An Approach Based on Maintainability Criteria for Building Aspect-Oriented Software Design Model

Software modeling is an important activity for maintenance since it can facilitate the software comprehension as well as the understanding of its activities towards evolution, correction and adaptation. In this sense, maintainability and its subcharacteristics as presented in the ISO/IEC 9126 standard should be incorporated 0to the artifacts produced in the modeling activity aiming at designing software with characteristics that render its maintenance less costly. Especially in non-trivial software, such as those that are aspect-oriented, the research on maintenance process considering it during the software development is remarkable. These categories of software aim at maintainability and reusability since they provide the separation of concerns. Thus, seeking to reduce the transition effort to the artifacts generated during the Aspect-Oriented Software Development among the different abstraction levels, this paper presents a proposal of maintainability criteria for building aspect-oriented software design models based on the Maintainability Criteria for Implementation Models, on the aSideML language modeling conventions and on the ISO/IEC 9126 standard

Characterisation of microbial attack on archaeological bone

As part of an EU funded project to investigate the factors influencing bone preservation in the archaeological record, more than 250 bones from 41 archaeological sites in five countries spanning four climatic regions were studied for diagenetic alteration. Sites were selected to cover a range of environmental conditions and archaeological contexts. Microscopic and physical (mercury intrusion porosimetry) analyses of these bones revealed that the majority (68%) had suffered microbial attack. Furthermore, significant differences were found between animal and human bone in both the state of preservation and the type of microbial attack present. These differences in preservation might result from differences in early taphonomy of the bones. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved