Kernel arquitecture for CAD/CAM in shipbuilding enviroments

The capabilities of complex software products such as CAD/CAM systems are strongly supported by basic information technologies related with data management, visualization, communication, geometry modeling and others related with the development process. These basic information technologies are involved in a continuous evolution process, but over recent years this evolution has been dramatic. The main reason for this has been that new hardware capabilities (including graphic cards) are available at very low cost, but also a contributing factor has been the evolution of the prices of basic software. To take advantage of these new features, the existing CAD/CAM systems must undergo a complete and drastic redesign. This process is complicated but strategic for the future evolution of a system. There are several examples in the market of how a bad decision has lead to a cul-de-sac (both technically and commercially). This paper describes what the authors consider are the basic architectural components of a kernel for a CAD/CAM system oriented to shipbuilding. The proposed solution is a combination of in-house developed frameworks together with commercial products that are accepted as standard components. The proportion of in-house frameworks within this combination of products is a key factor, especially when considering CAD/CAM systems oriented to shipbuilding. General-purpose CAD/CAM systems are mainly oriented to the mechanical CAD market. For this reason several basic products exist devoted to geometry modelling in this context. But these basic products are not well suited to deal with the very specific geometry modelling requirements of a CAD/CAM system oriented to shipbuilding. The complexity of the ship model, the different model requirements through its short and changing life cycle and the many different disciplines involved in the process are reasons for this inadequacy. Apart from these basic frameworks, specific shipbuilding frameworks are also required. This second layer is built over the basic technology components mentioned above. This paper describes in detail the technological frameworks which have been used to develop the latest FORAN version.Postprint (published version

P ORTOLAN: a Model-Driven Cartography Framework

Processing large amounts of data to extract useful information is an essential task within companies. To help in this task, visualization techniques have been commonly used due to their capacity to present data in synthesized views, easier to understand and manage. However, achieving the right visualization display for a data set is a complex cartography process that involves several transformation steps to adapt the (domain) data to the (visualization) data format expected by visualization tools. To maximize the benefits of visualization we propose Portolan, a generic model-driven cartography framework that facilitates the discovery of the data to visualize, the specification of view definitions for that data and the transformations to bridge the gap with the visualization tools. Our approach has been implemented on top of the Eclipse EMF modeling framework and validated on three different use cases

A document-like software visualization method for effective cognition of c-based software systems

It is clear that maintenance is a crucial and very costly process in a software life cycle. Nowadays there are a lot of software systems particularly legacy systems that are always maintained from time to time as new requirements arise. One important source to understand a software system before it is being maintained is through the documentation, particularly system documentation. Unfortunately, not all software systems developed or maintained are accompanied with their reliable and updated documents. In this case, source codes will be the only reliable source for programmers. A number of studies have been carried out in order to assist cognition based on source codes. One way is through tool automation via reverse engineering technique in which source codes will be parsed and the information extracted will be visualized using certain visualization methods. Most software visualization methods use graph as the main element to represent extracted software artifacts. Nevertheless, current methods tend to produce more complicated graphs and do not grant an explicit, document-like re-documentation environment. Hence, this thesis proposes a document-like software visualization method called DocLike Modularized Graph (DMG). The method is realized in a prototype tool named DocLike Viewer that targets on C-based software systems. The main contribution of the DMG method is to provide an explicit structural re-document mechanism in the software visualization tool. Besides, the DMG method provides more level of information abstractions via less complex graph that include inter-module dependencies, inter-program dependencies, procedural abstraction and also parameter passing. The DMG method was empirically evaluated based on the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm and the findings depict that the method can improve productivity and quality in the aspect of cognition or program comprehension. A usability study was also conducted and DocLike Viewer had the most positive responses from the software practitioners

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework