Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

Timed patterns: TCOZ to timed automata

Abstract. The integrated logic-based modeling language, Timed Communicating Object Z (TCOZ), is well suited for presenting complete and coherent requirement models for complex real-time systems. However, the challenge is how to verify the TCOZ models with tool support, especially for analyzing timing properties. Specialized graph-based modeling technique, Timed Automata (TA), has powerful mechanisms for designing real-time models using multiple clocks and has well developed automatic tool support. One weakness of TA is the lack of high level composable graphical patterns to support systematic designs for complex systems. The investigation of possible links between TCOZ and TA may benefit both techniques. For TCOZ, TA’s tool support can be reused to check timing properties. For TA, a set of composable graphical patterns can be defined based on the semantics of the TCOZ constructs, so that those patterns can be re-used in a generic way. This paper firstly defines the composable TA graphical patterns, and then presents sound transformation rules and a tool for projecting TCOZ specifications into TA. A case study of a railroad crossing system is demonstrated

Hierarchical Bayesian inference of galaxy redshift distributions from photometric surveys

Accurately characterizing the redshift distributions of galaxies is essential for analysing deep photometric surveys and testing cosmological models. We present a technique to simultaneously infer redshift distributions and individual redshifts from photometric galaxy catalogues. Our model constructs a piecewise constant representation (effectively a histogram) of the distribution of galaxy types and redshifts, the parameters of which are efficiently inferred from noisy photometric flux measurements. This approach can be seen as a generalization of template-fitting photometric redshift methods and relies on a library of spectral templates to relate the photometric fluxes of individual galaxies to their redshifts. We illustrate this technique on simulated galaxy survey data, and demonstrate that it delivers correct posterior distributions on the underlying type and redshift distributions, as well as on the individual types and redshifts of galaxies. We show that even with uninformative priors, large photometric errors and parameter degeneracies, the redshift and type distributions can be recovered robustly thanks to the hierarchical nature of the model, which is not possible with common photometric redshift estimation techniques. As a result, redshift uncertainties can be fully propagated in cosmological analyses for the first time, fulfilling an essential requirement for the current and future generations of surveys.Comment: 10 pages, matches version accepted in MNRAS, including new appendix describing the effect of Bayesian shrinkage in a simplified settin

Tools and verification techniques for integrated formal methods

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Semantic web and formal design methods

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Aspect-Oriented Modeling: Applying Aspect-Oriented UML Use Cases and Extending Aspect-Z

Considering predominant aspect-oriented software development (asymmetric AOSD), this paper discusses the application of aspect-oriented UML use case diagrams and formal language AspectZ to part of a classic AOSD case study, the Health-Watcher software system. In addition, this article proposes an extension of AspectZ to reach a new property for asymmetric AOSD which reacts after a schema successfully finishes, or not, showing messages for that situation, with an implicit join point; and a way for generalizing similar operations in a system using AspectZ. Thus, the main goal of this article is to show the application of and differences between asymmetric aspect-oriented formal and non-formal modeling, and to highlight potential advantages of aspect-oriented formal modeling over aspect-oriented non-formal modeling. First, this article describes the main concepts of the classic AOSD paradigm focusing on problems unsolved by previous forms of software development and resolved by AOSD. Second, by applying aspect-oriented UML use case diagrams, this paper highlights the use of dominion classes and extend-relationships. Considering the Health-Watcher case study and an asymmetric AOSD approach, this study found that using extend-relationships in UML use cases does not completely follow the basic principles of the prevailing AOSD approach in which a base element does not know about aspects, whereas an extending use case must explicitly know its extension points. Third, this article shows a formal modeling of the case study using AspectZ. Moreover, extensions of this aspect-oriented formal language are proposed and applied to the same case study to show their practical properties for modeling. These extensions allow showing success or error messages, and inserting or not a new item in a set of elements to take care of invalid situations

Integrating BON and Object-Z.

A significant limitation with object-oriented formal specification languages, such as Object-Z, is that they lack development and management processes, which can be used to guide the production of reliable, robust object-oriented systems. An integration of an object-oriented methodology, BON, and Object-Z is presented in order to add an industrially validated development process to Object-Z. An extensible CASE tool for BON is also described that supports the integration with an Object-Z code generation engine

Aspect-Oriented Modeling: Applying Aspect-Oriented UML Use Cases and Extending Aspect-Z

Considering predominant aspect-oriented software development (asymmetric AOSD), this paper discusses the application of aspect-oriented UML use case diagrams and formal language AspectZ to part of a classic AOSD case study, the Health-Watcher software system. In addition, this article proposes an extension of AspectZ to reach a new property for asymmetric AOSD which reacts after a schema successfully finishes, or not, showing messages for that situation, with an implicit join point; and a way for generalizing similar operations in a system using AspectZ. Thus, the main goal of this article is to show the application of and differences between asymmetric aspect-oriented formal and non-formal modeling, and to highlight potential advantages of aspect-oriented formal modeling over aspect-oriented non-formal modeling. First, this article describes the main concepts of the classic AOSD paradigm focusing on problems unsolved by previous forms of software development and resolved by AOSD. Second, by applying aspect-oriented UML use case diagrams, this paper highlights the use of dominion classes and extend-relationships. Considering the Health-Watcher case study and an asymmetric AOSD approach, this study found that using extend-relationships in UML use cases does not completely follow the basic principles of the prevailing AOSD approach in which a base element does not know about aspects, whereas an extending use case must explicitly know its extension points. Third, this article shows a formal modeling of the case study using AspectZ. Moreover, extensions of this aspect-oriented formal language are proposed and applied to the same case study to show their practical properties for modeling. These extensions allow showing success or error messages, and inserting or not a new item in a set of elements to take care of invalid situations

XML-based formal specification comprehension

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Building A Big Data Analytical Pipeline With Hadoop For Processing Enterprise XML Data

The current paper shows an end-to-end approach how to process XML files in the Hadoop ecosystem. The work demonstrates a way how to handle problems faced during the analysis of a large amounts of XML files. The paper presents a completed Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) cycle, which is based on the open source software stack Apache Hadoop, which became a standard for processing of a huge amounts of data. This work shows that applying open source solutions to a particular set of problems could not be enough. In fact, most of big data processing open source tools were implemented only to address a limited number of the use cases. This work explains and shows, why exactly specific use cases may require significant extension with a self-developed multiple software components. The use case described in the paper deals with huge amounts of semi-structured XML files, which supposed to be persisted and processed daily