Zipper-based attribute grammars and their extensions

Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 8129, 2013.Attribute grammars are a suitable formalism to express complex software language analysis and manipulation algorithms, which rely on multiple traversals of the underlying syntax tree. Recently, Attribute Grammars have been extended with mechanisms such as references and high-order and circular attributes. Such extensions provide a powerful modular mechanism and allow the specification of complex fix-point computations. This paper defines an elegant and simple, zipper-based embedding of attribute grammars and their extensions as first class citizens. In this setting, language specifications are defined as a set of independent, off-the-shelf components that can easily be composed into a powerful, executable language processor. Several real examples of language specification and processing programs have been implemented in this setting

CItyMaker:

Due to its complexity, the evolution of cities is something that is difficult to predict and planning new developments for cities is therefore a difficult task. This complexity can be identified on two levels: on a micro level, it emerges from the multiple relations between the many components and actors in cities, whereas on a macro level it stems from the geographical, social and economic relations between cities. However, many of these relations can be measured. The design of plans for cities can only be improved if designers are able to address measurements of some of the relationships between the components of cities during the design process. These measurements are called urban indicators. By calculating such measurements, designers can grasp the meaning of the changes being proposed, not just as simple alternative layouts, but also in terms of the changes in indicators adding a qualitative perception. This thesis presents a method and a set of tools to generate alternative solutions for an urban context. The method proposes the use of a combined set of design patterns encoding typical design moves used by urban designers. The combination of patterns generates different layouts which can be adjusted by manipulating several parameters in relation to updated urban indicators. The patterns were developed from observation of typical urban design procedures, first encoded as discursive grammars and later translated into parametric design patterns. The CItyMaker method and tools allows the designer to compose a design solution from a set of programmatic premises and fine-tune it by pulling parameters whilst checking the changes in urban indicators. These tools improve the designer’s awareness of the consequences of their design moves

Creation and extension of ontologies for describing communications in the context of organizations

Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer ScienceThe use of ontologies is nowadays a sufficiently mature and solid field of work to be considered an efficient alternative in knowledge representation. With the crescent growth of the Semantic Web, it is expectable that this alternative tends to emerge even more in the near future. In the context of a collaboration established between FCT-UNL and the R&D department of a national software company, a new solution entitled ECC – Enterprise Communications Center was developed. This application provides a solution to manage the communications that enter, leave or are made within an organization, and includes intelligent classification of communications and conceptual search techniques in a communications repository. As specificity may be the key to obtain acceptable results with these processes, the use of ontologies becomes crucial to represent the existing knowledge about the specific domain of an organization. This work allowed us to guarantee a core set of ontologies that have the power of expressing the general context of the communications made in an organization, and of a methodology based upon a series of concrete steps that provides an effective capability of extending the ontologies to any business domain. By applying these steps, the minimization of the conceptualization and setup effort in new organizations and business domains is guaranteed. The adequacy of the core set of ontologies chosen and of the methodology specified is demonstrated in this thesis by its effective application to a real case-study, which allowed us to work with the different types of sources considered in the methodology and the activities that support its construction and evolution

Supporting the DSL Spectrum

A language tailored to the problem domain can focus on its idioms and jargon, avoiding clumsy, overly general constructs needed to support general-purpose language. The leverage provided by DSLs over conventional programming languages is often extreme; application engineers may specify as little as 2% of the code that one would need to program the same thing in a conventional programming language! But commitment to a DSL approach can be rather expensive. It is often difficult to know when to invest in exactly how much infrastructure support for a product or product family. All of the concerns that are germane to generalpurpose programming language design and support may become important in the support of a specific DSL. At the same time, there is a wide spectrum of approaches to providing DSL support. This paper relates the various DSL design approaches to alternatives for tool support, providing a kind of “DSL tool support selection framework,” indicating where one might expect to need to invest heavily to obtain adequate support and illustrating the spectrum of tradeoffs and situations in which each is appropriate