2796750
Pattern-Based Specification and Validation of Web Services Interaction Properties
There have been significant efforts in providing semantic descriptions for Web services, including the approach as exemplified by OWL-S. Part of the semantic description in OWL-S is about the interaction process of the service concerned, and adopts a procedural programming style. We argue that this style of description for service interactions is not natural to publishing service behavior properties from the viewpoint of facilitating third-party service composition and analysis. In this paper, we introduce a declarative approach that better supports the specification and use of service interaction properties in the service description and composition process. This approach uses patterns to describe the interaction behavior of a service as a set of constraints. As such, it supports the incremental description of a service’s interaction behavior from the service developer’s perspective, and the easy understanding and analysis of the interaction properties from the service user’s perspective. We also introduce a framework and tool support for monitoring and checking the conformance of the service’s run-time interactions against its specified interaction properties, to test whether the service is used properly and whether the service fulfils its behavioral obligations.
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.
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.
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.
10019293
Substructure similarity search in graph databases
Advanced database systems face a great challenge raised by the emergence of massive, complex structural data in bioinformatics, chem-informatics, and many other applications. The most fundamental support needed in these applications is the efficient search of complex structured data. Since exact matching is often too restrictive, similarity search of complex structures becomes a vital operation that must be supported efficiently.In this paper, we investigate the issues of substructure similarity search using indexed features in graph databases. By transforming the edge relaxation ratio of a query graph into the maximum allowed missing features, our structural filtering algorithm, called Grafil, can filter many graphs without performing pairwise similarity computations. It is further shown that using either too few or too many features can result in poor filtering performance. Thus the challenge is to design an effective feature set selection strategy for filtering. By examining the effect of different feature selection mechanisms, we develop a multi-filter composition strategy, where each filter uses a distinct and complementary subset of the features. We identify the criteria to form effective feature sets for filtering, and demonstrate that combining features with similar size and selectivity can improve the filtering and search performance significantly. Moreover, the concept presented in Grafil can be applied to searching approximate non-consecutive sequences, trees, and other complicated structures as well.
29673478
Exploring the Power of Links in Data Mining
Algorithms like PageRank and HITS have been developed in late 1990s to explore links among Web pages to discover authoritative pages and hubs. Links have also been popularly used in citation analysis and social network analysis. We show that the power of links can be explored thoroughly in data mining, such as classification, clustering, information integration, and object distinction. Some recent results of our research that explore the crucial information hidden inside links will be introduced, including (1) multi-relational classification, (2) user-guided clustering, (3) link-based clustering, and (4) object distinction analysis. The power of links in other analysis tasks will also be discussed in the talk.
17959434
Graph indexing based on discriminative frequent structure analysis
Graphs have become increasingly important in modelling complicated structures and schemaless data such as chemical compounds, proteins, and XML documents. Given a graph query, it is desirable to retrieve graphs quickly from a large database via indices. In this article, we investigate the issues of indexing graphs and propose a novel indexing model based on discriminative frequent structures that are identified through a graph mining process. We show that the compact index built under this model can achieve better performance in processing graph queries. Since discriminative frequent structures capture the intrinsic characteristics of the data, they are relatively stable to database updates, thus facilitating sampling-based feature extraction and incremental index maintenance. Our approach not only provides an elegant solution to the graph indexing problem, but also demonstrates how database indexing and query processing can benefit from data mining, especially frequent pattern mining. Furthermore, the concepts developed here can be generalized and applied to indexing sequences, trees, and other complicated structures as well.
18395453
Content-Based Model Template Adaptation and Real-Time System for Behavior Interpretation in Sports Video
In this paper, we present a real-time sports analysis system, which not only recognizes the semantic events, but also concludes the behavior, like player's tactics. To this end, we propose an advanced multiple-player tracking algorithm, which addresses two improvements on practical problems: (1) updating of the player template so that it remains a good model over time, and (2) adaptive scaling of the template size depending on the player motion. In this algorithm, we obtain the initial locations of players in the first frame. The tracking is performed by considering both the kinematic constraints of the player and the color distribution of appearance, thereby achieving promising results. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed system by evaluating it for double tennis matches where the player count and the resulting occlusions are challenging.
10084934
CLOSET: An Efficient Algorithm for Mining Frequent Closed Itemsets
Association mining may often derive an undesirably large set of frequent itemsets and association rules. Recent studies have proposed an interesting alternative: mining frequent closed itemsets and their corresponding rules, which has the same power as association mining but substantially reduces the number of rules to be presented. In this paper, we propose an e cient algorithm, CLOSET, for mining closed itemsets, with the development of three techniques: (1) applying a compressed, frequent pattern tree FP-tree structure for mining closed itemsets without candidate generation, (2) developing a single pre x path compression technique to identify frequent closed itemsets quickly, and (3) exploring a partition-based projection mechanism for scalable mining in large databases. Our performance study shows that CLOSET is e cient and scalable over large databases, and is faster than the previously proposed methods.