The Derivation of a pragmatic requirements framework for web development.

Web-based development is a relatively immature area of Software Engineering, producing often complex applications to many different types of end user and stakeholders. Web Engineering as a research area, was created to introduce processes that enable web based development to be repeatable and to avoid potential failure in the fast changing landscape that is the current ubiquitous Internet. A survey of existing perspectives from the literature highlights a number of points. Firstly, that web development has a number of subtle differences to Software Engineering and that many web development methods are not used. Further, that there has been little work done on what should be in a web development method. A full survey of 50 web development methods finds that they do not give enough detail to be used in their entirety; they are difficult for a non-computer scientist to understand in the techniques they use and most do not cover the lifecycle, particularly in the area of requirements, implementation and testing. This thesis introduces a requirements framework for novice web developers. It is created following an in-depth case study carried out over two years that investigates the use of web development methods by novice developers. The study finds that web development methods are not easy to understand, there is a lack of explanation as to how to use the techniques within the method and the language used is too complex. A high level method is derived with an iterative process and with the requirements phase in the form of a framework; it addresses the problems that are discussed and provides excellent support for a novice web developer in the requirements phase of the lifecycle. An evaluation of the method using a group of novice developers who reflect on the method and a group who use it for development finds that the method is both easy to understand and use

The derivation of a pragmatic requirements framework for web development

Web-based development is a relatively immature area of Software Engineering, producing often complex applications to many different types of end user and stakeholders. Web Engineering as a research area, was created to introduce processes that enable web based development to be repeatable and to avoid potential failure in the fast changing landscape that is the current ubiquitous Internet. A survey of existing perspectives from the literature highlights a number of points. Firstly, that web development has a number of subtle differences to Software Engineering and that many web development methods are not used. Further, that there has been little work done on what should be in a web development method. A full survey of 50 web development methods finds that they do not give enough detail to be used in their entirety; they are difficult for a non-computer scientist to understand in the techniques they use and most do not cover the lifecycle, particularly in the area of requirements, implementation and testing. This thesis introduces a requirements framework for novice web developers. It is created following an in-depth case study carried out over two years that investigates the use of web development methods by novice developers. The study finds that web development methods are not easy to understand, there is a lack of explanation as to how to use the techniques within the method and the language used is too complex. A high level method is derived with an iterative process and with the requirements phase in the form of a framework; it addresses the problems that are discussed and provides excellent support for a novice web developer in the requirements phase of the lifecycle. An evaluation of the method using a group of novice developers who reflect on the method and a group who use it for development finds that the method is both easy to understand and use.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Selecting Ontology Entailments for Presentation to Users

Peer reviewedPreprin

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

An ontology of agile aspect oriented software development

Both agile methods and aspect oriented programming (AOP) have emerged in recent years as new paradigms in software development. Both promise to free the process of building software systems from some of the constraints of more traditional approaches. As a software engineering approach on the one hand, and a software development tool on the other, there is the potential for them to be used in conjunction. However, thus far, there has been little interplay between the two. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that there may be untapped synergies that may be exploited, if the appropriate approach is taken to integrating AOP with agile methods. This paper takes an ontological approach to supporting this integration, proposing ontology enabled development based on an analysis of existing ontologies of aspect oriented programming, a proposed ontology of agile methods, and a derived ontology of agile aspect oriented development

The pragmatic proof: hypermedia API composition and execution

Machine clients are increasingly making use of the Web to perform tasks. While Web services traditionally mimic remote procedure calling interfaces, a new generation of so-called hypermedia APIs works through hyperlinks and forms, in a way similar to how people browse the Web. This means that existing composition techniques, which determine a procedural plan upfront, are not sufficient to consume hypermedia APIs, which need to be navigated at runtime. Clients instead need a more dynamic plan that allows them to follow hyperlinks and use forms with a preset goal. Therefore, in this paper, we show how compositions of hypermedia APIs can be created by generic Semantic Web reasoners. This is achieved through the generation of a proof based on semantic descriptions of the APIs' functionality. To pragmatically verify the applicability of compositions, we introduce the notion of pre-execution and post-execution proofs. The runtime interaction between a client and a server is guided by proofs but driven by hypermedia, allowing the client to react to the application's actual state indicated by the server's response. We describe how to generate compositions from descriptions, discuss a computer-assisted process to generate descriptions, and verify reasoner performance on various composition tasks using a benchmark suite. The experimental results lead to the conclusion that proof-based consumption of hypermedia APIs is a feasible strategy at Web scale.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft