International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

With the widespread application of web services, trust-based service selection has become a significant requirement from a requester's point of view, and trust prediction mechanism has become a determining factor for any given service's success. But the dynamic nature of trust creates the biggest challenge in measuring a trust value and make trust predictions. In this paper, a new trust prediction model is proposed based on multiple decision factors. Firstly, the proposed model integrates multiple complementary decision factors to reflect complexity and uncertainty of trust relationship. In addition to including traditional experience-based trust factor and feedback-based trust factor, this model innovatively integrates QoS-based trust factor into global trust evaluation, which makes the model have a better rationality and a higher practicability than the existing approaches. Meanwhile, the proposed model applies the theory of OWA (Ordered Weighted Averaging) operator to assign the classification weights to these decision factors, which makes the model exhibit a strong adaptability in handling various dynamic behaviors of service providers. Simulation results show that, compared to the existing approaches, the proposed model has remarkable enhancements in the accuracy of trust prediction.

The event based paradigm has gathered momentum as witnessed by current efforts in areas ranging from event driven architectures, complex event processing, and business process management and modeling to grid computing, web services notifications, event stream processing and message-oriented middleware. The increasing popularity of event based systems has opened new challenging issues for them. One such issue is measuring complexity of these systems. A well-developed system should be maintainable, pluggable, scalable and less complex. In this paper, an event based approach is proposed to derive software metrics for measuring system complexity. Events taking place in a system are documented using the proposed event template. An event-flow model is constructed from event templates. The event-flow model of an event based system is represented as an event-flow graph. The proposed event-flow complexity metric for analysis model is derived from an event-flow graph. The metric has also been evaluated in terms of Weyuker's properties. Results of evaluation show that it satisfies 8 out of 9 Weyuker's properties. A prototype tool is also developed to automatically generate event interdependency matrices and compute absolute and relative complexity of an entire system. The proposed technique can be very effective especially for real time systems where lots of events take place.

Developing and maintaining reliable object-oriented software requires a precise understanding of how individual classes must be used. Unfortunately, for many systems, especially those that are large, the available documentation is inadequate. Developers are left with incomplete information concerning the allowable set of call sequences that each class can accommodate. Techniques for reverse engineering this information and presenting it to developers in an intellectually scalable manner are critical.

In this paper, we present four contributions to address this challenge. First, we describe a runtime trace collection system for large C++ applications. Second, we present a methodology for reverse engineering interface protocols from collected trace data. Third, we present a scalable, tunable algorithm for generating compact specifications of these protocols. Finally, we present a detailed case study involving the Mozilla Necko library. We consider popular applications in common use constructed using this library. The results are promising both in terms of the performance of the approach and the utility of the identified protocols.

The field of ontology has received attention lately due to the increasing needs in conceptualizing the domain knowledge for resolving various jobs' demand. Numerous new techniques, tools and applications have then been developed for their suitability in managing knowledge. However, most works carried out focused on non-fiction domain and categorizing the concepts into component or cluster. Hence, the originality of the content flow is not preserved. This paper presents an automated ontology construction in fiction domain. The significance of the study lies in (1) designing a simple and easy algorithmic framework for automated ontology construction while preserving the originality of the content flow in an ontology, (2) identification of suitable threshold value in extracting true terms, and (3) process an unstructured fiction-based domain text into meaningful structure automatically.

We present a mathematical model of multimedia data streams and a framework for multimedia functional dependency analysis. The dual objectives are to effectively design multimedia data streams schema and to efficiently process continuous queries on sensor-based multimedia data streams. To further improve query processing, we introduce the concept of ontological filtering. A software tool to add multimedia functional dependencies to ontology is developed. Based upon multimedia functional dependency analysis and ontological filtering, query processing algorithms, illustrative examples and experimental results for sensor-based multimedia data streams continuous querying are presented to demonstrate the practical applications of our approach.