Going on-line on a shoestring: An experiment in concurrent development of requirements and architecture

A number of on-line applications were built for a small university using a micro-sized development team. Four ideas were tested during the project: the Twin Peaks development model, using fully functional prototypes in the requirements elicitation process, some core practices of Extreme Programming, and the use of open-source software in a production environment. Certain project management techniques and their application to a micro-sized development effort were also explored. These ideas and techniques proved effective in developing many significant Internet and networked applications in a short time and at very low cost

A Shared Ontology Approach to Semantic Representation of BIM Data

Architecture, engineering, construction and facility management (AEC-FM) projects involve a large number of participants that must exchange information and combine their knowledge for successful completion of a project. Currently, most of the AEC-FM domains store their information about a project in text documents or use XML, relational, or object-oriented formats that make information integration difficult. The AEC-FM industry is not taking advantage of the full potential of the Semantic Web for streamlining sharing, connecting, and combining information from different domains. The Semantic Web is designed to solve the information integration problem by creating a web of structured and connected data that can be processed by machines. It allows combining information from different sources with different underlying schemas distributed over the Internet. In the Semantic Web, all data instances and data schema are stored in a graph data store, which makes it easy to merge data from different sources. This paper presents a shared ontology approach to semantic representation of building information. The semantic representation of building information facilitates finding and integrating building information distributed in several knowledge bases. A case study demonstrates the development of a semantic based building design knowledge base

The Real World Software Process

The industry-wide demand for rapid development in concert with greater process maturity has seen many software development firms adopt tightly structured iterative processes. While a number of commercial vendors offer suitable process infrastructure and tool support, the cost of licensing, configuration and staff training may be prohibitive for the small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) which dominate the Asia-Pacific software industry. This work addresses these problems through the introduction of the Real World Software Process (RWSP), a freely available, Web-based iterative scheme designed specifically for small teams and organisations. RWSP provides a detailed process description, high quality document templates - including code review and inspection guidelines - and the integrated tutorial support necessary for successful usage by inexperienced developers and teams. In particular it is intended that the process be readily usable by software houses which at present do not follow a formal process, and that the free RWSP process infrastructure should be a vehicle for improving industry standards

Technical Issues in the Development of Knowledge-Based Services for the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web with formal semantics in order to improve how users experience the Web, by ameliorating current activities and supporting the automation of some others. So far, current Semantic Web prototypes mostly aim at collecting and exposing information. Still, a semantic layer can support applying Knowledge-Based Systems techniques to the development of brand-new fully-fledged Knowledge-Based Services for the Web. In this paper, we present the technical issues that have to be faced in the development of such a kind of application by presenting the Online Design of Events Application: a Semantic Web-based design support system that assists event organisers in the process of preparing events such as workshops and conferences, by effectively reasoning over an inter-organisational process across the Web

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure