Reusability in software engineering

This paper surveys recent work concerning reusability in software engineering. The current directions in software reusability are discussed, and the two major approaches of reusable building blocks and reusable patterns studied. An extensive bibliography, parts of which are annotated, is included

Knowledge re-use for decision support

Effective decision support has already been identified as a fundamental requirement for the realisation of Network Enabled Capability. Decision making itself is a knowledge-intensive process, and it is known that right decisions can only be reached based on decision maker's good judgement, which in turn is based on sufficient knowledge. It is not unusual for decision makers to make incorrect decisions because of insufficient knowledge. However, it is not always possible for decision makers to have all the knowledge needed for making decisions in complex situations without external support. The re-use of knowledge has been identified as providing an important contribution to such support, and this paper considers one, hitherto unexplored, aspect of how this may be achieved. This paper is concerned with the computational view of knowledge re-use to establish an understanding of a knowledge-based system for decision support. The paper explores knowledge re-use for decision support from two perspectives: knowledge provider's and knowledge re-user's. Key issues and challenges of knowledge re-use are identified from both perspectives. A structural model for knowledge re-use is proposed with initial evaluation through empirical study of both experienced and novice decision maker's behaviour in reusing knowledge to make decisions. The proposed structural model for knowledge re-use captures five main elements (knowledge re-uers, knowledge types, knowledge sources, environment, and integration strategies) as well as the relationships between the elements, which forms a foundation for constructing a knowledge-based decision support system. The paper suggests that further research should be investigating the relationship between knowledge re-use and learning to achieve intelligent decision support

A Pattern Based Approach for Re-engineering Non-Ontological Resources into Ontologies

With the goal of speeding up the ontology development process, ontology engineers are starting to reuse as much as possible available ontologies and non-ontological resources such as classification schemes, thesauri, lexicons and folksonomies, that already have some degree of consensus. The reuse of such non-ontological resources necessarily involves their re-engineering into ontologies. Non-ontological resources are highly heterogeneous in their data model and contents: they encode different types of knowledge, and they can be modeled and implemented in different ways. In this paper we present (1) a typology for non-ontological resources, (2) a pattern based approach for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies, and (3) a use case of the proposed approach

Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents

Collaborative Authoring of Open Courseware with SlideWiki: A Case Study in Open Education

Producing or finding and reusing high-quality educational content online can be a laborious and costly process. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of producing and reusing highly-structured remixable educational content can be crowdsourced and therefore widely shared. SlideWiki employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the open education community in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing open courseware. This paper presents a case study of this platform carried out in the context of open education and informal learning and reports on the feedback received thus far from members of the open education community