Opportunities in Software Engineering Research for Web API Consumption

Nowadays, invoking third party code increasingly involves calling web services via their web APIs, as opposed to the more traditional scenario of downloading a library and invoking the library's API. However, there are also new challenges for developers calling these web APIs. In this paper, we highlight a broad set of these challenges and argue for resulting opportunities for software engineering research to support developers in consuming web APIs. We outline two specific research threads in this context: (1) web API specification curation, which enables us to know the signatures of web APIs, and (2) static analysis that is capable of extracting URLs, HTTP methods etc. of web API calls. Furthermore, we present new work on how we combine (1) and (2) to provide IDE support for application developers consuming web APIs. As web APIs are used broadly, research in supporting the consumption of web APIs offers exciting opportunities.Comment: Erik Wittern and Annie Ying are both first author

Personalised correction, feedback, and guidance in an automated tutoring system for skills training

In addition to knowledge, in various domains skills are equally important. Active learning and training are effective forms of education. We present an automated skills training system for a database programming environment that promotes procedural knowledge acquisition and skills training. The system provides support features such as correction of solutions, feedback and personalised guidance, similar to interactions with a human tutor. Specifically, we address synchronous feedback and guidance based on personalised assessment. Each of these features is automated and includes a level of personalisation and adaptation. At the core of the system is a pattern-based error classification and correction component that analyses student input

A Generic Approach and Framework for Managing Complex Information

Several application domains, such as healthcare, incorporate domain knowledge into their day-to-day activities to standardise and enhance their performance. Such incorporation produces complex information, which contains two main clusters (active and passive) of information that have internal connections between them. The active cluster determines the recommended procedure that should be taken as a reaction to specific situations. The passive cluster determines the information that describes these situations and other descriptive information plus the execution history of the complex information. In the healthcare domain, a medical patient plan is an example for complex information produced during the disease management activity from specific clinical guidelines. This thesis investigates the complex information management at an application domain level in order to support the day-to-day organization activities. In this thesis, a unified generic approach and framework, called SIM (Specification, Instantiation and Maintenance), have been developed for computerising the complex information management. The SIM approach aims at providing a conceptual model for the complex information at different abstraction levels (generic and entity-specific). In the SIM approach, the complex information at the generic level is referred to as a skeletal plan from which several entity-specific plans are generated. The SIM framework provides comprehensive management aspects for managing the complex information. In the SIM framework, the complex information goes through three phases, specifying the skeletal plans, instantiating entity-specific plans, and then maintaining these entity-specific plans during their lifespan. In this thesis, a language, called AIM (Advanced Information Management), has been developed to support the main functionalities of the SIM approach and framework. AIM consists of three components: AIMSL, AIM ESPDoc model, and AIMQL. The AIMSL is the AIM specification component that supports the formalisation process of the complex information at a generic level (skeletal plans). The AIM ESPDoc model is a computer-interpretable model for the entity-specific plan. AIMQL is the AIM query component that provides support for manipulating and querying the complex information, and provides special manipulation operations and query capabilities, such as replay query support. The applicability of the SIM approach and framework is demonstrated through developing a proof-of-concept system, called AIMS, using the available technologies, such as XML and DBMS. The thesis evaluates the the AIMS system using a clinical case study, which has applied to a medical test request application

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them

Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200