Ontology in software engineering

© 2018 authors. During the past years, ontological thinking and design have become more and more popular in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). More recently, Software Engineering (SE) has evolved towards more conceptual approaches based on the extensive adoption of models and meta-models. This paper briefly discusses the role of ontologies in SE according to a perspective that closely matches the theoretical life-cycle. These roles vary considerably across the development lifecycle. The use of ontologies to improve SE development activities is still relatively new (2000 onward), but it is definitely no more a novelty. Indeed, the role of such structures is well consolidated in certain SE aspects, such as requirement engineering. On the other hand, despite their well-known potential as knowledge representation mechanisms, ontologies are not completely exploited in the area of SE. We first (i) proposes a brief overview of ontologies and their current understanding within the Semantic Web with a focus on the benefits provided; then, the role that ontologies play in the more specific context of SE is addressed (ii); finally, we deal with (iii) some brief considerations looking at specific types of software architecture, such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The main limitation of our research is that we are focusing on traditional developments, where phases occur mostly sequentially. However, industry has fully embraced agile developments. It is unclear that agile practitioners are willing to adopt ontologies as a tool, unless we ensure that they can provide a clear benefit and they be used in a lean way, without introducing significant overhead to the agile development process

Arquitectura de cooperación horizontal en desarrollo de aplicaciones móviles: procesos logísticos en el caso del sector textil

The present article describes the design and prototyping processes carried out to develop a mobile application using horizontal collaboration architecture for e-commerce. Said application is meant to be used by SMEs in the textile sector in order to facilitate transportation-related logistics by collecting information. Hence, costs are reduced for the end customer by delivering goods via a unified logistics provider.El presente artículo describe los procesos de diseño y creación de prototipos llevados a cabo para desarrollar una aplicación móvil utilizando la arquitectura de colaboración horizontal para el comercio electrónico. Dicha aplicación está destinada a ser utilizada por las PYME en el sector textil con el fin de facilitar la logística relacionada con el transporte mediante la recopilación de información. En consecuencia, los costos se reducen para el cliente final al entregar productos a través de un proveedor de logística unificado

Mining and linking crowd-based software engineering how-to screencasts

In recent years, crowd-based content in the form of screencast videos has gained in popularity among software engineers. Screencasts are viewed and created for different purposes, such as a learning aid, being part of a software project’s documentation, or as a general knowledge sharing resource. For organizations to remain competitive in attracting and retaining their workforce, they must adapt to these technological and social changes in software engineering practices. In this thesis, we propose a novel methodology for mining and integrating crowd-based multi- media content in existing workflows to help provide software engineers of different levels of experience and roles access to a documentation they are familiar with or prefer. As a result, we first aim to gain insights on how a user’s background and the task to be performed influence the use of certain documentation media. We focus on tutorial screencasts to identify their important information sources and provide insights on their usage, advantages, and disadvantages from a practitioner’s perspective. To that end, we conduct a survey of software engineers. We discuss how software engineers benefit from screencasts as well as challenges they face in using screencasts as project documentation. Our survey results revealed that screencasts and question and answers sites are among the most popular crowd-based information sources used by software engineers. Also, the level of experience and the role or reason for resorting to a documentation source affects the types of documentation used by software engineers. The results of our survey support our motivation in this thesis and show that for screencasts, high quality content and a narrator are very important components for users. Unfortunately, the binary format of videos makes analyzing video content difficult. As a result, dissecting and filtering multimedia information based on its relevance to a given project is an inherently difficult task. Therefore, it is necessary to provide automated approaches for mining and linking this crowd-based multimedia documentation to their relevant software artifacts. In this thesis, we apply LDA-based (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) mining approaches that take as input a set of screencast artifacts, such as GUI (Graphical User Interface) text (labels) and spoken words, to perform information extraction and, therefore, increase the availability of both textual and multimedia documentation for various stakeholders of a software product. For example, this allows screencasts to be linked to other software artifacts such as source code to help software developers/maintainers have access to the implementation details of an application feature. We also present applications of our proposed methodology that include: 1) an LDA-based mining approach that extracts use case scenarios in text format from screencasts, 2) an LDA-based approach that links screencasts to their relevant artifacts (e.g., source code), and 3) a Semantic Web-based approach to establish direct links between vulnerability exploitation screencasts and their relevant vulnerability descriptions in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and indirectly link screencasts to their relevant Maven dependencies. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed approach, we report on empirical case studies conducted on existing screencasts that describe different use case scenarios of the WordPress and Firefox open source applications or vulnerability exploitation scenarios

Simplified database forensic investigation using metamodeling approach

Database Forensic Investigation (DBFI) domain is a significant field used to identify, collect, preserve, reconstruct, analyze and document database incidents. However, it is a heterogeneous, complex, and ambiguous domain due to the variety and multidimensional nature of database systems. Numerous specific DBFI models and frameworks have been proposed to solve specific database scenarios but there is a lack of structured and unified frameworks to facilitate managing, sharing and reusing of DBFI tasks and activities. Thus, this research developed a DBFI Metamodel (DBFIM) to structure and organize DBFI domain. A Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) to provide a logical, testable and communicable metamodel was applied in this study. In this methodology, the steps included problem identification, define objectives, design and development, demonstration and evaluation, and communication. The outcome of this study is a DBFIM developed for structuring and organizing DBFI domain knowledge that facilitates the managing, sharing and reusing of DBFI domain knowledge among domain practitioners. DBFIM identifies, recognizes, extracts and matches different DBFI processes, concepts, activities, and tasks from different DBFI models into a developed metamodel, thus, allowing domain practitioners to derive/instantiate solution models easily. The DBFIM was validated using qualitative techniques: comparison against other models; face validity (domain experts); and case study. Comparisons against other models and face validity were applied to ensure completeness, logicalness, and usefulness of DBFIM against other DBFI domain models. Following this, two case studies were selected and implemented to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the DBFIM in the DBFI domain using a DBFIM Prototype (DBFIMP). The results showed that DBFIMP allowed domain practitioners to create their solution models easily based on their requirements

Ontology in software engineering

During the past years, ontological thinking and design have become more and more popular in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). More recently, Software Engineering (SE) has evolved towards more conceptual approaches based on the extensive adoption of models and meta-models. This paper briefly discusses the role of ontologies in SE according to a perspective that closely matches the theoretical life-cycle. These roles vary considerably across the development lifecycle. The use of ontologies to improve SE development activities is still relatively new (2000 onward), but it is definitely no more a novelty. Indeed, the role of such structures is well consolidated in certain SE aspects, such as requirement engineering. On the other hand, despite their well-known potential as knowledge representation mechanisms, ontologies are not completely exploited in the area of SE. We first (i) proposes a brief overview of ontologies and their current understanding within the Semantic Web with a focus on the benefits provided; then, the role that ontologies play in the more specific context of SE is addressed (ii); finally, we deal with (iii) some brief considerations looking at specific types of software architecture, such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The main limitation of our research is that we are focusing on traditional developments, where phases occur mostly sequentially. However, industry has fully embraced agile developments. It is unclear that agile practitioners are willing to adopt ontologies as a tool, unless we ensure that they can provide a clear benefit and they be used in a lean way, without introducing significant overhead to the agile development process

Lupascian Non-Negativity Applied to Conceptual Modeling: Alternating Static Potentiality and Dynamic Actuality

In software engineering, conceptual modeling focuses on creating representations of the world that are as faithful and rich as possible, with the aim of guiding the development of software systems. In contrast, in the computing realm, the notion of ontology has been characterized as being closely related to conceptual modeling and is often viewed as a specification of a conceptualization. Accordingly, conceptual modeling and ontology engineering now address the same problem of representing the world in a suitable fashion. A high-level ontology provides a means to describe concepts and their interactions with each other and to capture structural and behavioral features in the intended domain. This paper aims to analyze ontological concepts and semantics of modeling notations to provide a common understanding among software engineers. An important issue in this context concerns the question of whether the modeled world might be stratified into ontological levels. We introduce an abstract system of two-level domain ontology to be used as a foundation for conceptual models. We study the two levels of staticity and dynamics in the context of the thinging machine (TM) model using the notions of potentiality and actuality that the Franco-Romanian philosopher Stephane Lupasco developed in logic. He provided a quasi-universal rejection of contradiction where every event was always associated with a no event, such that the actualization of an event entails the potentialization of a no event and vice versa without either ever disappearing completely. This approach is illustrated by re-modeling UML state machines in TM modeling. The results strengthen the semantics of a static versus dynamic levels in conceptual modeling and sharpen the notion of events as a phenomenon without negativity alternating between the two levels of dynamics and staticity.Comment: 11 pages, 21 figure

Metamodel-based framework in designing fault management in network management system

Fault management is the first element that matters in network management to ensure the high availability of the network. The existing fault management models are mostly specific to an organization’s standard. The proposed model can guide and help network managers to perform their routine task. Thus, the purpose of this research is to develop a generic and unified Fault Management Metamodel (FMM) that would create a fault management model, which in turn could be referred to as to better understand the flow of fault management. The FMM is developed by extracting and reconciling the fault management components from various fault management models. Then, the FMM is validated to ensure the correctness and logic of the proposed FMM. The FMM is validated using three validation techniques, which are the Frequency-based Selection, Face Validity and Tracing. The metamodelling framework that was used in this research is the Meta Object Facilities (MOF), and it was chosen because of its wide acceptance and coverage in many domains. The outcome of this research is the final validated FMM v1.2, which would guide network managers and other network users to better understand the fault management concepts flow and issues for their network. As for the future work, besides fault management, there are four other functional areas in network management that should be developed. The other areas are configuration management, accounting management, performance management and security management

Horizontal cooperation architecture used in development of mobile applications: logistics processes at textile sector case

El presente artículo describe los procesos de diseño y creación de prototipos llevados a cabo para desarrollar una aplicación móvil utilizando la arquitectura de colaboración horizontal para el comercio electrónico. Dicha aplicación está destinada a ser utilizada por las PYME en el sector textil con el fin de facilitar la logística relacionada con el transporte mediante la recopilación de información. Por lo tanto, los costos se reducen para el cliente final al entregar productos a través de un proveedor de logística unificado.The present article describes the design and prototyping processes carried out to develop a mobile application using horizontal collaboration architecture for e-commerce. Said application is meant to be used by SMEs in the textile sector in order to facilitate transportation-related logistics by collecting information. Hence, costs are reduced for the end customer by delivering goods via a unified logistics provider

An ontology for ISO software engineering standards: 1) Creating the infrastructure

Software engineering standards developed under the auspices of ISO/IEC JTC1's SC7 have been identified as employing terms whose definitions vary significantly between standards. This led to a request in 2012 to investigate the creation of an ontological infrastructure that aims to be a single coherent underpinning for all SC7 standards, present and future. Here, we develop that necessary infrastructure prior to its adoption by SC7 and its implementation (likely 2014). The proposal described here requires, firstly, the identification of a single comprehensive set of definitions, the definitional elements ontology (DEO). For the scope of an individual standard, only a subset of these definitional elements will be needed. Once configured, this definitional subset creates a configured definitional ontology or CDO. Both the DEO and the CDO are essentially foundational ontologies from which a domain-specific ontology known as a SDO or standard domain ontology can be created. Consequently, all such SDOs are conformant to a CDO and hence to the single DEO thus ensuring that all standards use the same ontological base. Standards developed in this fashion will therefore be not only of a higher quality but also, importantly, interoperable. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Ontologies in domain specific languages : a systematic literature review

The systematic literature review conducted in this paper explores the current techniques employed to leverage the development of DSLs using ontologies. Similarities and differences between ontologies and DSLs, techniques to combine DSLs with ontologies, the rationale of these techniques and challenges in the DSL approaches addressed by the used techniques have been investigated. Details about these topics have been provided for each relevant research paper that we were able to investigate in the limited amount of time of one month. At the same time, a synthesis describing the main trends in all the topics mentioned above has been done