Preserving architectural choices throughout the component-based software development process

Abstrac

A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

Recording, Documentation, and Information Management for the Conservation of Heritage Places: Guiding Principles

Provides guidance on integrating recording, documentation, and information management of territories, sites, groups of buildings, or monuments into the conservation process; evaluating proposals; consulting specialists; and controlling implementation

From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work

An architecture for certification-aware service discovery

Service-orientation is an emerging paradigm for building complex systems based on loosely coupled components, deployed and consumed over the network. Despite the original intent of the paradigm, its current instantiations are limited to a single trust domain (e.g., a single organization). Also, some of the key promises of service-orientation - such as the dynamic orchestration of externally provided software services, using runtime service discovery and deployment - are still unachieved. One of the main reasons for this is the trust gap that normally arises when software services, offered by previously unknown providers, are to be selected at run-time, without any human intervention. To close this gap, the concept of machine-readable security certificates (called asserts) has been recently introduced, which paves the way to automated processing about security properties of services. Similarly to current security certification schemes, the assessment of the security properties of a service is delegated to an independent third party (certification authority), who issues a corresponding assert, bound to the service. In this paper, we propose an architecture, which exploits the assert concept to realise a certification-aware service discovery framework. The architecture supports the discovery of single services based on certified security properties (in additional to the usual functional properties), as well as the dynamic synthesis of service compositions, that satisfy the given security properties. The architecture is extensible, thus allowing for a range of domain specific matchmaking components, to cover dimensions related to, e.g., performance, cost and other non-functional characteristics

Autonomous Architectural Assembly And Adaptation

An increasingly common solution for systems which are deployed in unpredictable or dangerous environments is to provide the system with an autonomous or selfmanaging capability. This capability permits the software of the system to adapt to the environmental conditions encountered at runtime by deciding what changes need to be made to the system’s behaviour in order to continue meeting the requirements imposed by the designer. The chief advantage of this approach comes from a reduced reliance on the brittle assumptions made at design time. In this work, we describe mechanisms for adapting the software architecture of a system using a declarative expression of the functional requirements (derived from goals), structural constraints and preferences over the space of non-functional properties possessed by the components of the system. The declarative approach places this work in contrast to existing schemes which require more fine-grained, often procedural, specifications of how to perform adaptations. Our algorithm for assembling and re-assembling configurations chooses between solutions that meet both the functional requirements and the structural constraints by comparing the non-functional properties of the selected components against the designer’s preferences between, for example, a high-performance or a highly reliable solution. In addition to the centralised algorithm, we show how the approach can be applied to a distributed system with no central or master node that is aware of the full space of solutions. We use a gossip protocol as a mechanism by which peer nodes can propose what they think the component configuration is (or should be). Gossip ensures that the nodes will reach agreement on a solution, and will do so in a logarithmic number of steps. This latter property ensures the approach can scale to very large systems. Finally, the work is validated on a number of case studies

Creating a Religious Properties Database for the City of New Bedford: an Analysis of Best Practices and Available Systems

This policy analysis was written to provide the city of New Bedford, the Waterfront Historic Area League, Inter-church Council of Greater New Bedford, and the congregations with possible database systems to consider in creating their historic religious properties database. It also provides the best methodology to use when choosing a database. Deciding on who will be involved in the choosing process, determining a budget, and listing the mandatory requirements the database should provide are all important to consider in the decision making process