Visualization of Academic Quality Assurance Metamodel Through the Creation of Academic Quality Assurance Metamodel Information System

Academic quality assurance metamodel information system (AQAMIS) is a mobile-web-friendly system designed to manage academic quality assurance (AQA) knowledge structure for higher education using the AQA metamodel structure. This research describes the development and functionality of AQAMIS, as well as how it visualizes the AQA metamodel on a system-based level. The AQAMIS system transformed the metamodel class diagram design into a user-friendly design, making it easier for any non-technical user to understand the metamodel design. The AQAMIS is composed of two major parts: the AQA metamodel and the knowledge repository system. The metamodel addresses the issue of managing knowledge for quality assurance in higher education. While the system resolves the issue of sharing best practices in higher education AQA. The AQAMIS system assists in ensuring that academic quality assurance systems are implemented more efficiently and effectively in higher learning institutions (HLIs). AQAMIS is also a one-stop center for respective users such as HLI top management, policymakers, auditors, and quality assurance personnel to access their expertise and share best practices in AQA endeavors

User Acceptance of the E-Perolehan System Among Government Users in Malaysia

The study of user acceptance of new technology and technology innovation is considered to be one of the mature studies in the field of Information Systems (IS). User acceptance refers to the willingness of the user group to employ information technology for tasks the technology is designed to support. This study looked into user acceptance of the eperolehan system at the individual level in the context of business-to-consumer (B2C). eperolehan is an electronic procurement system that converts manual procurement processes in the Government machinery to electronic procurement processes on the Internet. The study involved the use of an intention-based model and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as its nomological framework. The constructs or variables of this study were subsumed in the quality dimension of the DeLone and McLean Model of IS Success. This study framed ten (10) independent variables and two (2) dependent variables. The ten independent variables were perceived usefulness (subsumed in the system quality dimension), trust, perceived ease of use and perceived risk (information quality dimension), assurance, responsiveness and facilitating conditions (service quality dimension) and web design quality (system, information and service). The two dependent variables were Intention to Transact and Actual Transaction Behavior. The instruments utilized in this study were adapted and adopted from established instruments in the context of the eperolehan system. This study employed a survey using self-administered questionnaires which were distributed to 358 respondents (government users) of the eperolehan system from a sampling frame of 1150 government users from 230 Pusat Tanggungjawab (procuring unit) of the 28 government ministeries and departments located in Klang Valley and Putrajaya. The data analysis procedures administered in this study generally comprised of descriptive and inferential statistics using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and a Structural Equation Model (SEM) using LISREL to examine the hypotheses. A competing model was developed which had several path relationships added to the original model and presented a good model fit which enabled the hypotheses to be tested. It was found that perceived usefulness, assurance, facilitating conditions, perceived risk and web design quality (service quality) had significant relationships with lntention to Transact. Meanwhile, perceived ease of use, trust, responsiveness, web design quality (information and system) had insignificant relationships with lntention to Transact. lntention to Transact had a significant relationship with Actual Transaction Behavior. This study addressed several limitations and recommendations for future studies were proposed to encourage further research on user acceptance studies

Using structural and semantic methodologies to enhance biomedical terminologies

Biomedical terminologies and ontologies underlie various Health Information Systems (HISs), Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) and health administrative systems. Moreover, the proliferation of interdisciplinary research efforts in the biomedical field is fueling the need to overcome terminological barriers when integrating knowledge from different fields into a unified research project. Therefore well-developed and well-maintained terminologies are in high demand. Most of the biomedical terminologies are large and complex, which makes it impossible for human experts to manually detect and correct all errors and inconsistencies. Automated and semi-automated Quality Assurance methodologies that focus on areas that are more likely to contain errors and inconsistencies are therefore important. In this dissertation, structural and semantic methodologies are used to enhance biomedical terminologies. The dissertation work is divided into three major parts. The first part consists of structural auditing techniques for the Semantic Network of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), which serves as a vocabulary knowledge base for biomedical research in various applications. Research techniques are presented on how to automatically identify and prevent erroneous semantic type assignments to concepts. The Web-based adviseEditor system is introduced to help UMLS editors to make correct multiple semantic type assignments to concepts. It is made available to the National Library of Medicine for future use in maintaining the UMLS. The second part of this dissertation is on how to enhance the conceptual content of SNOMED CT by methods of semantic harmonization. By 2015, SNOMED will become the standard terminology for EH R encoding of diagnoses and problem lists. In order to enrich the semantics and coverage of SNOMED CT for clinical and research applications, the problem of semantic harmonization between SNOMED CT and six reference terminologies is approached by 1) comparing the vertical density of SNOM ED CT with the reference terminologies to find potential concepts for export and import; and 2) categorizing the relationships between structurally congruent concepts from pairs of terminologies, with SNOMED CT being one terminology in the pair. Six kinds of configurations are observed, e.g., alternative classifications, and suggested synonyms. For each configuration, a corresponding solution is presented for enhancing one or both of the terminologies. The third part applies Quality Assurance techniques based on “Abstraction Networks” to biomedical ontologies in BioPortal. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology provides B ioPortal as a repository of over 350 biomedical ontologies covering a wide range of domains. It is extremely difficult to design a new Quality Assurance methodology for each ontology in BioPortal. Fortunately, groups of ontologies in BioPortal share common structural features. Thus, they can be grouped into families based on combinations of these features. A uniform Quality Assurance methodology design for each family will achieve improved efficiency, which is critical with the limited Quality Assurance resources available to most ontology curators. In this dissertation, a family-based framework covering 186 BioPortal ontologies and accompanying Quality Assurance methods based on abstraction networks are presented to tackle this problem

Fine-tuning Central Banks Web Communications: Usability Tests & Content Management

Business processes especially in the Central Banks are more fully integrated and streamlined than ever before. Also, realistic system landscapes often consist of many systems. Disconnected silos of unstructured information continue to pile up for each organizational function and different interfaces are often implemented using the technology that is considered to be ideal for the respective interface. There appears to be lack of Enterprise Content Management strategy thus leading to significant business challenges such as untrustworthy business information due to inaccurate, outdated, conflicting information, longer financial cycles and generally inefficient processes, system performance degradations and poor data organization, inconsistent, confusing user interface as well as frequent context switching. There is therefore the need for an effective enterprise content management strategy. Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentations. Usability testing of web sites is an essential element of quality assurance and a true test of how people actually use Central Banks’ web site. It is a test of whether outsiders can successfully use the Banks’ Web site. Although formal usability tests are expensive, time-consuming and often prohibitive, periodic user testing is an important element in developing and maintaining a reader-friendly Website. Usability should emphasise clarity of communication, accessibility, consistency, navigation design, maintenance and good visual presentation. A solution to corporate intranet/internet chaos are Enterprise Portals. An enterprise portal is the gateway to the end user. It offers a central point of access to information, applications and services in an enterprise. It is a one-stop shopping for knowledge workers; the portal is both a gateway to and a destination on the enterprise network that provides transparent, tailored access to distributed digital resource. An Enterprise Portal provides numerous benefits to users, allowing them to interact with relevant information and application, both internal and external to the company, collaborate with others both inside and outside the Central Banks through self-service publishing customise-and-tailor a Web page with information that is easily found. This paper discusses the issue of Usability Tests and Web Content Management that enhance user productivity. Drawing from some award winning intranets some areas for best practices for the financial services such as the African Central Banks are high-lightened vis-à-vis the infrastructural problems facing the African Continen

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

A Model-Driven Approach for Business Process Management

The Business Process Management is a common mechanism recommended by a high number of standards for the management of companies and organizations. In software companies this practice is every day more accepted and companies have to assume it, if they want to be competitive. However, the effective definition of these processes and mainly their maintenance and execution are not always easy tasks. This paper presents an approach based on the Model-Driven paradigm for Business Process Management in software companies. This solution offers a suitable mechanism that was implemented successfully in different companies with a tool case named NDTQ-Framework.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2010-20057-C03-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

Proposing a secure component-based-application logic and system’s integration testing approach

Software engineering moved from traditional methods of software enterprise applications to com-ponent based development for distributed system’s applications. This new era has grown up forlast few years, with component-based methods, for design and rapid development of systems, butfact is that , deployment of all secure software features of technology into practical e-commercedistributed systems are higher rated target for intruders. Although most of research has been con-ducted on web application services that use a large share of the present software, but on the otherside Component Based Software in the middle tier ,which rapidly develops application logic, alsoopen security breaching opportunities .This research paper focus on a burning issue for researchersand scientists ,a weakest link in component based distributed system, logical attacks, that cannotbe detected with any intrusion detection system within the middle tier e-commerce distributed ap-plications. We proposed An Approach of Secure Designing application logic for distributed system,while dealing with logically vulnerability issue