Analyse the risks of ad hoc programming in web development and develop a metrics of appropriate tools

Today the World Wide Web has become one of the most powerful tools for business promotion and social networking. As the use of websites and web applications to promote the businesses has increased drastically over the past few years, the complexity of managing them and protecting them from security threats has become a complicated task for the organizations. On the other hand, most of the web projects are at risk and less secure due to lack of quality programming. Although there are plenty of frameworks available for free in the market to improve the quality of programming, most of the programmers use ad hoc programming rather than using frameworks which could save their time and repeated work. The research identifies the different frameworks in PHP and .NET programming, and evaluates their benefits and drawbacks in the web application development. The research aims to help web development companies to minimize the risks involved in developing large web projects and develop a metrics of appropriate frameworks to be used for the specific projects. The study examined the way web applications were developed in different software companies and the advantages of using frameworks while developing them. The findings of the results show that it was not only the experience of developers that motivated them to use frameworks. The major conclusions and recommendations drawn from this research were that the main reasons behind web developers avoiding frameworks are that they are difficult to learn and implement. Also, the motivations factors for programmers towards using frameworks were self-efficiency, habit of learning new things and awareness about the benefits of frameworks. The research recommended companies to use appropriate frameworks to protect their projects against security threats like SQL injection and RSS injectio

Towards MKM in the Large: Modular Representation and Scalable Software Architecture

MKM has been defined as the quest for technologies to manage mathematical knowledge. MKM "in the small" is well-studied, so the real problem is to scale up to large, highly interconnected corpora: "MKM in the large". We contend that advances in two areas are needed to reach this goal. We need representation languages that support incremental processing of all primitive MKM operations, and we need software architectures and implementations that implement these operations scalably on large knowledge bases. We present instances of both in this paper: the MMT framework for modular theory-graphs that integrates meta-logical foundations, which forms the base of the next OMDoc version; and TNTBase, a versioned storage system for XML-based document formats. TNTBase becomes an MMT database by instantiating it with special MKM operations for MMT.Comment: To appear in The 9th International Conference on Mathematical Knowledge Management: MKM 201

The DLV System for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

This paper presents the DLV system, which is widely considered the state-of-the-art implementation of disjunctive logic programming, and addresses several aspects. As for problem solving, we provide a formal definition of its kernel language, function-free disjunctive logic programs (also known as disjunctive datalog), extended by weak constraints, which are a powerful tool to express optimization problems. We then illustrate the usage of DLV as a tool for knowledge representation and reasoning, describing a new declarative programming methodology which allows one to encode complex problems (up to $\Delta^P_3$-complete problems) in a declarative fashion. On the foundational side, we provide a detailed analysis of the computational complexity of the language of DLV, and by deriving new complexity results we chart a complete picture of the complexity of this language and important fragments thereof. Furthermore, we illustrate the general architecture of the DLV system which has been influenced by these results. As for applications, we overview application front-ends which have been developed on top of DLV to solve specific knowledge representation tasks, and we briefly describe the main international projects investigating the potential of the system for industrial exploitation. Finally, we report about thorough experimentation and benchmarking, which has been carried out to assess the efficiency of the system. The experimental results confirm the solidity of DLV and highlight its potential for emerging application areas like knowledge management and information integration.Comment: 56 pages, 9 figures, 6 table

A System for Deduction-based Formal Verification of Workflow-oriented Software Models

The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models using deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model's behaviour is considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are considered as a set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be the significant obstacle for an inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, and its architecture, for the deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models is proposed. The process of inference is based on the semantic tableaux method which has some advantages when compared to traditional deduction strategies. The algorithm for an automatic generation of logical specifications is proposed. The generation procedure is based on the predefined workflow patterns for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of business processes. The main idea for the approach is to consider patterns, defined in terms of temporal logic,as a kind of (logical) primitives which enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for bridging the gap between intuitiveness of the deductive reasoning and the difficulty of its practical application in the case when logical specifications are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting, hopefully enhancing our understanding of, the deduction-based formal verification of workflow-oriented models.Comment: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Scienc

The intention to use mobile digital library technology: A focus group study in the United Arab Emirates

IGI Global (“IGI”) granted Brunel University London the permission to archive this article in BURA (http://bura.brunel.ac.uk).This paper presents a qualitative study on student adoption of mobile library technology in a developing world context. The findings support the applicability of a number of existing constructs from the technology acceptance literature, such as perceived ease of use, social influence and trust. However, they also suggest the need to modify some adoption factors previously found in the literature to fit the specific context of mobile library adoption. Perceived value was found to be a more relevant overarching adoption factor than perceived usefulness for this context. Facilitating conditions were identified as important but these differed somewhat from those covered in earlier literature. The research also uncovered the importance of trialability for this type of application. The findings provide a basis for improving theory in the area of mobile library adoption and suggest a number of practical design recommendations to help designers of mobile library technology to create applications that meet user needs

Increasing information feed in the process of structural steel design

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We investigate to what extent information can be described with these technologies in the context of structural steel design. This investigation indicates significant possibilities regarding information reuse in the process of structural steel design and, by extent, in other design contexts as well. However, important obstacles and question remarks can still be outlined as well