30,502 research outputs found
A Model of Layered Architectures
Architectural styles and patterns play an important role in software
engineering. One of the most known ones is the layered architecture style.
However, this style is usually only stated informally, which may cause problems
such as ambiguity, wrong conclusions, and difficulty when checking the
conformance of a system to the style. We address these problems by providing a
formal, denotational semantics of the layered architecture style. Mainly, we
present a sufficiently abstract and rigorous description of layered
architectures. Loosely speaking, a layered architecture consists of a hierarchy
of layers, in which services communicate via ports. A layer is modeled as a
relation between used and provided services, and layer composition is defined
by means of relational composition. Furthermore, we provide a formal definition
for the notions of syntactic and semantic dependency between the layers. We
show that these dependencies are not comparable in general. Moreover, we
identify sufficient conditions under which, in an intuitive sense which we make
precise in our treatment, the semantic dependency implies, is implied by, or
even coincides with the reflexive-transitive closure of the syntactic
dependency. Our results provide a technology-independent characterization of
the layered architecture style, which may be used by software architects to
ensure that a system is indeed built according to that style.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2015, arXiv:1503.0437
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Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services
Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic
Emergent requirements for supporting introductory programming
The problems associated with learning and teaching first year University Computer Science (CS1) programming classes are summarized showing that various support tools and techniques have been developed and evaluated. From this review of applicable support the paper derives ten requirements that a support tool should have in order to improve CS1 student success rate with respect to learning and understanding
A framework for deriving semantic web services
Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been
predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but
lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the
migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the
framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario
TarTar: A Timed Automata Repair Tool
We present TarTar, an automatic repair analysis tool that, given a timed
diagnostic trace (TDT) obtained during the model checking of a timed automaton
model, suggests possible syntactic repairs of the analyzed model. The suggested
repairs include modified values for clock bounds in location invariants and
transition guards, adding or removing clock resets, etc. The proposed repairs
are guaranteed to eliminate executability of the given TDT, while preserving
the overall functional behavior of the system. We give insights into the design
and architecture of TarTar, and show that it can successfully repair 69% of the
seeded errors in system models taken from a diverse suite of case studies.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure
Dependency parsing resources for French: Converting acquired lexical functional grammar F-Structure annotations and parsing F-Structures directly
Recent years have seen considerable success in the generation of automatically obtained wide-coverage deep grammars for natural language processing, given reliable
and large CFG-like treebanks. For research within Lexical Functional Grammar framework, these deep grammars are
typically based on an extended PCFG parsing scheme from which dependencies are extracted. However, increasing success in statistical dependency parsing suggests that such deep grammar approaches to statistical parsing could be streamlined. We explore this novel approach to deep
grammar parsing within the framework of LFG in this paper, for French, showing that best results (an f-score of 69.46) for the established integrated architecture may be obtained for French
Information-Theoretic Aspects of Control in a Bio-Hybrid Robot Device
Information processing in natural systems radically differs from current information technology. This difference is particularly apparent in the area of robotics, where both organisms and artificial devices face a similar challenge: the need to act in real time in a complex environment and to do so with computing resources severely limited by their size and power consumption. The formidable gap between artificial and natural systems in terms of information processing capability motivates research into the biological modes of information processing. Such undertakings, however, are hampered by the fact that nature directly exploits the manifold physical characteristics of its computing substrates, while available theoretical tools in general ignore the underlying implementation. Here we sketch the concept of bounded computability in an attempt towards reconciling the information-theoretic perspective with the need to take the material basis of information processing into account. We do so in the context of Physarum polycephalum as a naturally evolved information processor and the use of this organism as an integral component of a robot controller
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