GAMES: A new Scenario for Software and Knowledge Reuse

Games are a well-known test bed for testing search algorithms and learning methods, and many authors have presented numerous reasons for the research in this area. Nevertheless, they have not received the attention they deserve as software projects. In this paper, we analyze the applicability of software and knowledge reuse in the games domain. In spite of the need to find a good evaluation function, search algorithms and interface design can be said to be the primary concerns. In addition, we will discuss the current state of the main statistical learning methods and how they can be addressed from a software engineering point of view. So, this paper proposes a reliable environment and adequate tools, necessary in order to achieve high levels of reuse in the games domain

A Semantics-Rich Information Technology Architecture for Smart Buildings

The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers. This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

AOSD Ontology 1.0 - Public Ontology of Aspect-Orientation

This report presents a Common Foundation for Aspect-Oriented Software Development. A Common Foundation is required to enable effective communication and to enable integration of activities within the Network of Excellence. This Common Foundation is realized by developing an ontology, i.e. the shared meaning of terms and concepts in the domain of AOSD. In the first part of this report, we describe the definitions of an initial set of common AOSD terms. There is general agreement on these definitions. In the second part, we describe the Common Foundation task in detail