Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

The CAMOMILE collaborative annotation platform for multi-modal, multi-lingual and multi-media documents

In this paper, we describe the organization and the implementation of the CAMOMILE collaborative annotation framework for multimodal, multimedia, multilingual (3M) data. Given the versatile nature of the analysis which can be performed on 3M data, the structure of the server was kept intentionally simple in order to preserve its genericity, relying on standard Web technologies. Layers of annotations, defined as data associated to a media fragment from the corpus, are stored in a database and can be managed through standard interfaces with authentication. Interfaces tailored specifically to the needed task can then be developed in an agile way, relying on simple but reliable services for the management of the centralized annotations. We then present our implementation of an active learning scenario for person annotation in video, relying on the CAMOMILE server; during a dry run experiment, the manual annotation of 716 speech segments was thus propagated to 3504 labeled tracks. The code of the CAMOMILE framework is distributed in open source.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform

The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and re-established in 2011, has become a de-facto evaluation standard for robust reading systems and algorithms. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous effort started to develop an on-line framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This paper outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the competitions. The RRC Annotation and Evaluation Platform is a modular framework, fully accessible through on-line interfaces. It comprises a collection of tools and services for managing all processes involved with defining and evaluating a research task, from dataset definition to annotation management, evaluation specification and results analysis. Although the framework has been designed with robust reading research in mind, many of the provided tools are generic by design. All aspects of the RRC Annotation and Evaluation Framework are available for research use.Comment: 6 pages, accepted to DAS 201

WormBase: a comprehensive resource for nematode research

WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org) is a central data repository for nematode biology. Initially created as a service to the Caenorhabditis elegans research field, WormBase has evolved into a powerful research tool in its own right. In the past 2 years, we expanded WormBase to include the complete genomic sequence, gene predictions and orthology assignments from a range of related nematodes. This comparative data enrich the C. elegans data with improved gene predictions and a better understanding of gene function. In turn, they bring the wealth of experimental knowledge of C. elegans to other systems of medical and agricultural importance. Here, we describe new species and data types now available at WormBase. In addition, we detail enhancements to our curatorial pipeline and website infrastructure to accommodate new genomes and an extensive user base

A framework for goal-oriented discovery of resources in the RESTful architecture

One of the challenges facing the current web is the efficient use of all the available information. The Web 2.0 phenomenon has favored the creation of contents by average users, and thus the amount of information that can be found for diverse topics has grown exponentially in the last years. Initiatives such as linked data are helping to build the Semantic Web, in which a set of standards are proposed for the exchange of data among heterogeneous systems. However, these standards are sometimes not used, and there are still plenty of websites that require naive techniques to discover their contents and services. This paper proposes an integrated framework for content and service discovery and extraction. The framework is divided into several layers where the discovery of contents and services is made in a representational stateless transfer system such as the web. It employs several web mining techniques as well as feature-oriented modeling for the discovery of cross-cutting features in web resources. The framework is used in a scenario of electronic newspapers. An intelligent agent crawls the web for related news, and uses services and visits links automatically according to its goal. This scenario illustrates how the discovery is made at different levels and how the use of semantics helps implement an agent that performs high-level tasks

Automated information extraction from web APIs documentation

A fundamental characteristic of Web APIs is the fact that, de facto, providers hardly follow any standard practices while implementing, publishing, and documenting their APIs. As a consequence, the discovery and use of these services by third parties is significantly hampered. In order to achieve further automation while exploiting Web APIs we present an approach for automatically extracting relevant technical information from the Web pages documenting them. In particular we have devised two algorithms that automatically extract technical details such as operation names, operation descriptions or URI templates from the documentation of Web APIs adopting either RPC or RESTful interfaces. The algorithms devised, which exploit advanced DOM processing as well as state of the art Information Extraction and Natural Language Processing techniques, have been evaluated against a detailed dataset exhibiting a high precision and recall–around 90% for both REST and RPC APIs outperforming state of the art information extraction algorithms

ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge. To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts achieving their tasks.Comment: 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshop