A Multi-Faceted Software Reusability Model: The Quintet Web.

Over the past decade, problems in software development and maintenance have increased rapidly. The size of software has grown explosively, complexity of software applications has increased, the nature of software applications has become more critical, and large quantities of software to be maintained have accumulated. During the same time, the productivity of individual software engineers has not improved proportionally. Software reusability is widely believed to be a key to help overcome the ongoing software crisis by improving software productivity and quality. However, the promise of software reusability has not yet been fulfilled. We present a multi-faceted software reusability model, a Quintet Web, that enables designers to reuse software artifacts from all phases. The Quintet Web consists of links of five types of reuse support information among existing document blocks: semantic, horizontal, hierarchical, syntactic, and alternative relationships. The five types of reuse support information are named the Semantic Web, the Horizontal Web, the Vertical Web, the Syntactic Web, and the Alternative Web. The Semantic Web defines the operational functionality of each software block. The Horizontal Web links functionally identical blocks of all phases. The Vertical Web identifies hierarchical relationships of software blocks. The Syntactic Web forms a chain from the declaration of each variable to its uses for all variables. The Alternative Web enables software developers to select an alternative algorithm for an identical functionality. The Quintet Web supports both software development and maintenance. When the Quintet Web is applied to development process, it provides software developers a means to check the consistency of the software being developed. The Quintet Web model is independent of a specific software development method

Modeling Faceted Browsing with Category Theory for Reuse and Interoperability

Faceted browsing (also called faceted search or faceted navigation) is an exploratory search model where facets assist in the interactive navigation of search results. Facets are attributes that have been assigned to describe resources being explored; a faceted taxonomy is a collection of facets provided by the interface and is often organized as sets, hierarchies, or graphs. Faceted browsing has become ubiquitous with modern digital libraries and online search engines, yet the process is still difficult to abstractly model in a manner that supports the development of interoperable and reusable interfaces. We propose category theory as a theoretical foundation for faceted browsing and demonstrate how the interactive process can be mathematically abstracted in order to support the development of reusable and interoperable faceted systems. Existing efforts in facet modeling are based upon set theory, formal concept analysis, and light-weight ontologies, but in many regards they are implementations of faceted browsing rather than a specification of the basic, underlying structures and interactions. We will demonstrate that category theory allows us to specify faceted objects and study the relationships and interactions within a faceted browsing system. Resulting implementations can then be constructed through a category-theoretic lens using these models, allowing abstract comparison and communication that naturally support interoperability and reuse. In this context, reuse and interoperability are at two levels: between discrete systems and within a single system. Our model works at both levels by leveraging category theory as a common language for representation and computation. We will establish facets and faceted taxonomies as categories and will demonstrate how the computational elements of category theory, including products, merges, pushouts, and pullbacks, extend the usefulness of our model. More specifically, we demonstrate that categorical constructions such as the pullback and pushout operations can help organize and reorganize facets; these operations in particular can produce faceted views containing relationships not found in the original source taxonomy. We show how our category-theoretic model of facets relates to database schemas and discuss how this relationship assists in implementing the abstractions presented. We give examples of interactive interfaces from the biomedical domain to help illustrate how our abstractions relate to real-world requirements while enabling systematic reuse and interoperability. We introduce DELVE (Document ExpLoration and Visualization Engine), our framework for developing interactive visualizations as modular Web-applications in order to assist researchers with exploratory literature search. We show how facets relate to and control visualizations; we give three examples of text visualizations that either contain or interact with facets. We show how each of these visualizations can be represented with our model and demonstrate how our model directly informs implementation. With our general framework for communicating consistently about facets at a high level of abstraction, we enable the construction of interoperable interfaces and enable the intelligent reuse of both existing and future efforts

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

An MPEG-7 scheme for semantic content modelling and filtering of digital video

Abstract Part 5 of the MPEG-7 standard specifies Multimedia Description Schemes (MDS); that is, the format multimedia content models should conform to in order to ensure interoperability across multiple platforms and applications. However, the standard does not specify how the content or the associated model may be filtered. This paper proposes an MPEG-7 scheme which can be deployed for digital video content modelling and filtering. The proposed scheme, COSMOS-7, produces rich and multi-faceted semantic content models and supports a content-based filtering approach that only analyses content relating directly to the preferred content requirements of the user. We present details of the scheme, front-end systems used for content modelling and filtering and experiences with a number of users

Proceedings of the 14th Annual Software Engineering Workshop

Several software related topics are presented. Topics covered include studies and experiment at the Software Engineering Laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center, predicting project success from the Software Project Management Process, software environments, testing in a reuse environment, domain directed reuse, and classification tree analysis using the Amadeus measurement and empirical analysis

Semantically-enhanced recommendations in cultural heritage

In the Web 2.0 environment, institutes and organizations are starting to open up their previously isolated and heterogeneous collections in order to provide visitors with maximal access. Semantic Web technologies act as instrumental in integrating these rich collections of metadata by defining ontologies which accommodate different representation schemata and inconsistent naming conventions over the various vocabularies. Facing the large amount of metadata with complex semantic structures, it is becoming more and more important to support visitors with a proper selection and presentation of information. In this context, the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) funded the Cultural Heritage Information Personalization (CHIP) project in early 2005, as part of the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH) program in the Netherlands. It is a collaborative project between the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Telematica Instituut. The problem statement that guides the research of this thesis is as follows: Can we support visitors with personalized access to semantically-enriched collections? To study this question, we chose cultural heritage (museums) as an application domain, and the semantically rich background knowledge about the museum collection provides a basis to our research. On top of it, we deployed user modeling and recommendation technologies in order to provide personalized services for museum visitors. Our main contributions are: (i) we developed an interactive rating dialog of artworks and art concepts for a quick instantiation of the CHIP user model, which is built as a specialization of FOAF and mapped to an existing event model ontology SEM; (ii) we proposed a hybrid recommendation algorithm, combining both explicit and implicit relations from the semantic structure of the collection. On the presentation level, we developed three tools for end-users: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Following a user-centered design cycle, we performed a series of evaluations with museum visitors to test the effectiveness of recommendations using the rating dialog, different ways to build an optimal user model and the prediction accuracy of the hybrid algorithm. Chapter 1 introduces the research questions, our approaches and the outline of this thesis. Chapter 2 gives an overview of our work at the first stage. It includes (i) the semantic enrichment of the Rijksmuseum collection, which is mapped to three Getty vocabularies (ULAN, AAT, TGN) and the Iconclass thesaurus; (ii) the minimal user model ontology defined as a specialization of FOAF, which only stores user ratings at that time, (iii) the first implementation of the content-based recommendation algorithm in our first tool, the CHIP Art Recommender. Chapter 3 presents two other tools: Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the user's ratings, the Web-based Tour Wizard recommends museum tours consisting of recommended artworks that are currently available for museum exhibitions. The Mobile Tour Guide converts recommended tours to mobile devices (e.g. PDA) that can be used in the physical museum space. To connect users' various interactions with these tools, we made a conversion of the online user model stored in RDF into XML format which the mobile guide can parse, and in this way we keep the online and on-site user models dynamically synchronized. Chapter 4 presents the second generation of the Mobile Tour Guide with a real time routing system on different mobile devices (e.g. iPod). Compared with the first generation, it can adapt museum tours based on the user's ratings artworks and concepts, her/his current location in the physical museum and the coordinates of the artworks and rooms in the museum. In addition, we mapped the CHIP user model to an existing event model ontology SEM. Besides ratings, it can store additional user activities, such as following a tour and viewing artworks. Chapter 5 identifies a number of semantic relations within one vocabulary (e.g. a concept has a broader/narrower concept) and across multiple vocabularies (e.g. an artist is associated to an art style). We applied all these relations as well as the basic artwork features in content-based recommendations and compared all of them in terms of usefulness. This investigation also enables us to look at the combined use of artwork features and semantic relations in sequence and derive user navigation patterns. Chapter 6 defines the task of personalized recommendations and decomposes the task into a number of inference steps for ontology-based recommender systems, from a perspective of knowledge engineering. We proposed a hybrid approach combining both explicit and implicit recommendations. The explicit relations include artworks features and semantic relations with preliminary weights which are derived from the evaluation in Chapter 5. The implicit relations are built between art concepts based on instance-based ontology matching. Chapter 7 gives an example of reusing user interaction data generated by one application into another one for providing cross-application recommendations. In this example, user tagging about cultural events, gathered by iCITY, is used to enrich the user model for generating content-based recommendations in the CHIP Art Recommender. To realize full tagging interoperability, we investigated the problems that arise in mapping user tags to domain ontologies, and proposed additional mechanisms, such as the use of SKOS matching operators to deal with the possible mis-alignment of tags and domain-specific ontologies. We summarized to what extent the problem statement and each of the research questions are answered in Chapter 8. We also discussed a number of limitations in our research and looked ahead at what may follow as future work

Ubiquitous Semantic Applications

As Semantic Web technology evolves many open areas emerge, which attract more research focus. In addition to quickly expanding Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, various embeddable metadata formats (e.g. RDFa, microdata) are becoming more common. Corporations are already using existing Web of Data to create new technologies that were not possible before. Watson by IBM an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language can be a great example. On the other hand, ubiquitous devices that have a large number of sensors and integrated devices are becoming increasingly powerful and fully featured computing platforms in our pockets and homes. For many people smartphones and tablet computers have already replaced traditional computers as their window to the Internet and to the Web. Hence, the management and presentation of information that is useful to a user is a main requirement for today’s smartphones. And it is becoming extremely important to provide access to the emerging Web of Data from the ubiquitous devices. In this thesis we investigate how ubiquitous devices can interact with the Semantic Web. We discovered that there are five different approaches for bringing the Semantic Web to ubiquitous devices. We have outlined and discussed in detail existing challenges in implementing this approaches in section 1.2. We have described a conceptual framework for ubiquitous semantic applications in chapter 4. We distinguish three client approaches for accessing semantic data using ubiquitous devices depending on how much of the semantic data processing is performed on the device itself (thin, hybrid and fat clients). These are discussed in chapter 5 along with the solution to every related challenge. Two provider approaches (fat and hybrid) can be distinguished for exposing data from ubiquitous devices on the Semantic Web. These are discussed in chapter 6 along with the solution to every related challenge. We conclude our work with a discussion on each of the contributions of the thesis and propose future work for each of the discussed approach in chapter 7

Ontology-based knowledge representation and semantic search information retrieval: case study of the underutilized crops domain

The aim of using semantic technologies in domain knowledge modeling is to introduce the semantic meaning of concepts in knowledge bases, such that they are both human-readable as well as machine-understandable. Due to their powerful knowledge representation formalism and associated inference mechanisms, ontology-based approaches have been increasingly adopted to formally represent domain knowledge. The primary objective of this thesis work has been to use semantic technologies in advancing knowledge-sharing of Underutilized crops as a domain and investigate the integration of underlying ontologies developed in OWL (Web Ontology Language) with augmented SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules for added expressiveness. The work further investigated generating ontologies from existing data sources and proposed the reverse-engineering approach of generating domain specific conceptualization through competency questions posed from possible ontology users and domain experts. For utilization, a semantic search engine (the Onto-CropBase) has been developed to serve as a Web-based access point for the Underutilized crops ontology model. Relevant linked-data in Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) were added for comprehensiveness in generating federated queries. While the OWL/SWRL combination offers a highly expressive ontology language for modeling knowledge domains, the combination is found to be lacking supplementary descriptive constructs to model complex real-life scenarios, a necessary requirement for a successful Semantic Web application. To this end, the common logic programming formalisms for extending Description Logic (DL)-based ontologies were explored and the state of the art in SWRL expressiveness extensions determined with a view to extending the SWRL formalism. Subsequently, a novel fuzzy temporal extension to the Semantic Web Rule Language (FT-SWRL), which combines SWRL with fuzzy logic theories based on the valid-time temporal model, has been proposed to allow modeling imprecise temporal expressions in domain ontologies

Arcabouço de arquitetura da informação para ciclo de vida de projeto de vocabulário controlado : uma aplicação em Engenharia de Software

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Ciência da Informação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação, 2017.A pesquisa que resultou nesta tese investigou processos de desenvolvimento e de avaliação de vocabulários controlados. Esta tese inclui os seguintes elementos: resultado de pesquisa bibliográfica sobre arquitetura da informação, recuperação da informação, organização da informação e representação da informação; proposta de arcabouço para ciclo de vida de projeto de vocabulário controlado; e exemplo de uso de elementos desse arcabouço na construção de um protótipo de vocabulário controlado no domínio da Engenharia de Software. O arcabouço proposto é composto por arquitetura de referência, modelo de domínio, modelo de qualidade e lista de atividades. Entre os elementos do modelo de qualidade proposto, existe uma lista de características de qualidade de vocabulários controlados. Os modelos propostos estão parcialmente alinhados a ferramentas semânticas existentes.The research that resulted in this thesis has investigated development and evaluation processes of controlled vocabularies. This thesis includes the following elements: results of a bibliographic research on information architecture, information recovery, information organization and information representation; proposal of a framework for controlled vocabulary project life cycle; and example of use of this framework during the construction of a prototype of a controlled vocabulary on the Software Engineering domain. The proposed framework is composed of reference architecture, domain model, quality model and list of activities. Among the elements of the proposed quality model, there is a list of controlled vocabulary quality characteristics. The proposed models are partially aligned to existing semantic tools

The anatomy of a search and mining system for digital humanities : Search And Mining Tools for Language Archives (SAMTLA)

Humanities researchers are faced with an overwhelming volume of digitised primary source material, and "born digital" information, of relevance to their research as a result of large-scale digitisation projects. The current digital tools do not provide consistent support for analysing the content of digital archives that are potentially large in scale, multilingual, and come in a range of data formats. The current language-dependent, or project specific, approach to tool development often puts the tools out of reach for many research disciplines in the humanities. In addition, the tools can be incompatible with the way researchers locate and compare the relevant sources. For instance, researchers are interested in shared structural text patterns, known as \parallel passages" that describe a specific cultural, social, or historical context relevant to their research topic. Identifying these shared structural text patterns is challenging due to their repeated yet highly variable nature, as a result of differences in the domain, author, language, time period, and orthography. The contribution of the thesis is a novel infrastructure that directly addresses the need for generic, flexible, extendable, and sustainable digital tools that are applicable to a wide range of digital archives and research in the humanities. The infrastructure adopts a character-level n-gram Statistical Language Model (SLM), stored in a space-optimised k-truncated suffix tree data structure as its underlying data model. A character-level n-gram model is a relatively new approach that is competitive with word-level n-gram models, but has the added advantage that it is domain and language-independent, requiring little or no preprocessing of the document text unlike word-level models that require some form of language-dependent tokenisation and stemming. Character-level n-grams capture word internal features that are ignored by word-level n-gram models, which provides greater exibility in addressing the information need of the user through tolerant search, and compensation for erroneous query specification or spelling errors in the document text. Furthermore, the SLM provides a unified approach to information retrieval and text mining, where traditional approaches have tended to adopt separate data models that are often ad-hoc or based on heuristic assumptions. In addition, the performance of the character-level n-gram SLM was formally evaluated through crowdsourcing, which demonstrates that the retrieval performance of the SLM is close to that of the human level performance. The proposed infrastructure, supports the development of the Samtla (Search And Mining Tools for Language Archives), which provides humanities researchers digital tools for search, browsing, and text mining of digital archives in any domain or language, within a single system. Samtla supersedes many of the existing tools for humanities researchers, by supporting the same or similar functionality of the systems, but with a domain-independent and languageindependent approach. The functionality includes a browsing tool constructed from the metadata and named entities extracted from the document text, a hybrid-recommendation system for recommending related queries and documents. However, some tools are novel tools and developed in response to the specific needs of the researchers, such as the document comparison tool for visualising shared sequences between groups of related documents. Furthermore, Samtla is the first practical example of a system with a SLM as its primary data model that supports the real research needs of several case studies covering different areas of research in the humanities