International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Scientific data/documents play a significant role in academic research and industrial applications. In the era of information fusion, building knowledge and content management systems is necessary, particularly in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This paper discusses an overview about the impact of XML in knowledge and content management systems in science and technology; extends to the integration and implementation including the discussions of infrastructures, methodologies, some typical examples in case studies; finally, it ends with future research and development in a new challenge in information and knowledge engineering. It concluded that XML will make significant contributions to the next generation in information processing for scientific content management systems.

This paper describes model transformation for analyzing dynamic behavior of large-scale systems. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) based system model is transformed into the Colored Petri Nets (CPN) model, which is used for analyzing the scenarios of the use cases of a system and checking freedom of system deadlock at an early stage of software development.

The CPN model that is executable is hierarchically structured on the basis of the functional decomposition of a large-scale system. The UML-based system model consisting of the use case model, class model and collaboration model is not executable so that the dynamic behavior of the system cannot be analyzed until implementation of the system. However, the UML-based system model has no hierarchical structure to be transformed into the hierarchical CPN model as well. The discrepancies of dynamic and structural views in the two models are resolved by transformation of the UML model into the layered, executable CPN model with three layers — the use case layer, object layer and operation layer. The model transformation is carried out using relationships among the use case model, class model, and collaboration model of the UML.

With the executable CPN model transformed, the dynamic properties of the system are analyzed using the simulation technique, occurrence graph, and state space report provided by the Design/CPN tool. The approach in this paper is validated through two case studies — the gas station system and the distributed factory automation system.

Agent interaction protocols (AIP) design is one of the principal issues for building multi-agent systems. Indeed, the construction of AIP should integrate theories, methodologies and tools. We propose in this paper a unifying framework that provides a generic agent architecture to be reused as well as a methodology to construct and refine AIP specifications in an incremental way. This framework is based on the highly expressive formal language Lotos and its related technologies, such as finite state machines and temporal logics. Hence, the proposed framework also facilitates formal validation and verification of AIP specifications using rigorous tools. We argue that there are three layers of semantics of Lotos specifications that can improve Lotos expressivity in describing agent interaction. Therefore, this framework can describe almost all aspects of agent interaction and at different abstraction levels. In addition, we demonstrate how to generate an online auction protocol from the generic framework, and how to validate and verify this protocol.

A user-oriented programming paradigm based on the "filmification" of methods is developed by the Active Knowledge Studio team at the University of Aizu. Within this paradigm, an algorithmic "cyberFilm" is a set of multimedia frames where different groups of frames represent different algorithmic features from multiple views. Because of the multiple views and multimedia, users can understand the algorithm correctly and easily. In this paper, an example of the filmification of methods is presented, related to cyberFilm frames of the thermal conduction problem solved with the Gauss-Jordan method. Through these frames, features of the algorithm are presented, and an essential compactness of an integrated view, considered as a visual program, is explained. Examples of program templates supporting the cyberFilm frames are also presented. Two types of program synthesis schemes supporting program synthesis are also described.

XML-Schemas and domain ontologies are two key features of the Semantic Web. The possibility of assessing similarity between concepts is becoming a fundamental support in e-commerce and business transactions. In this paper a method for evaluating similarity of XML-Schema elements is proposed, by making use of domain ontologies. The method is inspired by a previous proposal concerning concept similarity within an enterprise ontology management system developed at IASI.