An Infrastructure to Support Interoperability in Reverse Engineering

An infrastructure that supports interoperability among reverse engineering tools and other software tools is described. The three major components of the infrastructure are: (1) a hierarchy of schemas for low- and middle-level program representation graphs, (2) g4re, a tool chain for reverse engineering C++ programs, and (3) a repository of reverse engineering artifacts, including the previous two components, a test suite, and tools, GXL instances, and XSLT transformations for graphs at each level of the hierarchy. The results of two case studies that investigated the space and time costs incurred by the infrastructure are provided. The results of two empirical evaluations that were performed using the api module of g4re, and were focused on computation of object-oriented metrics and three-dimensional visualization of class template diagrams, respectively, are also provided

Grid-selvitys. Näkökulma tietojärjestelmien yhteiskäytön edistämiseen

Raportissa kuvataan yleisesti grid-käsitemaailmaa sekä gridin kehittymisen ja soveltamisen nykyvaihetta ja tulevaisuuskuvaa. Käsitteellä grid ei ole yhtä ja ainoaa yleisesti hyväksyttyä määritelmää. Tietojärjestelmissä grid voidaan hahmottaa infrastruktuurina, johon kuuluu joukko erilaisia resursseja: mm. prosessointivoimaa, tietovarastoja, verkkoyhteyksiä ja sovelluspalveluita. Rapaortissa esitellään lisäksi gridin roolia tietoyhteiskunnan kehityksessä sekä grid-ajattelun asemaa ja etenemistä Suomessa, Euroopassa ja myös laajemmin kansainvälisesti

Ontology for Application Development

The chapter describes the process of ontology development for different subject domains for application designing. The analysis of existing approaches to ontology development for software platform realization in some subject domains is depicted. The example of ontology model development for telecom operator billing system based on descriptive logic is shown. For ontology model designing, it is proposed to use two formal theories: descriptive logic and set theory, which allow to systematize data and knowledge, to organize search and navigation, and to describe informational and computational recourses according to the meta-notion standards

PRIME: Proactive Inter-Middleware for Global Enterprise Resource Integration

We present PRIME software ecosystem, which connects heterogeneous resources from different layers of the Internet of Things and capable of handling complex interoperability scenarios involving: hardware devices, software-based systems and humansМы представляем программную экосистему  PRIME, которая соединит разнородные ресурсы из различных слоев Интернета вещей и способна обслуживать сложные сценарии взаимодействия с участием: аппаратных устройств, программных систем и людейМи представляємо програмну екосистему PRIME, яка з'єднає різнорідні ресурси з різних верств Інтернету речей і здатна обслуговувати складні сценарії взаємодії за участю: апаратних пристроїв, програмних систем і люде

Automated generation of geometrically-precise and semantically-informed virtual geographic environnements populated with spatially-reasoning agents

La Géo-Simulation Multi-Agent (GSMA) est un paradigme de modélisation et de simulation de phénomènes dynamiques dans une variété de domaines d'applications tels que le domaine du transport, le domaine des télécommunications, le domaine environnemental, etc. La GSMA est utilisée pour étudier et analyser des phénomènes qui mettent en jeu un grand nombre d'acteurs simulés (implémentés par des agents) qui évoluent et interagissent avec une représentation explicite de l'espace qu'on appelle Environnement Géographique Virtuel (EGV). Afin de pouvoir interagir avec son environnement géographique qui peut être dynamique, complexe et étendu (à grande échelle), un agent doit d'abord disposer d'une représentation détaillée de ce dernier. Les EGV classiques se limitent généralement à une représentation géométrique du monde réel laissant de côté les informations topologiques et sémantiques qui le caractérisent. Ceci a pour conséquence d'une part de produire des simulations multi-agents non plausibles, et, d'autre part, de réduire les capacités de raisonnement spatial des agents situés. La planification de chemin est un exemple typique de raisonnement spatial dont un agent pourrait avoir besoin dans une GSMA. Les approches classiques de planification de chemin se limitent à calculer un chemin qui lie deux positions situées dans l'espace et qui soit sans obstacle. Ces approches ne prennent pas en compte les caractéristiques de l'environnement (topologiques et sémantiques), ni celles des agents (types et capacités). Les agents situés ne possèdent donc pas de moyens leur permettant d'acquérir les connaissances nécessaires sur l'environnement virtuel pour pouvoir prendre une décision spatiale informée. Pour répondre à ces limites, nous proposons une nouvelle approche pour générer automatiquement des Environnements Géographiques Virtuels Informés (EGVI) en utilisant les données fournies par les Systèmes d'Information Géographique (SIG) enrichies par des informations sémantiques pour produire des GSMA précises et plus réalistes. De plus, nous présentons un algorithme de planification hiérarchique de chemin qui tire avantage de la description enrichie et optimisée de l'EGVI pour fournir aux agents un chemin qui tient compte à la fois des caractéristiques de leur environnement virtuel et de leurs types et capacités. Finalement, nous proposons une approche pour la gestion des connaissances sur l'environnement virtuel qui vise à supporter la prise de décision informée et le raisonnement spatial des agents situés

Über die Anwendung des service-orientierten Architekturstils auf heterogene Anwendungslandschaften

This thesis investigates the application of the service-oriented architectural style in the context of industrial enterprises. This style provides a commonly perceived paradigm for organizing distributed software systems. However, beyond general attention to this style, there are only few descriptions of the difference between service orientation and more mature styles, such as component orientation. This dissertation argues that the service-oriented style is an approach that centralizes control over distributed functionality that is provided by the application systems of an organization. This means that service orientation is a paradigm for application integration. Moreover, we argue that it is not possible to fully formalize the inherent principles of service orientation as part of an architectural style description. In fact, soft design principles are a differentiator of this style. These principles, however, are rarely applied in the context of industrial enterprises. This is why we analyze how such design principles could be objectively described and what attention should be paid to them. This analysis is performed by categorizing the potential benefits of this style and assigning the respective underlying principles to the identified benefits. Subsequently, a reference architecture is defined on the basis of these findings. This architecture focuses on structuring service-oriented applications - so-called composite applications. In order to apply the defined reference architecture in the context of actual projects, we describe a design methodology for composite applications. This design methodology focuses on using business processes for designing various types of services and on describing their interconnections by the reference architecture. To achieve this, a service design algorithm is included that derives services from business processes by incorporating the results of a statistical analysis of service design principles. The result of this methodology is a platform-independent design of a composite application. It considers the restrictions of the application landscape in which a composite will be deployed. To permit the realization of composite applications, we informally map the platform-independent reference architecture to a platform that is widely used in industrial enterprises. This mapping is, together with the design methodology and the reference architecture, applied to an industry-scale use case. This way, the applicability of the concepts is demonstrated.Diese Dissertation untersucht, wie der service-orientierte Architekturstil von großen Konzernen angewandt werden kann. Dieser Architekturstil strukturiert verteilte Systeme. Neben allgemeiner Aufmerksamkeit sind jedoch nur wenige Beschreibungen verfügbar, die zeigen, wie sich dieser Stil von anderen - so z.B. von dem der Komponentenorientierung - absetzt. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt, dass der service-orientierte Stil ein Ansatz zur Kontrollzentralisierung ist. Dabei zentralisiert er die Kontrolle über die Funktionalität, die von den Applikationssystemen einer Organisation bereitgestellt wird. Daher kann er auch als Integrationsansatz verstanden werden. Zusätzlich ist es nicht möglich, alle Prinzipien des service-orientierten Stils als Architekturstil zu beschreiben. Tatsächlich stellen weiche Designprinzipien das Alleinstellungsmerkmal dieses Stils dar. Diese Prinzipien werden allerdings von großen Organisationen kaum angewendet. Diese Dissertation untersucht deshalb den Stellenwert der einzelnen Prinzipien und beschreibt, wie sie objektiviert werden können. In dieser Untersuchung werden die möglichen Vorteile dieses Architekturstils zunächst kategorisiert. Danach werden diesen potentiellen Vorteilen die Prinzipien zugewiesen, die zu ihrer Erlangung beitragen. Auf Basis dieser Analyse wird danach eine Referenzarchitektur erstellt. Diese Architektur beschreibt eine Struktur für service-orientierte Applikationen, so genannte composite applications, die es erlaubt weiche Designprinzipien zu berücksichtigen. Um diese Referenzarchitektur auf reelle Problemstellungen anwenden zu können, wird außerdem eine Methodik zum Design von composite applications beschrieben. Im Fokus dieser Methodik steht es, Geschäftsprozesse als Ausgangspunkt für das Design von Services zu benutzen und deren Verbindungen zu beschreiben. Dabei orientiert sie sich an den möglichen Verbindungen, die von der Referenzarchitektur definiert werden. Um dies zu erreichen ist außerdem ein Algorithmus für das Design von Services enthalten. Dieser Algorithmus leitet aus Geschäftsprozessen Services ab und berücksichtigt dabei die Ergebnisse einer statistischen Auswertung, die die Wiederverwendbarkeit von Services als Untersuchungsziel hat. Das Ergebnis dieser Methodik ist das plattformunabhängige Design einer composite application. Dieses Design ist an einem Geschäftsprozess orientiert, berücksichtigt aber auch die Einschränkungen der Systemlandschaft, in der die Applikation betrieben werden soll. Um auf der Basis eines solchen Designs eine composite application erstellen zu können, ist weiterhin eine informelle Abbildung der plattformunabhängigen Architektur auf eine häufig eingesetzte Plattform in der Arbeit beschrieben. Zusammen mit der Methodik und der Referenzarchitektur wird diese Abbildung dann auf ein industrielles Fallbeispiel angewandt. Auf diese Weise wird die Anwendbarkeit der beschriebenen Konzepte demonstriert

Model-driven and Compositional Service Creation in the Internet of Services

Doktorgradsavhandling i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi, Universitetet i Agder, Grimstad, 2012In the Future Internet, billions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Devices at any levels of hierarchy provide software functionality that can be used by others. We can call the device’s functionality a service, which in turn, introduces the concept of the Internet of Services. From the software developer perspectives, a new service can be created by utilizing services in the Internet of Services. An important issue of the creation of such service-based application is regarding their deployment method on personalized and embedded devices. For each device with different capability and configuration, different tailored code is required. For this, a flexible method and tools that support an automatic code generation for a device with a specific capability and configuration are mandatory. This thesis proposes PMG-pro (Present, Model, Generate and provide), a language- independent, bottom-up and model-driven method for the service creation in the Internet of Services. With this method, a service is created by providing the new functionality of a service-based application as a service. By using existing service frameworks and APIs, from a service description, PMG-pro generates an abstract graphical service representation (service model) and source code implementing for service invocations. Depending on the target modeling languages, different graphical notations can be used to represent services. Similarly, different programming languages can also be used to implement the service invocations. We call these pairs (i.e., the service model and the source code) platform-specific models. With these platform models, service composers use the graphical service representation to model new service-based applications, while the machine (i.e., computer system) uses the source code to generate code from the service-based application model. This thesis contributes to the service engineering method that applies a modeldriven development approach. Three main contributions are a model-driven method for service creation, an automatic service presentation of pre-made services, and a new method of handling device capability and configuration. With these, service creation in the Internet of Services can be done in a rapid and automatic manner. Service designers can create a new service by defining a model of service-based applications using pre-made service models, while code for a specific device can be generated automatically from the model. The PMG-pro method has been partly prototyped and validated on various case studies in the domain of smart homes that have produced encouraging results. The method promotes a rapid, language-independent, and unified process of software service development

Querying heterogeneous data in an in-situ unified agile system

Data integration provides a unified view of data by combining different data sources. In today’s multi-disciplinary and collaborative research environments, data is often produced and consumed by various means, multiple researchers operate on the data in different divisions to satisfy various research requirements, and using different query processors and analysis tools. This makes data integration a crucial component of any successful data intensive research activity. The fundamental difficulty is that data is heterogeneous not only in syntax, structure, and semantics, but also in the way it is accessed and queried. We introduce QUIS (QUery In-Situ), an agile query system equipped with a unified query language and a federated execution engine. It is capable of running queries on heterogeneous data sources in an in-situ manner. Its language provides advanced features such as virtual schemas, heterogeneous joins, and polymorphic result set representation. QUIS utilizes a federation of agents to transform a given input query written in its language to a (set of) computation models that are executable on the designated data sources. Federative query virtualization has the disadvantage that some aspects of a query may not be supported by the designated data sources. QUIS ensures that input queries are always fully satisfied. Therefore, if the target data sources do not fulfill all of the query requirements, QUIS detects the features that are lacking and complements them in a transparent manner. QUIS provides union and join capabilities over an unbound list of heterogeneous data sources; in addition, it offers solutions for heterogeneous query planning and optimization. In brief, QUIS is intended to mitigate data access heterogeneity through query virtualization, on-the-fly transformation, and federated execution. It offers in-Situ querying, agile querying, heterogeneous data source querying, unifeied execution, late-bound virtual schemas, and Remote execution

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Integrated Software Architecture-Based Reliability Prediction for IT Systems

With the increasing importance of reliability in business and industrial IT systems, new techniques for architecture-based software reliability prediction are becoming an integral part of the development process. This dissertation thesis introduces a novel reliability modelling and prediction technique that considers the software architecture with its component structure, control and data flow, recovery mechanisms, its deployment to distributed hardware resources and the system\u27s usage profile