International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

We describe IC card, which is a visual specification scheme for the rapid prototyping of time-critical applications. The software developer can use IC cards to describe the entities of an application and their interaction patterns to capture user's requirements. The IC card management system, which is a visual specification tool, supports the creation and editing of IC cards and the transformation of IC cards into an XML specification. The XML specification can be transformed into an IC system and compiled into codes, thus creating a working prototype. Application examples are described.

XML Schema matching problem can be formulated as follows: given two XML Schemas, find the best mapping between the elements and attributes of the schemas, and the overall similarity between them. XML Schema matching is an important problem in data integration, schema evolution, and software reuse. This paper describes a matching system that can find accurate matches and scales to large XML Schemas with hundreds of nodes. In our system, XML Schemas are modeled as labeled and unordered trees, and the schema matching problem is turned into a tree matching problem. We proposed Approximate Common Structures in trees, and developed a tree matching algorithm based on this concept. Compared with the traditional tree edit-distance algorithm and other schema matching systems, our algorithm is faster and more suitable for large XML Schema matching.

Software architectural design has an enormous effect on downstream software artifacts. Decomposition of function for the final system is one of the critical steps in software architectural design. The process of decomposition is typically conducted by designers based on their intuition and past experiences, which may not be robust sometimes. This paper presents a study of applying the clustering technique to support system decomposition based on requirements and their attributes. The approach can support the architectural design process by grouping closely related requirements to form a subsystem or module. In this paper, we demonstrate our experiments in applying the approach to an industrial communication protocol software system and comparing several clustering algorithms. The result obtained from WPGMA (weighted pair-group method using arithmetic averages) shows closer resemblance than other clustering methods to the one developed by the designer.

This article deals with the problem of dynamic role-playing in Multi-Agent organisations. The approach presented uses a formal specification notation and is based upon a formal framework which defines the concepts of role, interaction and organisation. Within this framework the problem of dynamic role-playing specification is related to the merging of specifications. The formal notation used composes Object-Z and Statecharts. The main features of this approach are: enough expressive power to represent Multi-Agents dynamic aspects, tools for specification analysis and mechanisms allowing the refinement of a high level specification into a low level specification which can be easily implemented. The last part of this paper presents an application with the specification of a reactive and cooperative MAS model named Satisfaction Altruism. An analysis of the specification validates the agents' behaviours.

The Hellenic Open University has embarked on a large-scale effort to enhance its textbook-based material with content that demonstrably supports the basic tenets of distance learning. The challenge is to set up a framework that allows for the production-level creation, distribution and consumption of content, and at the same time, evaluate the effort in terms of technological, educational and organizational knowledge gained. This paper presents a model of the educational process that is used as a development backbone and argues about its conceptual and technical practicality at large.

As a result of IT outsourcing and offshoring, IT professionals and educators are faced with the following question: What SE & KE skill sets will make a software engineer or a knowledge engineer immune to the impact of outsourcing and offshoring? This article summarizes the position papers from a panel held during the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering from July 5 to 7 at the Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City in California, USA. Bringing software and knowledge engineers closer to the needs of their prospective customers and providing more value than simply pure software development and maintenance, is an open challenge at least for traditional computer science and software engineering curricula.