Improving a Modular Verification Technique for Aspect Oriented Programming

As aspect oriented software becomes more popular, there will be more demand for a method of verifying the correctness of the programs. This paper tries to address the verification issue by improving a modular verification technique proposed by Krisnamuhrti et al. The technique has the problem that it can not handle every aspect, which may result in a false awnser. By checking the type of the aspect in advance we can prevent this behavior. The proposed solution also improves some other issues regarding the model-checker

Tool-supported identification of functional concerns in object-oriented code

Concern identification aims to find the implementation of a functional concern in existing source code. In this work, concerns are described, using the Hierarchic Concern Model, as gray-boxes containing subconcerns, inputs, and outputs. The inputs and outputs are used as concern seeds to identify data-oriented abstractions of concern implementations, called concern skeletons. The identification approach is based on context free language reachability and supported by a tool, called CoDEx

Image processing for the extraction of nutritional information from food labels

Current techniques for tracking nutritional data require undesirable amounts of either time or man-power. People must choose between tediously recording and updating dietary information or depending on unreliable crowd-sourced or costly maintained databases. Our project looks to overcome these pitfalls by providing a programming interface for image analysis that will read and report the information present on a nutrition label directly. Our solution involves a C++ library that combines image pre-processing, optical character recognition, and post-processing techniques to pull the relevant information from an image of a nutrition label. We apply an understanding of a nutrition label\u27s content and data organization to approach the accuracy of traditional data-entry methods. Our system currently provides around 80% accuracy for most label images, and we will continue to work to improve our accuracy

Participation in the Environmental Information Exchange Network Using the National Emission Inventory Dataflow

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state environmental agencies have implemented a large nationwide system termed the Environmental Information Exchange Network, intended to consolidate and standardize the mechanism in which environmental data is exchanged between states, EPA, and other environmental organizations. The Exchange Network infrastructure is based on XML, Web services, and the Internet. The State of Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has an interest in participating in the Exchange Network. This project involves creation of software to extract, transform, validate, and submit DEC\u27s air emissions data to EPA through the Exchange Network. Development of this software also represents a case study of the viability, benefits, and problems when transitioning an existing data exchange to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Abstraction and concretizing in information systems and problem domains : implications for system descriptions and theoretical frameworks

“Abstraction” is used both for denoting relations in the problem domain of an information system, and for denoting relations inside software and hardware of a computer. This calls for a clarification of the concept, such that frameworks of information system concepts and techniques for analysis and design can distinguish and compare different types of abstractions. Abstraction is specialized in the paper as follows: representation, classification, generalization, aggregation, and role-realization. The latter relation occurs often when modelling reality, but it is presented with erroneous direction of abstraction in the literature, and it is not supported by techniques for analysis. It is also shown that separating abstraction in analysis of problem domains from abstraction when designing information systems clarifies the direction of abstraction. Abstraction relations in a taxonomy of concepts for information systems science and the FRISCO framework are discussed, and improvements suggested. Jackson System Development, object-oriented analysis and design, and dataflow diagrams can be improved through extensions with the abstraction relations specified in this paper

Business process models and entity life cycles

Tasks and business entities are the major constituents of business processes but they are not always considered equally important. The activity-centric approach and the artifact-oriented one have radically different visions. The former focuses on the control flow, i.e., on the representation of the precedence constraints between tasks, and considers the dataflow an add-on. The latter emphasizes the states of the business entities and defines the transitions between states in a declarative way that makes it difficult to figure out what the control flow is. This paper presents the ELBA notation whose purpose is to integrate those different visions by leveraging the dataflow. The dataflow defines the input and output entities of the tasks in process models. Entities flowing through tasks change their states and then a process model results from the combination of the life cycles of the entities managed by the process. Process models are complemented by information models that show the attributes and relationships of the entity types handled by the processes. Life cycles are intertwined in process models but they can be separated by means of an extraction technique that is illustrated in this paper with the help of two examples