2,113 research outputs found
Adaptive development and maintenance of user-centric software systems
A software system cannot be developed without considering the various facets of its environment. Stakeholders â including the users that play a central role â have their needs, expectations, and perceptions of a system. Organisational and technical aspects of the environment are constantly changing. The ability to adapt a software system and its requirements to its environment throughout its
full lifecycle is of paramount importance in a constantly changing environment. The continuous involvement of users is as important as the constant evaluation of the system and the observation of evolving environments. We present a methodology for adaptive software systems development and
maintenance. We draw upon a diverse range of accepted methods including participatory design, software architecture, and evolutionary design. Our focus is on user-centred software systems
Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases
Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for
information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases
such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their
popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from
simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well
understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema
to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame
the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level
knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the
conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level
abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically
link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We
demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based
prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary
natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic
classification of the natural language query is made
Systematic development of courseware systems
Various difficulties have been reported in relation to the development of courseware systems. A central problem is to address the needs of not only the learner, but also instructor, developer, and other stakeholders, and to integrate these different needs. Another problem area is courseware architectures, to which much work has been dedicated recently. We present a systematic approach to courseware development â a methodology for courseware engineering â that addresses these problems. This methodology is rooted in the educational domain and is based on methods for software development in this context. We illustrate how this methodology can improve the quality of courseware systems and the development process
Towards hypermedia support in database systems
The general goal of our research is to automatically generate links and other hypermedia related services to analytical applications. Using a dynamic hypermedia engine (DHE), the following features have been automated for database systems. Based on the database\u27s relational (physical) schema and its original (non-normalized) entity-relationship specification links are generated, database application developers may also specify the relationship between different classes of database elements. These elements can be controlled by the same or different database application, or even by another software system. A DHE prototype has been developed and illustrates the above for a relational database management system.
The DHE is the only approach to automated linking that specializes in adding a hyperlinks automatically to analytical applications that generate their displays dynamically (e.g., as the result of a user query). The DHE\u27s linking is based on the structure of the application, not keyword search or lexical analysis based on the display values within its screens and documents. The DHE aims to provide hypermedia functionality without altering applications by building application wrappers as an intermediary between the applications and the engine
Visual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries
The emergence of information highways and multimedia computing has resulted in redefining the concept of libraries. It is widely believed that in the next few years, a significant portion of information in libraries will be in the form of multimedia electronic documents. Many approaches are being proposed for storing, retrieving, assimilating, harvesting, and prospecting information from these multimedia documents. Digital libraries are expected to allow users to access information independent of the locations and types of data sources and will provide a unified picture of information. In this paper, we discuss requirements of these emerging information systems and present query methods and data models for these systems. Finally, we briefly present a few examples of approaches that provide a preview of how things will be done in the digital libraries in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio
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