Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

Maturity Assessment Framework for Business Dimension of Software Product Family

The software product family approach aims at curtailing the concept of “reinventing the wheel” in the software development process. The business has been highlighted as one of the critical dimensions in the process of software product family. This work presents an assessment framework for evaluating the business dimension of software product family process. Additionally, a software product family business evaluation tool has been designed and implemented on the basis of the presented framework. The tool preprocesses the data of key business factors, and it evaluates the overall business maturity of an organization. To demonstrate the application of the framework, and to determine the current software product family business performance, we conducted a case study of an organization actively involved in the business of software product family. The framework and the tool provide direct mechanisms to evaluate the current maturity level of software product family business of an organization. This research is a contribution towards establishing a comprehensive and unified strategy for a process evaluation of the software product family

Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of mapping intellectual landscapes.The focus of this book is on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one’s own understanding, as well as communicating it.The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable. With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communitie

Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation

Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams. Central to this work is the process of sharing–and contesting–interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the 'Web 2.0' paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization

Itembanking infrastructure: a proposal for a decoupled architecture

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive outline of the elements which make up an Itembanking system and through the use of basic workflows and diagrams create a visual of the overall system and user interaction. In particular it will provide an overview of the proposed Itembanking Infrastructure that SQA is currently developing, and steps which have been taken towards its realisation. Our aims in developing this are to promote more flexibility in assessment, improve on access, increase efficiency, cost-effective processes, enhancement of validity and reliability and improve possibilities for feedback and reporting. The functionality of an Itembanking system will be explored in light of the ways that institutions may use such a technical structure along with the challenges and issues surrounding its implementation. We have divided the system into four main elements: • The itembank itself which stores the items and facilitates searching • The item production elements which generate items suitable for entry into the bank • The test delivery elements which control the delivery, marking and reporting of the results • The test generation elements which control items being selected from the bank and concatenated into tests. The paper will focus on a ‘reference’ diagram which will provide an overview of the elements and associated software, the relationships between them and the overall interaction of the system. Within the four main elements, sub elements will be identified; including the storage of items, the generation of items, item description, item delivery, marking, result processing, item analysis and test construction. These will be explored with a view to defining the functionality of each element independently to allow autonomous development – fitting in with a standards based decoupled system. Existing projects and recommended standards in these areas will also be highlighted. Role profiles and workflows are discussed in terms of how different users may interact with the system and roles may be transferred onto an electronic banking system. Future plans to establish user requirements for each component of the Itembanking Infrastructure will be discussed in the conclusion

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures

A Framework for Semantic Interoperability for Distributed Geospatial Repositories

Interoperable access of geospatial information across disparate geospatial applications has become essential. Geospatial data are highly heterogeneous -- the heterogeneity arises both at the syntactic and semantic levels. Finding and accessing appropriate data in such a distributed environment is an important research issue. The paper proposes a methodology for interoperable access of geospatial information based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specified standards. An architecture for integrating diverse geospatial data repositories has been proposed using service-based methodology. The semantic issues for discovery and retrieval of geospatial data over distributed geospatial services have also been proposed in the paper. The proposed architecture utilizes the ontological concepts for service description and subsequent discovery of services. An approach for semantic similarity assessment of geospatial services has been discussed