Frameworks: the future of formal software development?

It could be argued that the primary issue to be dealt with in software engineering today is re-use of software. Current software development rarely, if ever, starts from nothing. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the development of specifications. To overcome this problem, various works have attempted to show how specifications can be built using architectural principles. We discuss one such approach in particular, the Architectural Semantics of Open Distributed Processing. We show the limitations of this work with regard to the architecting of specifications and propose a new approach, based on frameworks. To highlight the approach we use the work currently being done in the TOSCA project in its development of a service creation and validation environment for telecommunication services

Version Control in Online Software Repositories

Software version control repositories provide a uniform and stable interface to manage documents and their version histories. Unfortunately, Open Source systems, for example, CVS, Subversion, and GNU Arch are not well suited to highly collaborative environments and fail to track semantic changes in repositories. We introduce document provenance as our Description Logic framework to track the semantic changes in software repositories and draw interesting results about their historic behaviour using a rule-based inference engine. To support the use of this framework, we have developed our own online collaborative tool, leveraging the fluency of the modern WikiWikiWeb

OGC SWE-based Data Acquisition System Development for EGIM on EMSODEV EU Project

The EMSODEV[1] (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory DEVelopment) is an EU project whose general objective is to set up the full implementation and operation of the EMSO distributed Research Infrastructure (RI), through the development, testing and deployment of an EMSO Generic Instrument Module (EGIM). This research infrastructure will provide accurate records on marine environmental changes from distributed local nodes around Europe. These observations are critical to respond accurately to the social and scientific challenges such as climate change, changes in marine ecosystems, and marine hazards. In this paper we present the design and development of the EGIM data acquisition system. EGIM is able to operate on any EMSO node, mooring line, sea bed station, cabled or non-cabled and surface buoy. In fact a central function of EGIM within the EMSO infrastructure is to have a number of ocean locations where the same set of core variables are measured homogeneously: using the same hardware, same sensor references, same qualification methods, same calibration methods, same data format and access, and same maintenance procedures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Space Generic Open Avionics Architecture (SGOAA) reference model technical guide

This report presents a full description of the Space Generic Open Avionics Architecture (SGOAA). The SGOAA consists of a generic system architecture for the entities in spacecraft avionics, a generic processing architecture, and a six class model of interfaces in a hardware/software system. The purpose of the SGOAA is to provide an umbrella set of requirements for applying the generic architecture interface model to the design of specific avionics hardware/software systems. The SGOAA defines a generic set of system interface points to facilitate identification of critical interfaces and establishes the requirements for applying appropriate low level detailed implementation standards to those interface points. The generic core avionics system and processing architecture models provided herein are robustly tailorable to specific system applications and provide a platform upon which the interface model is to be applied

On the standardisation of Web service management operations

Given the current interest in TCP/IP network management research towards Web services, it is important to recognise how standardisation can be achieved. This paper mainly focuses on the standardisation of operations and not management information. We state that standardisation should be done by standardising the abstract parts of a WSDL document, i.e. the interfaces and the messages. Operations can vary in granularity and parameter transparency, creating four extreme operation signatures, all of which have advantages and disadvantages

Development of a software tool for the evaluation of the shading factor under complex boundary conditions

12th Conference of International Building Performance Simulation Associatio

A Unified Approach for Representing Structurally-Complex Models in SBML Level 3

The aim of this document is to explore a unified approach to handling several of the proposed extensions to the SBML Level 3 Core specification. The approach is illustrated with reference to Simile, a modelling environment which appears to have most of the capabilities of the various SBML Level 3 package proposals which deal with model structure. Simile (http://www.simulistics.com) is a visual modelling environment for continuous systems modelling which includes the ability to handle complex disaggregation of model structure, by allowing the modeller to specify classes of object and the relationships between them.

The note is organised around the 6 packages listed on the SBML Level 3 Proposals web page (http://sbml.org/Community/Wiki/SBML_Level_3_Proposals) which deal with model structure, namely comp, arrays, spatial, geom, dyn and multi. For each one, I consider how the requirements which motivated the package can be handled using Simile's unified approach. Although Simile has a declarative model-representation language (in both Prolog and XML syntax), I use Simile diagrams and equation syntax throughout, since this is more compact and readable than large chunks of XML.

The conclusion is that Simile can indeed meet most of the requirements of these various packages, using a generic set of constructs - basically, the multiple-instance submodel, the concept of a relationship (association) between submodels, and array variables. This suggests the possibility of having a single SBML Level 3 extension package similar to the Simile data model, rather than a series of separate packages. Such an approach has a number of potential advantages and disadvantages compared with having the current set of discrete packages: these are discussed in this paper

Personalizable Service Discovery in Pervasive Systems

Today, telecom providers are facing changing challenges. To stay ahead in the competition and provide market leading offerings, carriers need to enable a global ecosystem of third party independent application developers to deliver converged services. This is the aim of leveraging a open standardsbased service delivery platform. To identify and to cope with those challenges is the main target of the EU funded project IST DAIDALOS II. And a central point to satisfy the changing user needs is the provision of a well working, user friendly and personalized service discovery. This paper describes our work in the project on a middleware in a framework for pervasive service usage. We have designed an architecture for it, that enables full transparency to the user, grants high compatibility and extendability by a modular and pluggable conception and allows for interoperability with most known service discovery protocols. Our Multi-Protocol Service Discovery and the Four Phases Service Filtering concept enabling personalization should allow for the best possible results in service discovery

The use of data-mining for the automatic formation of tactics

This paper discusses the usse of data-mining for the automatic formation of tactics. It was presented at the Workshop on Computer-Supported Mathematical Theory Development held at IJCAR in 2004. The aim of this project is to evaluate the applicability of data-mining techniques to the automatic formation of tactics from large corpuses of proofs. We data-mine information from large proof corpuses to find commonly occurring patterns. These patterns are then evolved into tactics using genetic programming techniques