Traceability for Model Driven, Software Product Line Engineering

Traceability is an important challenge for software organizations. This is true for traditional software development and even more so in new approaches that introduce more variety of artefacts such as Model Driven development or Software Product Lines. In this paper we look at some aspect of the interaction of Traceability, Model Driven development and Software Product Line

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

WebPicker: Knowledge Extraction from Web Resources

We show how information distributed in several web resources and represented in different restricted languages can be extracted from its original sources and transformed into a common knowledge model represented in XML using WebPicker. This information, which has been built to cover different needs and functionalities, can be later imported into WebODE, integrated, enriched and exported into different representation formats using WebODE specific modules. We show a case study in the e-commerce domain, using products and services standards from several organizations and/or joint initiatives of industrial and services companies, and a product catalogue from an e-commerce platform

The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant: Beyond CASE

This paper will outline the similarities and differences between two paradigms of software development. Both support the whole software life cycle and provide automation for most of the software development process, but have different approaches. The CASE approach is based on a set of tools linked by a central data repository. This tool-based approach is data driven and views software development as a series of sequential steps, each resulting in a product. The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant (KBSA) approach, a radical departure from existing software development practices, is knowledge driven and centers around a formalized software development process. KBSA views software development as an incremental, iterative, and evolutionary process with development occurring at the specification level

From Method Fragments to Method Services

In Method Engineering (ME) science, the key issue is the consideration of information system development methods as fragments. Numerous ME approaches have produced several definitions of method parts. Different in nature, these fragments have nevertheless some common disadvantages: lack of implementation tools, insufficient standardization effort, and so on. On the whole, the observed drawbacks are related to the shortage of usage orientation. We have proceeded to an in-depth analysis of existing method fragments within a comparison framework in order to identify their drawbacks. We suggest overcoming them by an improvement of the ?method service? concept. In this paper, the method service is defined through the service paradigm applied to a specific method fragment ? chunk. A discussion on the possibility to develop a unique representation of method fragment completes our contribution

From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web

In the process of scientific research, many information objects are generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary, multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST