4,754 research outputs found
A Model of Layered Architectures
Architectural styles and patterns play an important role in software
engineering. One of the most known ones is the layered architecture style.
However, this style is usually only stated informally, which may cause problems
such as ambiguity, wrong conclusions, and difficulty when checking the
conformance of a system to the style. We address these problems by providing a
formal, denotational semantics of the layered architecture style. Mainly, we
present a sufficiently abstract and rigorous description of layered
architectures. Loosely speaking, a layered architecture consists of a hierarchy
of layers, in which services communicate via ports. A layer is modeled as a
relation between used and provided services, and layer composition is defined
by means of relational composition. Furthermore, we provide a formal definition
for the notions of syntactic and semantic dependency between the layers. We
show that these dependencies are not comparable in general. Moreover, we
identify sufficient conditions under which, in an intuitive sense which we make
precise in our treatment, the semantic dependency implies, is implied by, or
even coincides with the reflexive-transitive closure of the syntactic
dependency. Our results provide a technology-independent characterization of
the layered architecture style, which may be used by software architects to
ensure that a system is indeed built according to that style.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2015, arXiv:1503.0437
SOAQE - Service Oriented Architecture Quality Evaluation
International audienceThis paper presents a semi-automated method for evaluating SOAs called SOAQE, correcting defects observed so far with existing methods such as lacks of pertinence and accuracy for evaluation results. SOAQE takes as a starting point the McCall model, describing software quality, which led to an international standard for the evaluation of software quality (ISO/IEC 9126-1, 2001). This model is organized around three types of quality attributes (factors, criteria and metrics). The SOAQE method consists in decomposing the whole architecture and evaluating it according to the McCall model, i.e.a list of quality factors arising from business needs grouping criteria composed by metrics. Our experimentations led us to quantify numerically a first determining factor for SOAs, the 'dynamism' and some attributes of its structure: namely the 'loose coupling' criterion and its constituent metrics ('physical, semantic and syntactic')
Ontology technology for the development and deployment of learning technology systems - a survey
The World-Wide Web is undergoing dramatic changes at the moment. The Semantic Web is an initiative to bring meaning to the Web. The Semantic Web is based on ontology
technology – a knowledge representation framework – at its core. We illustrate the importance of this evolutionary development. We survey five scenarios demonstrating different forms of applications of ontology technologies in the development and deployment of learning technology
systems. Ontology technologies are highly useful to organise, personalise, and publish learning content and to discover, generate, and compose learning objects
Modelling electronic service systems using UML
This paper presents a profile for modelling systems of electronic
services using UML. Electronic services encapsulate business services,
an organisational unit focused on delivering benefit to a consumer,
to enhance communication, coordination and information management.
Our profile is based on a formal, workflow-oriented description of electronic
services that is abstracted from particular implementation technologies.
Resulting models provide the basis for a formal analysis to verify
behavioural properties of services. The models can also relate services to
management components, including workflow managers and Electronic
Service Management Systems (ESMSs), a novel concept drawn from experience
of HP Service Composer and DySCo (Dynamic Service Composer),
providing the starting point for integration and implementation
tasks. Their UML basis and platform-independent nature is consistent
with a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) development strategy, appropriate
to the challenge of developing electronic service systems using
heterogeneous technology, and incorporating legacy systems
Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse
Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community
A model introducing SOAs quality attributes decomposition
International audienceRecently, service oriented architecture (SOA) has been popularized with the emergence of standards like Web services. Nevertheless, the shift to this architectural paradigm could potentially involve significant risks including projects abandonments. With this in mind, the question of evaluating SOA quality arose. The appearance of methods like ATAM or SAAM propelled software architecture evaluation to a standard stage for any paradigm. However, there still are a number of concerns that have been raised with these methods; in particular their cost in terms of time and money, essentially because of the hand-operated nature of the evaluations conducted. The model proposed in this paper for evaluating SOAs takes as a starting point the McCall model; it allows the whole architecture to be decomposed in three types of quality attributes (factor, criterion and metric
Neural Machine Translation Inspired Binary Code Similarity Comparison beyond Function Pairs
Binary code analysis allows analyzing binary code without having access to
the corresponding source code. A binary, after disassembly, is expressed in an
assembly language. This inspires us to approach binary analysis by leveraging
ideas and techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP), a rich area
focused on processing text of various natural languages. We notice that binary
code analysis and NLP share a lot of analogical topics, such as semantics
extraction, summarization, and classification. This work utilizes these ideas
to address two important code similarity comparison problems. (I) Given a pair
of basic blocks for different instruction set architectures (ISAs), determining
whether their semantics is similar or not; and (II) given a piece of code of
interest, determining if it is contained in another piece of assembly code for
a different ISA. The solutions to these two problems have many applications,
such as cross-architecture vulnerability discovery and code plagiarism
detection. We implement a prototype system INNEREYE and perform a comprehensive
evaluation. A comparison between our approach and existing approaches to
Problem I shows that our system outperforms them in terms of accuracy,
efficiency and scalability. And the case studies utilizing the system
demonstrate that our solution to Problem II is effective. Moreover, this
research showcases how to apply ideas and techniques from NLP to large-scale
binary code analysis.Comment: Accepted by Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium
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