17393036
Adoption-Centric Software Maintenance Process Improvement via Information Integration
Software process improvement is an iterative activity, normally involving measurement, analysis, and change. For most organizations, the existing software process has substantial momentum and is seemingly immovable. Any change to existing process activities causes turbulence in the organization, which can be a significant barrier to adoption of the quality improvement initiative. This paper presents a quiescent, non-invasive, and adoption-centric approach to process improvement for software maintenance. The approach realizes the goal of improving the efficiency of existing processes by minimizing changes to existing workflows and focusing on integrating enhancements at the micro-level of the system. By leveraging information buried in existing data, making it explicit, and integrating the results with known facts, more informed decision-making is made possible. The approach is illustrated with a model problem concerning redocumentation of an embedded control system in the context of performing higher-quality software maintenance
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
9069029
Detection of discriminative sequence motifs in proteins obtained from prokaryotes grown at various temperatures
Recent investigations on the stability of proteins have demonstrated various structural factors, but few have considered sequence factors such as protein motifs. These motifs represent highly conserved regions and describe critical regions that may only exist on proteins that remain functional at high temperatures. This investigation presents a method for identifying and comparing corresponding mesophilic and thermophilic sequence motifs between protein families. Discriminative motifs that are conserved only in the mesophilic or thermophilic subfamily are identified. Analysis of the results shows that, although the subfamilies of most protein families share similar motifs, some discriminative motifs are present in particular thermophilic/mesophilic subfamilies. The thermophilic discriminative motifs are conserved only in thermophilic organisms, revealing that physiochemical principles support thermostability.
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/.
46726074
Adaptive computation-aware scheme for software-based predictive block motion estimation
Abstract The progress in computer processing power makes the use of a software codec (encoder and decoder) a feasible solution in many real-time video applications. The efficient distribution of available processing power to frames and blocks by a software codec resulting in higher output quality comprises two phases: (1) frame-level computation distribution and (2) block-level computation allocation. Predictive block motion estimation algorithms are widely employed in current video coding standards to remove the temporal redundancy, but they do not have the ability to distribute available processing power. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes an efficient frame-level computation distribution scheme based on a sliding window approach and an adaptive block-level scheme which adaptively switches between a predictive computation distortion benefit list heuristic and a buffer control like procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that the output quality of software-based predictive block motion estimation algorithms can be uniformly improved by the proposed schemes.
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.
14288907
RgS-Miner: A Biological Data Warehousing, Analyzing and Mining System for Identifying Transcriptional Regulatory Sites in Human Genome
Recently, biological databases and analytical methods have become available for analyzing gene expression and transcriptional regulatory sequences. However, users must make the complicated analyses to query the data in various databases, and then they must analyze the gene upstreams using various predictive tools, before finally converting date among formats. Beyond methods for predicting transcriptional regulatory sites, new automated and integrated methods for analyzing gene upstream sequences on a higher level are urgently required. Efficient and integrated data management methods are essential, too. We present an integrated system, namely RgS-Miner, to predict transcriptional regulatory sites and detect co-occurrence of these regulatory sites. RgS-Miner comprises a biological data warehousing system, pattern discovery programs, pattern occurrence association detectors and user interfaces. The system is available at http://rgsminer.csie.ncu.edu.tw/.