Symbiotic modeling: Linguistic Anthropology and the promise of chiasmus

Reflexive observations and observations of reflexivity: such agendas are by now standard practice in anthropology. Dynamic feedback loops between self and other, cause and effect, represented and representamen may no longer seem surprising; but, in spite of our enhanced awareness, little deliberate attention is devoted to modeling or grounding such phenomena. Attending to both linguistic and extra-linguistic modalities of chiasmus (the X figure), a group of anthropologists has recently embraced this challenge. Applied to contemporary problems in linguistic anthropology, chiasmus functions to highlight and enhance relationships of interdependence or symbiosis between contraries, including anthropology’s four fields, the nature of human being and facets of being human

Strengthening the Scientific Foundations of Professional Psychology: Time for the Next Steps

The field of professional psychology has been tremendously successful, although it has also been characterized by many competing preparadigmatic theoretical orientations, which have led to a great deal of contention as well as conflicting views regarding psychological development, functioning, and behavior change. There is now widespread agreement regarding scientific explanations of many psychological processes, however, and, consequently, it is time to update the basic conceptual frameworks used for professional psychology education and practice. Replacing the traditional reliance on an array of theoretical orientations with a science-based biopsychosocial framework would resolve many of the contradictions and conflicts that characterized the preparadigmatic era and would also provide a common perspective for unifying psychologists around a shared approach to practice, research, and training

OntoEng: A design method for ontology engineering in information systems

This paper addresses the design problem relating to ontology engineering in the discipline of information systems. Ontology engineering is a realm that covers issues related to ontology development and use throughout its life span. Nowadays, ontology as a new innovation promises to improve the design, semantic integration, and utilization of information systems. Ontologies are the backbone of knowledge-based systems. In addition, they establish sharable and reusable common understanding of specific domains amongst people, information systems, and software agents. Notwithstanding, the ontology engineering literature does not provide adequate guidance on how to build, evaluate, and maintain ontologies. On the basis of the gathered experience during the development of V4 Telecoms Business Model Ontology as well as the conducted integration of the related literature from the design science paradigm, this paper introduces OntoEng and its application as a novel systematic design method for ontology engineering

A Metamodel for the Unified Modeling Language

Nowadays models, rather than code, become the key artifacts of software development. Consequently, this raises the level of requirements for modeling languages on which modeling practitioners should rely in their work. A minor inconsistency of a modeling language metamodel may cause major problems in the language applications; thus with the model driven systems development the solidness of modeling languages metamodels becomes particularly important. In its current state the UML metamodel leaves a significant area for improvement. We present an alternative metamodel that was inspired by the RM-ODP standard and that solves the problems of UML. RM-ODP was mentioned in UML specifications as a framework that has already influenced UML. Our metamodel was formalized, thus its resulting models can be simulated and checked for consistency. So, our proposed solution with constructive potential towards improvement of the UML metamodel, may have a significant practical impact on the UML specifications

Transformation As Search

In model-driven engineering, model transformations are con- sidered a key element to generate and maintain consistency between re- lated models. Rule-based approaches have become a mature technology and are widely used in different application domains. However, in var- ious scenarios, these solutions still suffer from a number of limitations that stem from their injective and deterministic nature. This article pro- poses an original approach, based on non-deterministic constraint-based search engines, to define and execute bidirectional model transforma- tions and synchronizations from single specifications. Since these solely rely on basic existing modeling concepts, it does not require the intro- duction of a dedicated language. We first describe and formally define this model operation, called transformation as search, then describe a proof-of-concept implementation and discuss experiments on a reference use case in software engineering

Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

Migrating agile methods to standardized development practice

Situated process and quality frame-works offer a way to resolve the tensions that arise when introducing agile methods into standardized software development engineering. For these to be successful, however, organizations must grasp the opportunity to reintegrate software development management, theory, and practice