Improving Schema Mapping by Exploiting Domain Knowledge

This dissertation addresses the problem of semi-automatically creating schema mappings. The need for developing schema mappings is a pervasive problem in many integration scenarios. Although the problem is well-known and a large body of work exists in the area, the development of schema mappings is today largely performed manually in industrial integration scenarios. In this thesis an approach for the semi-automatic creation of high quality schema mappings is developed

Transition of legacy systems to semantically enabled applications:TAO method and tools

Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web technologies in developing services and applications has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many legacy systems have been developed without considering the potential of theWeb in integrating services and sharing resources.Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to SemanticWeb Service-based systems can be a tedious and expensive process, which carries a significant risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies, allowing the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such strategies. In this paper we propose a methodology and its tool support for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services, which allow users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platforms automatically or semi-automatically. The transition of the GATE system is used as a case study

Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design.Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems

A Tool to Explore the Population of a CIDOC-CRM Ontology

This paper presents a visualising tool to explore the population of an Ontology, obtained through the processes of automatic migration and text information extraction. It was developed in the context of EPISA project, a R&D project that aims to represent the Portuguese National Archives records information in CIDOC-CRM, an ontology developed for museums. The tool allows the migration process developers to visualise the instances and their properties, and to debug the migration process and the migration representation model, or to explore the Archives by final users. It uses modeling and reasoners OWL-API with SPARQL-DL queries to obtain the exploration results

Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design.Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems

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

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Appendix To Software Migration: A Theoretical Framework A Grounded Theory approach on Systematic Literature Review

Software migration has been a research subject for a long time. Major research and industrial implementations have been conducted, shaping not only the techniques available nowadays, but also a good part of Software evolution jargon. To understand systematically the literature and grasp the major concepts is challenging and time consuming. Even more, research evolves, and it does based on the assumption that there is a single meaning that we all share redounding in the pollution of words with multiple and many times opposite meanings. In our quest to understand, share and contribute scientifically in this domain, we recognise this situation as a problem. To tackle down this problem we propose a taxonomy on the subject as a theoretical framework grounded on a systematic literature review. In this study we contribute a bottom-up taxonomy that links from the object of a migration t

Pristup integraciji tehničkih prostora zasnovan na preslikavanjima iinženjerstvu vođenom modelima

In order to automate development of integration adapters in industrial settings, a model-driven approach to adapter specification is devised. In this approach, a domain-specific modeling language is created to allow specification of mappings between integrated technical spaces. Also proposed is the mapping automation engine that comprises reuse and alignment algorithms. Based on mapping specifications, executable adapters are automatically generated and executed. Results of approach evaluations indicate that it is possible to use a model-driven approach to successfully integrate technical spaces and increase the automation by reusing domainspecific mappings from previously created adapters.За потребе повећања степена аутоматизације развоја адаптера за интеграцију у индустријском окружењу, осмишљен је моделом вођен приступ развоју адаптера. У оквиру овог приступа развијен је наменски језик за спецификацију пресликавања између техничких простора који су предмет интеграције. Приступ обухвата и алгоритме за поравнање и поновно искориштење претходно креираних пресликавања са циљем аутоматизације процеса спецификације. На основу креираних пресликавања, могуће je аутоматски генерисати извршиви код адаптера. У испитивањима приступа, показано је да је могуће успешно применити моделом вођен приступ у интеграцији техничких простора као и да је могуће успешно повећати степен аутоматизације поновним искоришћењем претходно креираних пресликавања.Za potrebe povećanja stepena automatizacije razvoja adaptera za integraciju u industrijskom okruženju, osmišljen je modelom vođen pristup razvoju adaptera. U okviru ovog pristupa razvijen je namenski jezik za specifikaciju preslikavanja između tehničkih prostora koji su predmet integracije. Pristup obuhvata i algoritme za poravnanje i ponovno iskorištenje prethodno kreiranih preslikavanja sa ciljem automatizacije procesa specifikacije. Na osnovu kreiranih preslikavanja, moguće je automatski generisati izvršivi kod adaptera. U ispitivanjima pristupa, pokazano je da je moguće uspešno primeniti modelom vođen pristup u integraciji tehničkih prostora kao i da je moguće uspešno povećati stepen automatizacije ponovnim iskorišćenjem prethodno kreiranih preslikavanja

On the Effect of Semantically Enriched Context Models on Software Modularization

Many of the existing approaches for program comprehension rely on the linguistic information found in source code, such as identifier names and comments. Semantic clustering is one such technique for modularization of the system that relies on the informal semantics of the program, encoded in the vocabulary used in the source code. Treating the source code as a collection of tokens loses the semantic information embedded within the identifiers. We try to overcome this problem by introducing context models for source code identifiers to obtain a semantic kernel, which can be used for both deriving the topics that run through the system as well as their clustering. In the first model, we abstract an identifier to its type representation and build on this notion of context to construct contextual vector representation of the source code. The second notion of context is defined based on the flow of data between identifiers to represent a module as a dependency graph where the nodes correspond to identifiers and the edges represent the data dependencies between pairs of identifiers. We have applied our approach to 10 medium-sized open source Java projects, and show that by introducing contexts for identifiers, the quality of the modularization of the software systems is improved. Both of the context models give results that are superior to the plain vector representation of documents. In some cases, the authoritativeness of decompositions is improved by 67%. Furthermore, a more detailed evaluation of our approach on JEdit, an open source editor, demonstrates that inferred topics through performing topic analysis on the contextual representations are more meaningful compared to the plain representation of the documents. The proposed approach in introducing a context model for source code identifiers paves the way for building tools that support developers in program comprehension tasks such as application and domain concept location, software modularization and topic analysis