35 research outputs found
EMBRACING CONCEPTUAL MODELLING TO ENABLE THE MEDIATION ROLE OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Nowadays, digital environments are getting a more important role than ever in shaping the way in which enterprise operations are conducted and enterprises are being developed. Traditional information systems (IS) used by enterprises need to evolve in order to accommodate the shift of their role from representation to mediation, role that has been recently conceptualized but not sufficiently researched to identify means that enable its operationalization across domains and purposes. This work identifies what are the key enablers and how should these be applied regardless of the domain of interest. For this, our paper showcases the development of a new enterprise system that serves as a proof-of concept artifact that operationalizes the before mentioned new role of the IS. Our proposal relies on Conceptual Modelling together with all the other related enablers like Digital Twins, metamodeling platforms or model-driven operation. In this way, we want to highlight the benefits of Conceptual Modelling in providing a new abstractization layer between the digital and the physical worlds, supporting roundtrip engineering capabilities. Our example concerns the modern organization that continuously aims to become more innovative and gain competitive advantage therefore, it employs smart devices like drones in different business operations
Interactive Behavior-driven Development: a Low-code Perspective
Within behavior-driven development (BDD), different types of stakeholders collaborate in creating scenarios that specify application behavior. The current workflow for BDD expects non-technical stakeholders to use an integrated development environment (IDE) to write textual scenarios in the Gherkin language and verify application behavior using test passed/failed reports. Research to date shows that this approach leads non-technical stakeholders to perceive BDD as an overhead in addition to the testing. In this vision paper, we propose an alternative approach to specify and verify application behavior visually, interactively, and collaboratively within an IDE. Instead of writing textual scenarios, non-technical stakeholders compose, edit, and save scenarios by using tailored graphical interfaces that allow them to manipulate involved domain objects. Upon executing such interactively composed scenarios, all stakeholders verify the application behavior by inspecting domain-specific representations of run-time domain objects instead of a test run report. Such a low code approach to BDD has the potential to enable nontechnical stakeholders to engage more harmoniously in behavior specification and validation together with technical stakeholders within an IDE. There are two main contributions of this work: (i) we present an analysis of the features of 13 BDD tools, (ii) we describe a prototype implementation of our approach, and (iii) we outline our plan to conduct a large-scale developer survey to evaluate our approach to highlight the perceived benefits over the existing approach
The Question of the Danube and the Planning Myopia
This is our first paper in a sequence of studies dedicated to the Danube. Hence, the following text should be considered as an introduction to a more ambitious research project in the field of spatial planning. In essence, the article forms a critical synthesis of the various arguments that have been put forwardover the past hundred years in support of the Danube’s significance as a vector for development. This exercise in synthesis is both a necessary and an instructing prerequisite for the entire research project: In due course, we wish to formulate a basic set of hypotheses concerning Romania’s development in connection to the Danube. If proven feasible, we wish to subsequently test them in as much detail as possible. The rationale behind this review paper is a reasoned examination of the functions the Danube can still fulfil from a Romanian spatial planning perspective
Improving live debugging of concurrent threads through thread histories
Concurrency issues are inherently harder to identify and fix than issues in sequential programs, due to aspects like indeterminate order of access to shared resources and thread synchronisation. Live debuggers are often used by developers to gain insights into the behaviour of concurrent programs by exploring the call stacks of threads. Nevertheless, contemporary live debuggers for concurrent programs are usually sequential debuggers augmented with the ability to display different threads in isolation. To these debuggers every thread call stack begins with a designated start routine and the calls that led to the creation of the thread are not visible, as they are part of a different thread. This requires developers to manually link stack traces belonging to related but distinct threads, adding another burden to the already difficult act of debugging concurrent programs. To improve debugging of concurrent programs we address the problem of incomplete call stacks in debuggers through a thread and debugger model that enables live debugging of child threads within the context of their parent threads. The proposed debugger operates on a virtual thread that merges together multiple relevant threads. To better understand the features of debuggers for concurrent programs we present an in-depth discussion of the concurrency related features in current live debuggers. We test the applicability of the proposed model by instantiating it for simple threads, local and remote promises, and a remote object-oriented database. Starting from these use cases we further discuss implementation details ensuring a practical approach
Controlling Plasmonic Chemistry Pathways through Specific Ion Effects
Plasmon-driven dehalogenation of brominated purines has been recently explored as a model system to understand fundamental aspects of plasmon-assisted chemical reactions. Here, it is shown that divalent Ca2+ ions strongly bridge the adsorption of bromoadenine (Br-Ade) to Ag surfaces. Such ion-mediated binding increases the molecule's adsorption energy leading to an overlap of the metal energy states and the molecular states, enabling the chemical interface damping (CID) of the plasmon modes of the Ag nanostructures (i.e., direct electron transfer from the metal to Br-Ade). Consequently, the conversion of Br-Ade to adenine almost doubles following the addition of Ca2+. These experimental results, supported by theoretical calculations of the local density of states of the Ag/Br-Ade complex, indicate a change of the charge transfer pathway driving the dehalogenation reaction, from Landau damping (in the lack of Ca2+ ions) to CID (after the addition of Ca2+). The results show that the surface dynamics of chemical species (including water molecules) play an essential role in charge transfer at plasmonic interfaces and cannot be ignored. It is envisioned that these results will help in designing more efficient nanoreactors, harnessing the full potential of plasmon-assisted chemistry
Plasma miR-19b, miR-34a, and miR-146a expression in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and cataract: A pilot study
Cataract is among the most common ocular complications in diabetes mellitus (DM). While microRNA (miRNA) dysregulations in DM have been previously reported, consensus is still lacking concerning miRNA expression in cataract. Furthermore, the miRNA profile in diabetic cataract patients remains largely unexplored, and data on plasma expression levels are limited. Our study aimed to assess the plasma levels of three distinct miRNA species (hsa-miR-19b, hsa-miR-34a, and hsa-miR-146a) implicated in the development of cataract and/or DM.We investigated the circulating miRNA expression in DM patients diagnosed with cataract, compared to a non-DM cataract group. We employed qRT-PCR for relative quantification experiments and subsequently conducted a correlation analysis between miRNA expression levels and clinical characteristics. Our findings reveal that hsa-miR-34a and hsa-miR-146a are differentially expressed in the two cohorts. However, no significant correlation was observed between the clinical variables and miRNA levels. In summary, our results suggest a potential role for hsa-miR-34a and hsa-miR-146a in the biology of diabetic cataract
Lightning Talk:"I solemnly pledge" A Manifesto for Personal Responsibility in the Engineering of Academic Software
International audienceSoftware is fundamental to academic research work, both as part of the method and as the result of research. In June 2016 25 people gathered at Schloss Dagstuhl for a week-long Perspectives Workshop and began to develop a manifesto which places emphasis on the scholarly value of academic software and on personal responsibility. Twenty pledges cover the recognition of academic software, the academic software process and the intellectual content of academic software. This is still work in progress. Through this lightning talk, we aim to get feedback and hone these further, as well as to inspire the WSSSPE audience to think about actions they can take themselves rather than actions they want others to take. We aim to publish a more fully developed Dagstuhl Manifesto by December 2016
Towards object-aware development tools
Reasoning about object-oriented applications requires developers to answer contextual questions about their domain objects. Tailored development tools can support developers in this activity by providing relevant domain-specific information. Nonetheless, a high effort for extending development tools to handle domain-specific objects, together with diverging mechanisms for creating, sharing and discovering extensions, discourage developers to adapt their tools. To address this, we propose to enable contextual behavior in development tools by allowing domain objects to decide how they are handled in development tools. We show that combining this idea with mechanisms for specifying extensions using internal DSLs can significantly reduce the cost of tailoring development tools to specific domains
Moldable tools
Development tools are a prerequisite for crafting software. They offer the lenses through which developers perceive and reason about their software systems. Generic development tools, while having a wide range of applicability, ignore the contextual nature of software systems and do not allow developers to directly reason in terms of domain abstractions. Domain-specific development tools, tailored to particular application domains, can address this problem. While it has clear advantages, incorporating domain abstractions into development tools is a challenging activity. The wide range of domains and contextual tasks that development tools need to support leads to costly or ad hoc mechanisms to incorporate and discover domain abstractions. Inherently, this limits developers from taking advantage of domain-specific information during the development and maintenance of their systems.
To overcome this problem, we propose to embed domain abstractions into development tools through the design of moldable tools that support the inexpensive creation of domain-specific extensions capturing domain abstractions, and that automatically select extensions based on the domain model and the developer’s interaction with the domain model. This solution aims to reduce the cost of creating extensions. Towards this goal, it provides precise extension points together with internal DSLs for configuring common types of extensions. This solution facilitates automatic discovery by enabling extension creators to specify together with an extension an activation predicate that captures the context in which that extension is applicable.
We validate the moldable tools approach by applying it, in the context of objectoriented applications, to improve three development activities, namely: reasoning about run-time objects, searching for domain-specific artifacts, and reasoning about run-time behavior. For each activity we identify limitations of current tools, show how redesigning those tools following the moldable tools approach addresses the identified limitations, and discuss the cost for creating domain-specific extensions. We demonstrate that moldable tools address an existing need by analyzing the increase in domain-specific extensions after we integrated the moldable tools solving the aforementioned tasks with an IDE. We also show what kinds of custom environments developers can create by continuously adapting their development tools
Towards moldable development tools
Developers commonly ask detailed and domain-specific questions about the software systems they are developing and maintaining. Integrated development environments (IDEs) form an essential category of tools for developing software that should support software engineering decision making. Unfortunately, rigid and generic IDEs that focus on low-level programming tasks, that promote code rather than data, and that suppress customization, offer limited support for informed decision making during software development. We propose to improve decision making within IDEs by moving from generic to context-aware IDEs through moldable tools. In this paper, we promote the idea of moldable tools, illustrate it with concrete examples, and discuss future research directions