7180776
A survey of architecture design rationale
Many claims have been made about the consequences of not documenting design rationale. The general perception is that designers and architects usually do not fully understand the critical role of systematic use and capture of design rationale. However, there is to date little empirical evidence available on what design rationale mean to practitioners, how valuable they consider it, and how they use and document it during the design process. This paper reports a survey of practitioners to probe their perception of the value of design rationale and how they use and document the background knowledge related to their design decisions. Based on 81 valid responses, this study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of documenting design rationale and frequently use them to reason about their design choices. However, they have indicated barriers to the use and documentation of design rationale. Based on the findings, we conclude that further research is needed to develop methodology and tool support for design rationale capture and usage. Furthermore, we put forward some specific research questions about design rationale that could be further investigated to benefit industry practice.
3251598
TRAM: a tool for requirements and architecture management
Management of system requirements and system architectures is part of any software engineering project. But it is usually very tedious and error prone. In particular, managing the traceability between system requirements and system architectures is critical but difficult. The article introduces a tool, TRAM, for managing system requirements, system architectures and more importantly the traceability between them. Its primary design objective is "being practical" and ready for practitioners to use without much overhead. The issues discussed in the paper include an information model that underlies the capture of requirements, architectures and their traceability, a set of document templates implementing the information model, and the support tool.
629310
Semantic and Usage Packaging for Software Components
Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of software components primarily deals with syntactic issues. To facilitate interoperability and proper use of software components, more comprehensive specification of these components is required. In this paper, we present an approach to software component packaging aimed at comprehensive component specification, especially its support for semantic and usage specification.
1745958
Industrial Perspective on the Usefulness of Design Rationale for Software Maintenance: A Survey
Software maintenance is widely known as a problematic area that may consume up to 80% of a software project's resources. It has been claimed that providing an effective mechanism to access design rationale (DR) has great potential to improve software maintenance processes. However, we postulate that the first step towards exploring the potential of DR for improving software maintenance should be to gain a better understanding of what DR means to practitioners, how valuable they consider DR to be and how they use DR. To determine the perceived usefulness of DR, we surveyed a large number of software designers. This exploratory study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of DR to understand existing designs and frequently use it to reason about proposed modifications. The results of this study establish that DR is perceived by practitioners to be useful and the efforts required to capture DR for the purpose of maintenance are worthwhile. The findings allow us to identify areas of further research on DR support that have the potential to improve the maintenance process
1659291
A Software Engineering Perspective for Services Security
Services are usually developed and deployed independently; and systems can be formed by composing relevant services to achieve set goals. In such an open and dynamic environment, security is of paramount importance. We have seen much work in the traditional area of information and network security, focusing on developing various security techniques. More recently, there have been efforts in integrating the security techniques into languages and infrastructural support that are used for developing services and systems. In fact, the development of services and the composition of service-based systems are software engineering activities. As such, they need to be viewed from a software engineering perspective. In this paper, we introduce an approach to services security engineering, to answer the questions like what the security properties of services and service-based systems are and how they meet the user’s security requirements. It deals with the issues of (1) security property characterisation for services, (2) compositional security analysis for service-based systems, and (3) certification of services.
17910560
Providing configuration management support in software engineering environments
Software configuration management (CM) is a key element of any software development project. A software engineering environment should not only provide support for software products and software processes in general, but also pay attention to high-level software engineering concepts like CM. In this paper, we present an overview of our approach to software engineering environments and demonstrate how CM can be achieved in such environments with minimal effort by codifying a CM model. Issues addressed include the structures and consistency of CM components and their relationships, the definition and activation of CM operations, and the definition of presentation views that facilitate CM activities.
5983751
Fusion of color and infrared video for moving human detection
We approach the task of human silhouette extraction from color and thermal image sequences using automatic image registration. Image registration between color and thermal images is a challenging problem due to the difficulties associated with finding correspondence. However, the moving people in a static scene provide cues to address this problem. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical scheme to automatically find the correspondence between the preliminary human silhouettes extracted from synchronous color and thermal image sequences for image registration. Next, we discuss strategies for probabilistically combining cues from registered color and thermal images for improved human silhouette detection. It is shown that the proposed approach achieves good results for image registration and human silhouette extraction. Experimental results also show a comparison of various sensor fusion strategies and demonstrate the improvement in performance over non-fused cases for human silhouette extraction.
8876000
Discovery of Multiple-Level Association Rules from Large Databases
Previous studies on mining association rules find rules at single concept level, however, mining association rules at multiple concept levels may lead to the discovery of more specific and concrete knowledge from data. In this study, a top-down progressive deepening method is developed for mining multiplelevel association rules from large transaction databases by extension of some existing association rule mining techniques. A group of variant algorithms are proposed based on the ways of sharing intermediate results, with the relative performance tested on different kinds of data. Relaxation of the rule conditions for finding “level-crossing” association rules is also discussed in the paper.
1695422
New Public-Key Cryptosystem Using Braid Groups
The braid groups are infinite non-commutative groups naturally arising from geometric braids. The aim of this article is twofold. One is to show that the braid groups can serve as a good source to enrich cryptography. The feature that makes the braid groups useful to cryptography includes the followings: (i) The word problem is solved via a fast algorithm which computes the canonical form which can be efficiently manipulated by computers. (ii) The group operations can be performed efficiently. (iii) The braid groups have many mathematically hard problems that can be utilized to design cryptographic primitives. The other is to propose and implement a new key agreement scheme and public key cryptosystem based on these primitives in the braid groups. The efficiency of our systems is demonstrated by their speed and information rate. The security of our systems is based on topological, combinatorial and group-theoretical problems that are intractible according to our current mathematical knowledge. The foundation of our systems is quite different from widely used cryptosystems based on number theory, but there are some similarities in design.
15205125
Fuzzy color histogram and its use in color image retrieval
A conventional color histogram (CCH) considers neither the color similarity across different bins nor the color dissimilarity in the same bin. Therefore, it is sensitive to noisy interference such as illumination changes and quantization errors. Furthermore, CCHs large dimension or histogram bins requires large computation on histogram comparison. To address these concerns, this paper presents a new color histogram representation, called fuzzy color histogram (FCH), by considering the color similarity of each pixel's color associated to all the histogram bins through fuzzy-set membership function. A novel and fast approach for computing the membership values based on fuzzy c-means algorithm is introduced. The proposed FCH is further exploited in the application of image indexing and retrieval. Experimental results clearly show that FCH yields better retrieval results than CCH. Such computing methodology is fairly desirable for image retrieval over large image databases.
43532686
AIM: Approximate Intelligent Matching for Time Series Data
Time-series data mining presents many challenges due to the intrinsic large scale and high dimensionality of the data sets. Subsequence similarity matching has been an active research area driven by the need to analyse large data sets in the financial, biomedical and scientific databases. In this paper, we investigate an intelligent subsequence similarity matching of time series queries based on efficient graph traversal. We introduce a new problem, the approximate partial matching of a query sequence in a time series database. Our system can address such queries with high specificity and minimal time and space overhead. The performance bottleneck of the current methods were analysed and we show our method can improve the performance of the time series queries significantly. It is general and flexible enough to find the best approximate match query without specifying a tolerance Ɛ parameter.