challenge for the software industry. In the context of object oriented software, Use Case Model (UCM) is widely used to capture the functionality addressed in the software. Existing size estimation techniques such as use case points and use case size points do not adhere to any standard. Consequently, lots of variations are possible, leading to inaccurate size estimation. On the other hand, Function Point Analysis (FPA) has been standardized. However, the current estimation approaches based on FPA employ object modeling that happens later in the software development life cycle rather than the UCM. In order to gain the advantages of FPA as well as UCM, this paper proposes a new approach for size estimation of object oriented software. This approach is based on the UCM by adapting it to FPA. Mapping rules are proposed for proper identification and classification of various components from UCM to FPA. Estimation results obtained using the proposed approach are compared with those using finer granular level object model which adapts FPA at design phase. The close agreement between these two results indicates that the proposed approach is suitable for accurate software size estimation earlier in the software development life cycle.
Download
Paper Nr: 222
Title:

ENGINEERING PROCESS BASED ON GRID USE CASES FOR MOBILE GRID SYSTEMS
Authors:

David G. Rosado, Eduardo Fernández-medina, Mario Piattini and Javier Lopez
Abstract: The interest to incorporate mobile devices into Grid systems has arisen with two main purposes. The first one is to enrich users of these devices while the other is that of enriching the own Grid infrastructure. Security of these systems, due to their distributed and open nature, is considered a topic of great interest. A formal approach to security in the software life cycle is essential to protect corporate resources. However, little attention has been paid to this aspect of software development. Due to its criticality, security should be integrated as a formal approach into the software life cycle. We are developing a methodology of development for secure mobile Grid computing based systems that helps to design and build secure Grid systems with support for mobile devices directed by use cases and security use cases and focused on service-oriented security architecture. In this paper, we will present one of the first steps of our methodology consisting of analyzing security requirements of mobile grid systems. This analysis will allow us to obtain a set of security requirements that our methodology must cover and implement.
Download
Paper Nr: 227
Title:

RESOLVING INCOMPATIBILITY DURING THE EVOLUTION OF WEB SERVICES WITH MESSAGE CONVERSION
Authors:

Vadym Borovskiy, Alexander Zeier, Jan Karstens and Heinz U. Roggenkemper
Abstract: One of the challenges that Web service providers face is service evolution management. In general, the challenge is to ensure the substitutability of service versions, i.e. correct functioning of all ongoing client applications relying on the old version of a service after the version has been substituted with a new one. Unfortunately, no currently available design approach can guarantee a perfectly extensible architecture that preserves full backward compatibility during its evolution. Hence, incompatibilities are very likely to occur if an old version of a service is replaced with a new one. This paper addresses the incompatibility problem and describes a solution to the problem. This solution is based upon the already known design pattern of message translation and the ASP.NET 2.0 Web service platform. Using the platform’s API the standard ASP.NET pipeline has been augmented with an additional step of applying XSL transformations to the XML payload of the messages. The solution is then verified against the Electronic Commerce Service from Amazon.com web services suite. Thus, the contribution of the work is a new .NET implementation of the translator pattern.
Download
Paper Nr: 276
Title:

FINE-GRAINED INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT OF SOFTWARE CONFIGURATIONS AND TRACEABILITY RELATIONS
Authors:

Pietro Colombo, Vieri D. Bianco and Luigi Lavazza
Abstract: Software Configuration Management is essential to manage the evolution of non trivial software systems. Requirements for SCM support are continuously growing, demanding for seamless integration with the traditional development tools and support for management activities like change management, change impact analysis, etc. This paper presents SCCS-XP, a SCM platform supporting change management and traceability among fine-grained software artifacts. SCCS-XP exploits a XML-based language to represent versioned software artifacts. SCCS-XP provides the basic capabilities to build full-fledged SCM environments featuring traceability management, change management and integrates nicely with development tools.
Download
Paper Nr: 277
Title:

AN INCREMENTAL APPROACH TO SOFTWARE REENGINEERING BASED ON OBJECT-DATA MAPPING
Authors:

Giacomo Bucci, Valeriano Sandrucci and Enrico Vicario
Abstract: We address the problem of reengineering legacy systems towards adoption of current predominant technologies, i.e. object-oriented (OO) programming and relational databases (RDB). To smooth the reengineering process we follow an evolutionary approach based on the construction of a mapping layer decoupling application logic from persistent data, so that application reengineering and data reengineering are made independent and carried out incrementally. The mapping layer does not impose any particular environment, container or whatsoever. Therefore, program development can be carried out based on well established OO design principles. In reimplementing applications, rather than trying to identify applicative classes exclusively from the legacy code, we follow the guidelines of iterative development processes such as UP, giving the due consideration to actual user requirements.
Download
Paper Nr: 281
Title:

A COMPONENT-BASED SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE - Reconfigurable Software for Ambient Intelligent Networked Services Environments
Authors:

Michael Berger, Lars Dittmann, Michael Caragiozidis, Nikos Mouratidis, Christoforos Kavadias and Michael Loupis
Abstract: This paper describes a component-based software architecture and design methodology, which will enable efficient engineering, deployment, and run-time management of reconfigurable ambient intelligent services. A specific application of a media player is taken as an example to show the development of software bundles according to the proposed methodology. Furthermore, a software tool has been developed to facilitate composition and graphical representation of component based services. The tool will provide a model of a generic reusable component, and the user of the tool will be able to instantiate reusable components using this model implementation. The work has been carried out within the European project COMANCHE that will utilize component models to support Software Configuration Management.
Download
Paper Nr: 295
Title:

STRUCTURING DESIGN KNOWLEDGE IN SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
Authors:

Dionisis X. Adamopoulos
Abstract: Web services are emerging technologies that can be considered as the result of the continuous improvement of Internet services due to the tremendous increase in demand that is being placed on them. They are rapidly evolving and are expected to change the paradigms of both software development and use, by promoting software reusability over the Internet, by facilitating the wrapping of underlying computing models with XML, and by providing diverse and sophisticated functionality fast and flexibly in the form of composite service offerings. In this paper, the different facets of Web services are identified and a flexible approach to engineering complex Web services is adopted in the form of a proposed framework for the development of Web services. After the examination of its main constituent parts, it is argued that its full potential and that of Web service engineering in general, is realized through the gradual formation of a rich service grid offering value-added supporting functionality and therefore the main desirable properties of such a service grid are highlighted. Finally, the paper outlines a validation approach for the proposed framework and assembles important pointers for future work and concluding remarks.
Download
Paper Nr: 300
Title:

LASER SIMULATION - Methods of Pulse Detection in Laser Simulation
Authors:

Jana Varnuskova
Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of laser simulation. At the beginning it gives a broader overview of the project of laser simulation which is processed at the University of West Bohemia. The simulation is described in several fundamental steps, a technique of data obtaining, processing and usage for the simulation is highlighted to understand the whole approach well. Three methods for automatic pulse detection are described in detail. Pulse detection is the main part of the pulse extraction, which is one of the most important data processing steps. The main idea of each described method is explained and their problems and possible ways of their elimination are discussed. At the end of the paper future plans for the project with the focus on the alternatives of system automation are introduced.
Download
Paper Nr: 304
Title:

HANDLING DEVELOPMENT TIME UNCERTAINTY IN AGILE RELEASE PLANNING
Authors:

Kevin Logue and Kevin McDaid
Abstract: When determining the functionality to complete in upcoming software releases, decisions are typically based upon uncertain information. Both the business value and cost to develop chosen functionality are highly susceptible to uncertainty. This paper proposes a relatively simple statistical methodology that allows for uncertainty in both business value and cost. In so doing it provides key stakeholders the ability to determine the probability of completing a release on time and to budget. The technique is lightweight in nature and consistent with existing agile planning practices. A case study is provided to demonstrate how the method may be used.
Download
Paper Nr: 325
Title:

GOOAL AUTOMATIC DESIGN TOOL - A Role Posets based Tool to Produce Object Models from Problem Descriptions
Authors:

Hector G. Perez-Gonzalez, Sandra Sandra Nava-Muñoz, Alberto Nuñez-Varela and Jugal Kalita
Abstract: A number of software analysts may produce different, perhaps all of them correct, solutions from one specific software requirement document. This is because natural language understanding is complex and because each analyst has distinct design experience. A methodology and approach that can be automated and that uses a proposed semi-natural language called 4WL used to accelerate the production of reliable accords between different stakeholders. The supporting software tool called GOOAL, Graphic Object Oriented Analysis Laboratory automatically produces simple object models (UML diagrams) from English or Spanish statements with minimal user participation. These statements, faithfully describe the original problem description sentences. The models are generated analyzing each sentence of the intermediate 4W language version of the original sentence set. With this methodology and supporting software tool, students of Object Oriented technology can visualize the design decisions being made by the system. This methodology and software tool has been used to support the learning process in object Oriented analysis and design courses. The original tool was developed to “understand” English and it was validated with design artefacts produced by several experts of the University of Colorado. The main results reported by the students, are related with the use of good design practices, a better understanding of UML language and a major interest in the pre programming process. Its technical contribution is the role posets technique.
Download
Paper Nr: 331
Title:

AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPES FOR DOMAIN MODEL VALIDATION
Authors:

António M. Rosado da Cruz and João P. Faria
Abstract: This paper presents an approach to domain models validation with customers, end users and other stakeholders. From an early system model that represents the main domain (or business) entities in a UML class diagram, with classes, relationships, attributes and constraints, it is automatically generated an interactive form-based application prototype supporting the basic CRUD operations (create, retrieve, update and delete). The generated form-based user interface provides some features that are derived from the model’s constraints and increase the prototype usability. This prototype allows the early validation of core system models, and can also be used as a basis for subsequent developments. The prototype generation process follows a model-driven development approach: the domain model, conforming to a defined domain meta-model, is first transformed to an application model, conforming to a defined application meta-model, based on a set of transformation rules; then a generator for a specific platform produces the executable files (currently, XUL and RDF files).
Download
Paper Nr: 331
Title:

AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPES FOR DOMAIN MODEL VALIDATION
Authors:

António M. Rosado da Cruz and João P. Faria
Abstract: This paper presents an approach to domain models validation with customers, end users and other stakeholders. From an early system model that represents the main domain (or business) entities in a UML class diagram, with classes, relationships, attributes and constraints, it is automatically generated an interactive form-based application prototype supporting the basic CRUD operations (create, retrieve, update and delete). The generated form-based user interface provides some features that are derived from the model’s constraints and increase the prototype usability. This prototype allows the early validation of core system models, and can also be used as a basis for subsequent developments. The prototype generation process follows a model-driven development approach: the domain model, conforming to a defined domain meta-model, is first transformed to an application model, conforming to a defined application meta-model, based on a set of transformation rules; then a generator for a specific platform produces the executable files (currently, XUL and RDF files).
Download
Paper Nr: 361
Title:

DYNAMISM IN REFACTORING CONSTRUCTION AND EVOLUTION - A Solution based on XML and Reflection
Authors:

Raúl Marticorena and Yania Crespo
Abstract: Current available refactoring tools, even stand-alone or integrated in development environments, offer a static set of refactoring operations. Users (developers) can run these refactorings on their source codes, but they can not adjust, enhance, evolve them or even increase the refactoring set in a smooth way. Refactoring operations are hand coded using some support libraries. The problem of maintaining or enriching the refactoring tools and their libraries are the same of any kind of software, introducing complexity dealing with refactoring, managing and transforming software elements, etc. On the other hand, available refactoring tools are mainly language dependent, thus the effort to reusing refactoring implementations is enormous, when we change the source code programming language. This paper describes our work on aided refactoring construction and evolution based on declarative definition of refactoring operations. The solution is based on frameworks, XML and reflective programming. Certain language independence is also achieved, easing migration from one programming language to another, and bringing rational support for multilanguage development environments.
Download
Paper Nr: 384
Title:

MODELS FOR INTERACTION, INTEGRATION AND EVOLUTION OF PRE-EXISTENT SYSTEMS AT ARCHITECTURAL LEVEL - Designing Systems for Changing Conditions
Authors:

Juan M. López, Jaime Muñoz Arteaga, Francisco Javier Álvarez Ramírez, Manuel Mora Tavarez and Ma. Lourdes Y. Margain Fernández
Abstract: This paper describes a set of models that may serve as the basis for the creation of architectural patterns for interaction, evolution and integration of pre-existent systems. Proposed models are based on an identification of system’s specialized components for operation, control and direction making easier to find connecting points between systems. This set of models covers some rationality needed to adapt pre-existent systems to an evolving environment where organization and technologies are under continuous change.
Download
Paper Nr: 384
Title:

MODELS FOR INTERACTION, INTEGRATION AND EVOLUTION OF PRE-EXISTENT SYSTEMS AT ARCHITECTURAL LEVEL - Designing Systems for Changing Conditions
Authors:

Juan M. López, Jaime Muñoz Arteaga, Francisco Javier Álvarez Ramírez, Manuel Mora Tavarez and Ma. Lourdes Y. Margain Fernández
Abstract: This paper describes a set of models that may serve as the basis for the creation of architectural patterns for interaction, evolution and integration of pre-existent systems. Proposed models are based on an identification of system’s specialized components for operation, control and direction making easier to find connecting points between systems. This set of models covers some rationality needed to adapt pre-existent systems to an evolving environment where organization and technologies are under continuous change.
Download
Paper Nr: 479
Title:

AN ESTIMATIVE MODEL OF THE POINTED DEFECTS RATE IN SOFTWARE PRE-REVIEW FOR NOVICE ENGINEERS IN CHINESE OFFSHORE COMPANY
Authors:

Zuoqi Wang, Yixiao Qu, Masanori Akiyoshi and Norihisa Komoda
Abstract: This paper quantitatively discusses the pre-review effectiveness of software developed by novice software engineers in Chinese offshore company. Pre-review process is applied to the software product developed by novice engineers before the normal test process for keeping the quality of product. We extract the factors that influence the number of defects. Then, the collected data of the pointed defects rate and the factors in 27 pre-review are analysed by using the “quantification theory type I” to create a mathematical model for estimating the pointed defects rate. The coefficient of determination R of the obtained estimative model is 0.86. The model provides sufficient accuracy. In the model, “ difficulty of task” is the most effective factor.
Download
Paper Nr: 481
Title:

A UML-BASED VARIABILITY SPECIFICATION FOR PRODUCT LINE ARCHITECTURE VIEWS
Authors:

Liliana Dobrica and Eila Niemelä
Abstract: In this paper we present a rigorous and practical notation for specifying variability in product line architecture views expressed in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The notation has been used for the explicit representation of variations and their locations in software product line architectures based on a design method already established. The improvement consists in a service orientation of architectural models. The benefit of a more familiar and widely used notation facilitates a broader understanding of the architecture and enables more extensive tool support for manipulating it. The specification notation paves the way for the development of tools.
Download
Paper Nr: 494
Title:

A HW/SW CO-REUSE METHODOLOGY BASED ON DESIGN REFINEMENT TEMPLATES IN UML DIAGRAMS
Authors:

Masahiro Fujita, Takeshi Matsumoto and Hiroaki Yoshida
Abstract: In general, a design refinement process of an electronic system including both hardware and software traces a similar process of other systems in requirements analysis and system-level design. It is more true especially when they belong to the same product domains. Therefore, we can reuse various documents easily by making templates of the design refinement. In this paper, we propose a methodology that generates those templates and illustrate that the template made from the design refinement process of Compact-Flash (CF) memory interface controller can actually be used in that of ATM switch. Both of them are typical HW/SW co-designs where most of the control is performed by software. The generated templates can be applied to various designs which have the structure of “IO + intelligent buffers”. We use UML to describe the design templates and prove the efficiency of the use of the templates by showing the similarity of UML diagrams.
Download
Paper Nr: 498
Title:

RIGOROUS COMMUNICATION MODELLING AT TRANSACTION LEVEL WITH SYSTEMC
Authors:

Tomi Metsälä, Tomi Westerlund, Seppo Virtanen and Juha Plosila
Abstract: We introduce a communication model for ActionC, a framework for rigorous development of embedded computer systems. The concept of ActionC is the integration of SystemC, an informal design language, and Action Systems, a formal modelling language supporting verification and stepwise correctness-preserving refinement of system models. The ActionC approach combines the possibility to use a formal correct-by-construct method and an industry standard design language that also includes a simulation environment. Translation of an Action Systems model to the corresponding ActionC model is carried out with the means provided by SystemC and in a way that preserves the semantics of the underlying formal model. Hence, the ActionC framework allows us to reliably simulate Action Systems descriptions using standard SystemC tools, which is especially important for validating the initial formal specification of a system. Our initial experiments with ActionC have successfully produced correct-proven simulatable SystemC descriptions of Action Systems.
Download
Paper Nr: 503
Title:

PATTERN-BASED BUSINESS-DRIVEN ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF SERVICE ARCHITECTURES
Authors:

Veronica Gacitua-Decar and Claus Pahl
Abstract: Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) problem originated by business process automation requirements. In previous work, we developed a methodological framework for the designing of service architectures for EAI. The framework is structured in a layered architecture called LABAS, and is distinguished by using architectural abstractions in different layers. This paper describes the pattern-based techniques used in LABAS for service identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications.
Download
Paper Nr: 57
Title:

LEARNABILITY AND ROBUSTNESS OF USER INTERFACES - Towards a Formal Analysis of Usability Design Principles
Authors:

Steinar Kristoffersen
Abstract: The paper is concerned with automatic usability assessment, based on heuristic principles. The objective is to lay the ground, albeit still rather informally, of a program of assessing the usability of an interactive system using formal methods. Further research can then extend this into an algebra of interactive systems.
Download
Paper Nr: 126
Title:

SOFTWARE RE-STRUCTURING - An Architecture-Based Tool
Authors:

Violeta Bozhikova, Mariana Stoeva, Anatoly Antonov and Vladimir Nikolov
Abstract: The practice shows that many software systems have been evolving for many years and are now large and complex. Because the structure of these systems is usually not well documented, great research effort is needed to find appropriate abstractions of their structure, that we can simplify their maintenance, evolution and adaptation. A variety of techniques and tools are developed trying to effectively solve this problem. In this paper an Architecture-Based Framework for software re-structuring is discussed. Next, how this framework is implemented in an ever evolving and user-driven tool that can effectively support the software re-structuring process is commented.
Download
Paper Nr: 126
Title:

SOFTWARE RE-STRUCTURING - An Architecture-Based Tool
Authors:

Violeta Bozhikova, Mariana Stoeva, Anatoly Antonov and Vladimir Nikolov
Abstract: The practice shows that many software systems have been evolving for many years and are now large and complex. Because the structure of these systems is usually not well documented, great research effort is needed to find appropriate abstractions of their structure, that we can simplify their maintenance, evolution and adaptation. A variety of techniques and tools are developed trying to effectively solve this problem. In this paper an Architecture-Based Framework for software re-structuring is discussed. Next, how this framework is implemented in an ever evolving and user-driven tool that can effectively support the software re-structuring process is commented.
Download
Paper Nr: 195
Title:

SOFTWARE EFFORT ESTIMATION AS A CLASSIFICATION PROBLEM
Authors:

Ayse BAKIR, Burak Turhan and Ayşe Başar Bener
Abstract: Software cost estimation is still an open challenge. Many researchers have proposed various methods that usually focus on point estimates. Software cost estimation, up to now, has been treated as a regression problem. However, in order to prevent over/under estimates, it is more practical to predict the interval of estimations instead of the exact values. In this paper, we propose an approach that converts cost estimation into a classification problem and classifies new software projects in one of the effort classes each corresponding to an effort interval. Our approach integrates cluster analysis with classification methods. Cluster analysis is used to determine effort intervals while different classification algorithms are used to find the corresponding effort classes. The proposed approach is applied to seven public data sets. Our experimental results show that hit rates obtained for effort estimation are around 90%-100%s. For point estimation, the results are also comparable to those in the literature.
Download
Paper Nr: 301
Title:

AN INTERMEDIATION SYSTEM BASED ON AGENTS MODELLING TO SHARE KNOWLEDGE IN A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICES
Authors:

Kenfack Clauvice and Danielle Boulanger
Abstract: This paper presents an intermediation multi-agent system to manage the distributed collaborative design environment like a CoPs. The JADE-based intermediation system (JAIS) uses community enactment mechanism and agent integration mechanism. The community enactment mechanism is the system kernel and follows the specifications of the CoPs reference model. The system kernel supports four agents (moderator, user, expert and newcomer agents) to manage the community, whereas the integration mechanism supports an intermediation agent to interact, coordinate and monitor the activities between agents. JAIS facilitates the team interaction in a collaborative and distributed environment.
Download
Paper Nr: 332
Title:

PREDICTING DEFECTS IN A LARGE TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEM
Authors:

Gozde Kocak, Burak Turhan and Ayşe Başar Bener
Abstract: In a large software system knowing which files are most likely to be fault-prone is valuable information for project managers. However, our experience shows that it is difficult to collect and analyze fine-grained test defects in a large and complex software system. On the other hand, previous research has shown that companies can safely use cross company data with nearest neighbor sampling to predict their defects in case they are unable to collect local data. In this study we analyzed 25 projects of a large telecommunication system. To predict defect proneness of modules we learned from NASA MDP data. We used static call graph based ranking (CGBR) as well as nearest neighbor sampling for constructing method level defect predictors. Our results suggest that, for the analyzed projects, at least 70% of the defects can be detected by inspecting only i) 6% of the code using a Naïve Bayes model, ii) 3% of the code using CGBR framework.
Download
Paper Nr: 411
Title:

REFACTORING PREDICTION USING CLASS COMPLEXITY METRICS
Authors:

Yasemin Kosker, Burak Turhan and Ayşe Başar Bener
Abstract: In the lifetime of a software product, development costs are only the tip of the iceberg. Nearly 90% of the cost is maintenance due to error correction, adoptation and mainly enhancements. As Belady and Lehman (Lehman and Belady, 1985) state that software will become increasingly unstructured as it is changed. One way to overcome this problem is refactoring. Refactoring is an approach which reduces the software complexity by incrementally improving internal software quality. Our motivation in this research is to detect the classes that need to be rafactored by analyzing the code complexity. We propose a machine learning based model to predict classes to be refactored. We use Weighted Naïve Bayes with InfoGain heuristic as the learner and we conducted experiments with metric data that we collected from the largest GSM operator in Turkey. Our results showed that we can predict 82% of the classes that need refactoring with 13% of manual inspection effort on the average.
Download
Paper Nr: 508
Title:

MODELS, FEATURES AND ALGEBRAS - An Exploratory Study of Model Composition and Software Product Lines
Authors:

Roberto Lopez-Herrejon
Abstract: Software Product Lines (SPL) are families of related programs distinguished by the features they provide. Feature Oriented Software Development (FOSD) is a paradigm that raises features to first-class entities in the definition and modularization of SPL. The relevance of model composition has been addressed in UML 2 with new construct Package Merge. In this paper we show the convergence that exists between FOSD and Package Merge. We believe exploring their synergies could be mutually beneficial. SPL compositional approaches could leverage experience on the composition of non-code artifacts, while model composition could find in SPL new problem domains on which to evaluate and apply their theories, tools and techniques.
Download