14475544
Issues of content and structure for a multilingual web site
Most content on the Web today is in English, but the majority of the Earth's peoples speak languages other than English. To reach a wider audience, future Web sites will have to be multilingual, changing a Web site from one that is American-centric and single-language to one that is globally-oriented and multilingual. While the challenges in creating and maintaining a high-quality Web site in a single language are considerable, working with multiple languages simultaneously creates special challenges, both culturally and technically. This paper outlines issues related to two important aspects of the problem: content and structure. Several representative Web sites are examined to illustrate some of these considerations.
14387450
Adoption challenges in migrating to web services
This paper outlines some of the challenges inherent in migrating to Web services. Technology adoption is a continual challenge for both tool developers and enterprise users. Web services are a prime example of a red-hot technology that is fraught with adoption issues. Part of the problem is separating marketing hype from business reality. Web services are network-accessible interfaces to application functionality. They are built using Internet technologies such as XML and standard protocols such as SOAP. The adoption issues related to Web services are complex and multifaceted. For example, determining whether this technology is a fundamental advance, rather than something old under a new name, requires technical depth, business acumen, and considerable historical knowledge of past claims. A model problem from the health care industry is used to illustrate some of the adoption issues that arise in migrating to Web services.
42165633
On the business value and technical challenges of adopting Web services
This paper provides a balanced perspective of the business value and technical challenges of adopting Web services. Technology adoption is a continual challenge for both tool developers and enterprise users. Web services are a prime example of an emerging technology that is fraught with adoption issues. Part of the problem is separating marketing hype from business reality. Web services are network-accessible interfaces to application functionality. They are built using Internet technologies such as XML and standard protocols such as SOAP. The adoption issues related to Web services are complex and multifaceted. For example, determining whether this technology is a fundamental advance, rather than something old under a new name, requires technical depth, business acumen, and considerable historical knowledge of past developments. A sample problem from the health care industry is used to illustrate some of the adoption issues.
6628850
A qualitative assessment of the efficacy of UML diagrams as a form of graphical documentation in aiding program understanding
Graphical documentation is often characterized as an effective aid in program understanding. However, it is an open question exactly which types of graphical documentation are most suitable for which types of program understanding tasks (and in which specific usage contexts). The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto standard for modeling modern software applications. This paper describes an experiment to assess the qualitative efficacy of UML diagrams in aiding program understanding. The experiment had participants analyze a series of UML diagrams and answer a detailed questionnaire concerning a hypothetical software system. Results from the experiment suggest that the UML's efficacy in support of program understanding is limited by factors such as ill-defined syntax and semantics, spatial layout, and domain knowledge.
2797141
Evaluating the reverse engineering capabilities of Web tools for understanding site content and structure: a case study
This paper describes an evaluation of the reverse engineering capabilities of three Web tools for understanding site content and structure. The evaluation is based on partitioning Web sites into three classes (static, interactive, and dynamic), and is structured using an existing reverse engineering environment framework (REEF). This case study also represents an initial evaluation of the applicability of the REEF in the related but qualitatively different domain of Web sites. The case study highlights several shortcomings of current Web tools in the context of aiding understanding to support evolution. For example, most Web tools are geared towards new page design and development, not to understanding detailed page content or overall site structure. The evaluation also identified some aspects of the REEF that might benefit from refinement to better reflect Web tool capabilities that support common evolution tasks. For example, Web server log file analysis as a specialized form of data gathering and subsequence information presentation.
15222093
Towards a documentation maturity model
This paper presents preliminary work towards a maturity model for system documentation. The Documentation Maturity Model (DMM) is specifically targeted towards assessing the quality of documentation used in aiding program understanding. Software engineers and technical writers produce such documentation during regular product development lifecycles. The documentation can also be recreated after the fact via reverse engineering. The DMM has both process and product components; this paper focuses on the product quality aspects.
15498474
Generating AspectJ Programs with Meta-AspectJ
Meta-AspectJ (MAJ) is a language tool for generating AspectJ programs using code templates. MAJ itself is an extension of Java, so users can interleave arbitrary Java code with AspectJ code templates. MAJ is a structured meta-programming tool: a well-typed generator implies a syntactically correct generated program. MAJ promotes a methodology that combines aspect-oriented and generative programming. Potential applications range from implementing domain-specific languages with AspectJ as a back-end to enhancing AspectJ with more powerful general-purpose constructs. In addition to its practical value, MAJ offers valuable insights to meta-programming tool designers. It is a mature meta-programming tool for AspectJ (and, by extension, Java): a lot of emphasis has been placed on context-sensitive parsing and error-reporting. As a result, MAJ minimizes the number of meta-programming (quote/unquote) operators and uses type inference to reduce the need to remember type names for syntactic entities.
1919715
Statically safe program generation with safegen
SafeGen is a meta-programming language for writing statically safe generators of Java programs. If a program generator written in SafeGen passes the checks of the SafeGen compiler, then the generator will only generate well-formed Java programs, for any generator input. In other words, statically checking the generator guarantees the correctness of any generated program, with respect to static checks commonly performed by a conventional compiler (including type safety, existence of a superclass, etc.). To achieve this guarantee, SafeGen supports only language primitives for reflection over an existing well-formed Java program, primitives for creating program fragments, and a restricted set of constructs for iteration, conditional actions, and name generation. SafeGen's static checking algorithm is a combination of traditional type checking for Java, and a series of calls to a theorem prover to check the validity of first-order logical sentences constructed to represent well-formedness properties of the generated program under all inputs. The approach has worked quite well in our tests, providing proofs for correct generators or pointing out interesting bugs.
31128018
The Repetitive Sequence Database and Mining Putative Regulatory Elements in Gene Promoter Regions
At least 43% of the human genome is occupied by repetitive elements. Moreover, around 51% of the rice genome is occupied by repetitive elements. The analysis of repetitive elements reveals that repetitive elements in our genome may have been very important in the evolutionary genomics. The first part of this study is to describe a database of repetitive elements - RSDB. The RSDB database contains repetitive elements, which are classified into the following categories: exact, tandem, and similar. The interfaces needed to query and show the results and statistical data, such as the relationship between repetitive elements and genes, cross-references of repetitive elements among different organisms, and so on, are provided. The second part of this study then attempts to mine the putative binding site for information on how combinations of the known regulatory sites and overrepresented repetitive elements in RSDB are distributed in the promoter regions of groups of functionally related genes. The overrepresented repetitive elements appearing in the associations are possible transcription factor binding sites. Our proposed approach is applied to Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the promoter regions of Yeast ORFs. The complete contents of RSDB and partial putative binding sites are available to the public at www.rsdb.csie.ncu.edu.tw. The readers may download partial query results.
1841883
Mining putative regulatory elements in gene promoter regions of Saccharomyces cerevisiae
The availability of genome-wide gene expression data provides a unique set of genes from which we can decipher the mechanisms underlying the common transcriptional response. Transcription factors, which can bind to specific DNA sites, cooperatively regulate the transcription of genes. This study attempts to mine putative binding sites to investigate how combinations of the sites predicted from known sites and over-represented repetitive elements are distributed in the promoter regions of groups of functionally related genes. The over-represented repetitive elements appearing in the associations are possible transcription factor binding sites. The deduced association rules would facilitate to predict putative regulatory elements and to identify genes which are potentially co-regulated by the putative regulatory elements. Our proposed approach is applied to Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the promoter regions of yeast ORFs.
12033624
Computing motif correlations in proteins
Protein motifs, which are specific regions and conserved regions, are found by comparing multiple protein sequences. These conserved regions in general play an important role in protein functions and protein folds, for example, for their binding properties or enzymatic activities. The aim here is to find the existence correlations of protein motifs. The knowledge of protein motif/domain sharing should be important in shedding new light on the biologic functions of proteins and offering a basis in analyzing the evolution in the human genome or other genomes. The protein sequences used here are obtained from the PIR-NREF database and the protein motifs are retrieved from the PROSITE database. We apply data mining approach to discover the occurrence correlations of motif in protein sequences. The correlation of motifs mined can be used in evolution analyses and protein structure prediction. We discuss the latter, i.e., protein structure prediction in this study. The correlations mined are stored and maintained in a database system. The database is now available at http://bioinfo.csie.ncu.edu.tw/ProMotif/.