A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Viewpoint Development of Stochastic Hybrid Systems

Nowadays, due to the explosive spreading of networked and highly distributed systems, mastering system complexity becomes a critical issue. Two development and verification paradigms have become more popular: viewpoints and randomisation. The viewpoints offer large freedom and introduce concurrency and compositionality in the development process. Randomisation is now a traditional method for reducing complexity (comparing with deterministic models) and it offers finer analytical analysis tools (quantification over non-determinism, multi-valued logics, etc). In this paper, we propose a combination of these two paradigms introducing a viewpoint methodology for systems with stochastic behaviours

User-Friendly Ontology Creation Methodologies - A Survey

The convergence of the semantic web and the social web to the social semantic web leads to new challenges in ontology engineering. As of today ontologies are created by highly specialized ontology engineers. In order to unite the wisdom of crowds and ontologies new approaches to ontology creation are necessary to bridge the ontology gap and enable novice users to create formalized knowledge. Numerous ontology development methodologies are available; in this paper we will briefly present 16 ontology development methodologies and evaluate them against criteria for their user-friendliness and their suitability for usage by novice users and domain experts. Our eventual goal is the identification of best practices and required research for user-friendly ontology design

Towards Principles for Structuring and Managing Very Large Semantic Multidimensional Data Models

The management of semantic multidimensional data models plays an important role during the phases of development and maintenance of data warehouse systems. Unfortunately, this is not done with the necessary stress by now. Reasons might be seen in the plethora of semantic notations or the insufficient tool support for multidimensional modeling. The paper on hand provides experiences gained within a project with an industry partner of the telecommunications industry. Their problem is a very huge data warehouse with more than 400 data cubes and several hundred key performance indicators. We developed a repository-based solution for managing the semantic data models. Our lessons learned show that especially for very large data models there has to be a repository based solution as well as a clear concept on how to break them up into their component pars. The aim of our principles is to increase the understandability as well as the maintainability of semantic multidimensional data models

Redesigning work organizations and technologies: experiences from European projects

Currently distributed business process (re) design (resulting in components of business networks) basically relies on technical criteria. And that are the main purposes of most research projects supported by EC. Through the process of building a European Research Area, this means a strong influence in the national research programmes. However it is generally accepted that it should also take into account social criteria and aspects such as the quality of working life, or participation in decision processes. Those were some of the objectives of projects in de 80s decade, and framed some of the main concepts and scientific approaches to work organisation. The democratic participation of network and organisations members in the design process is a critical success factor. This is not accepted by everyone, but is based in sufficient case studies. Nevertheless, in order to achieve an optimization that can satisfying the requirements of agility of a network of enterprises, more complex design methods must be developed. Thus, the support to the collaborative design of distributed work in a network of enterprises, through a concurrent approaching business processes, work organisation and task content is a key factor to achieve such purposes. Increasing needs in terms of amounts of information, agility, and support for collaboration without time and space constrains, imposes the use of a computer-based model.business process; networks; decision processes; collaborative design;

Using the Internet of Things to Teach Good Software Engineering Practice to High School Students

This paper describes a course to introduce high school students to software engineering in practice using the Internet Of Things (IoT). IoT devices allow students to get quick, visible results without watering down technical aspects of programming and networking. The course has three broad goals: (1) to make software engineering fun and applicable, with the aim of recruiting traditionally underrepresented groups into computing; (2) to make young students begin to approach problems with a design mindset; and (3) to show students that computer science, generally, and software engineering, specifically, is about much more than programming. The course unfolds in three segments. The first is a whirlwind introduction to a subset of IoT technologies. Students complete a specific task (or set of tasks) using each technology. This segment culminates in a “do-it-yourself” project, in which the students implement a simple IoT application using their basic knowledge of the technologies. The course’s second segment introduces software engineering practices, again primarily via hands-on practical tutorials. In the third segment of the course, the students conceive of, design, and implement a project that uses the technologies introduced in the first segment, all while being attentive to the good software engineering practices acquired in the second segment. In addition to presenting the course curriculum, the paper also discusses a first offering of the course in a threeweek summer intensive program in 2017, including assessments done to evaluate the curriculum.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Integrating SDLC and ITSM to \u27Servitize\u27 Systems Development

IT Service Management (ITSM) is generating much interest in industry as the quality and reliability of IT services are increasingly recognized as a critical factor for business success. Academic researchers have been slower to respond to industry demand for IT service management research and coursework. This paper argues that academia has an important role to play in integrating ITSM concepts and skills into traditional information systems coursework, specifically system development. The core systems analysis and design course is used to illustrate how IT service management concepts and models can be introduced into existing coursework to support the focus on IT services required by industry today, eventually reducing the growing percentage of IT budgets currently attributed to the operation and maintenance stages of ‘nonservitized’ systems development projects

The KB paradigm and its application to interactive configuration

The knowledge base paradigm aims to express domain knowledge in a rich formal language, and to use this domain knowledge as a knowledge base to solve various problems and tasks that arise in the domain by applying multiple forms of inference. As such, the paradigm applies a strict separation of concerns between information and problem solving. In this paper, we analyze the principles and feasibility of the knowledge base paradigm in the context of an important class of applications: interactive configuration problems. In interactive configuration problems, a configuration of interrelated objects under constraints is searched, where the system assists the user in reaching an intended configuration. It is widely recognized in industry that good software solutions for these problems are very difficult to develop. We investigate such problems from the perspective of the KB paradigm. We show that multiple functionalities in this domain can be achieved by applying different forms of logical inferences on a formal specification of the configuration domain. We report on a proof of concept of this approach in a real-life application with a banking company. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP