Aluizio Haendchen Filho

Using ontologies to formalize services specifications in multi-agent systems

One key issue in multi-agent systems (MAS) is their ability to interact and exchange information autonomously across applications. To secure agent interoperability, designers must rely on a communication protocol that allows software agents to exchange meaningful information. In this paper we propose using ontologies as such communication protocol. Ontologies capture the semantics of the operations and services provided by agents, allowing interoperability and information exchange in a MAS. Ontologies are a formal, machine processable, representation that allows to capture the semantics of a domain and, to derive meaningful information by way of logical inference. In our proposal we use a formal knowledge representation language (OWL) that translates into Description Logics (a subset of first order logic), thus eliminating ambiguities and providing a solid base for machine based inference.The main contribution of this approach is to make the requirements explicit, centralize the specification in a single document (the ontology itself), at the same that it provides a formal, unambigous representation that can be processed by automated inference machines.

Evolving a legacy data warehouse system to an object-oriented architecture

We introduce an object-oriented approach to transform a star-schema of a legacy data warehouse system into a Dimensional Object Model (DOM) (Firestone, 1998), in order to take advantage of the flexibility of the object paradigm. We have applied the Object-Oriented Software Engineering (OOSE) process, proposed by (Jacobson et al., 1992), to describe the life cycle of a data warehouse and to clarify the context of our intervention. By means of OOSE we also define the target architecture and the components that will ensure the development of reuse-supporting data warehouse systems. In a sense, a change tolerant architecture is proposed, as referred to by (Jacobson, 1998). The solution proposed applies the object paradigm for the star-schema decomposition in a three-layer architecture, separating the components in logical, interface and data management layers. This decomposition minimizes the dependence among the components and increases their reusability. The main contribution of this work is that, by transforming the star-schema into a DOM, we are preparing the system to evolve through any object-oriented data warehouse development methodology. In a context of many already existing data warehouse systems based on relational models, this transformation sounds especially interesting.

Requirements Engineering for Distributed Development Using Software Agents

The global spread of business is introducing a new trend in the organization of work. This dynamics in business has led to a distribution of activities in different locations, affecting also the way people develop software. Developers, software engineers, quality inspectors, and also users and customers, are distributed around the world. Since stakeholders are distributed, the software development cannot be efficiently performed without a support for articulating these people in a consistent way. Issues like distance, communication, and different time zones introduce additional difficulties to the stakeholders involved in the process. This paper explores the use of an agents architecture designed to support the Requirements Engineering, specifically the Verification and Validation (V&V) activities, in the distributed development process. A goal-driven approach is used to define high-level V&V goals that, after refined, makes possible to derive requirements and assigning responsibilities to the actors (humans, software agents, devices and programs).

Facilitating the specification capture and transformation process in the development of multi-agent systems

To support the development of flexible and reusable MAS, we have built a framework designated MAS-CF. MAS-CF is a component framework that implements a layered architecture based on contextual composition. Interaction rules, controlled by architecture mechanisms, ensure very low coupling, making possible the sharing of distributed services in a transparent, dynamic and independent way. These properties propitiate large-scale reuse, since organizational abstractions can be reused and propagated to all instances created from a framework. The objective is to reduce complexity and development time of multi-agent systems through the reuse of generic organizational abstractions.

XSearch: A Neural Network Based Tool for Components Search in a Distributed Object Environment

The large-scale adoption of three-tier partitioned architectures and the support provided by the distributed object technology has brought a great flexibility to the information systems development process. In addition, the development of applications based on these alternatives has led to an increasing amount of components. This boom in the components amount was remarkably influenced by the Internet arising, that incorporated a number of new components, as HTML pages, java scripts, servlets, applets, and others. In this context, to recover the most suitable component to accomplish the requirements of a particular application is crucial to an effective reuse and the consequent reduction in time, effort and cost. We describe, in this article, a neural network based solution to implement a components intelligent recovering mechanism. By applying this process, a developer will be able to stress the reuse, while avoiding the morbid proliferation of nearly similar components.

Offline Speech Recognition Development - A Systematic Review of the Literature.

This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art of speech recognition from a systematic review of the literature. For this, 222 papers from four digital repositories were examined. The research followed a methodology composed of questions of search, expression of search and criteria of inclusion and exclusion. After reading the abstract, introduction and conclusion, nine papers were selected. Based on the analysis of the selected papers, we observed that the research prioritizes the following topics: (i) solutions to reduce the error rate; (ii) neural networks for language models; and (iii) n-gram statistical models. However, no solution was offered to provide offline voice recognition on Android mobile devices. The information obtained is very useful in order to acquire knowledge to be used in the development of offline voice recognition in mobile devices. The techniques provide guidelines for the application of the best neural networks and mechanisms for reducing

An approach to evaluate adherence to the theme and the argumentative structure of essays

Abstract This paper presents an approach based on machine learning for automatic grading of essay adherence to the theme and the argumentative structure of essays. The work was done according to the evaluation model adopted in Brazil to verify the mastery of skills and abilities of students who have completed high school. From specific adherence to the theme and the argumentative structure of essays features and others that are able to capture general aspects of the text, we trained and measured the efficiency of a classification and regression models based on support vector machines. The accuracy level found with this approach shows its effectiveness, pointing out the strategy as promising since other improvements can be achieved, such as improve the set of features with more effective essay-argumentative analysis techniques. Furthermore, we demonstrate how normalization and class balancing techniques are essential to improve our results using the small dataset available for this task. This work also introduces a set of textual cohesion features adapted to Portuguese that showed to be promising for evaluating adherence to the theme and the argumentative structure of essays.

A Case-based Approach for Reusing Decisions in the Software Development Process.

This paper proposes a process for supporting reuse of decisions during the software development process, involving architectural, technological, or management issues, in order to help reducing time and costs in process. A survey with software engineering professionals was performed aiming at identifying a set of decision-making cases that could be applied to design the process. From the result of this survey, a process was implemented, including related software and procedures that eases the reuse of decisions made during software development projects. Design Rationale techniques were applied to structure the cases that were represented and recovered by means of a Case-Based Reasoning approach. The applicability of this approach was evaluated by means of a two-phase case study. The first one encompassed the construction of the case base using the cases identified previously and the second was focused in the application of the system and its evaluation by means of group dynamics. The focal group was chosen among a set of software engineering experts from companies and universities located in Brasília, the Brazilian capital. Satisfactory results were found with respect to the usefulness of the model to improve the performance of software development when past cases are available.

A Resource-Oriented Model for Services Management and Discovering in SOA

This paper presents a structural model and an infrastructure for resource management and service discovering in SOA. The structural model is composed by a set of metaclasses which allow representation and descriptions of services, as well as different types of service components and granularities for composition and reuse. The model includes procedures to find and retrieve candidates to build composite services for meeting specific needs and purposes. Candidate services are found and retrieved by means of intelligent discovery mechanisms on the basis of a set of descriptors. The discovery procedure adopts a Case-Based Reasoning approach, in which the services are considered as cases that are kept and indexed in a repository.