Anneli Heimbürger

Knowledge-oriented software engineering process in a multi-cultural context

In software engineering, leading trends can be detected that will affect the characteristic features of a product and its development process. On a product level, the growth of size and complexity is apparent—but on the one hand only. On the other hand, there is also a growing demand for simple and reasonable small software products executed by handheld terminals and smartphones; these applications are in many cases expected to collaborate with databases over the Internet. In addition, different kinds of service concepts (ASP, SaaS) are becoming recognized alternatives to the traditional way of buying software. Increasingly, software products are also distributed in a wide geographical scope to users with different cultural backgrounds and expectations. In software engineering work, as a consequence of this growth in size and complexity, the development work is more and more often distributed. The software business itself is becoming global because of acquisitions, offshoring, and international subcontracting. The globalization of work sets new requirements to the engineering processes: in international teams the organisational and cultural differences of the development subteams have to be recognized. In this paper, the focus is on the software development and its global dimension—especially the roles of multi-cultural and cross-organizational issues in software engineering. Our paper presents the results of the first phase of our three phases research project related to “Culture-Aware Software Engineering.” The main result of the first phase is the multi-cultural software engineering working model introduced in our paper. Culture is seen as one example of the context, i.e. the situation at hand. The concept of culture has also different meanings, which have to be understood in well-organized software engineering. Software engineering work is analyzed as a knowledge creation process, in which both explicit and tacit knowledge are recognized and the transformation between these establishes baselines along the development life cycle.

Context-Based Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Cross-Cultural Collaborative Communities

Virtual communities rely primarily on ICT to connect their members to work together, and to share knowledge and practices. The importance of virtual collaborative work is increasing not only because of its economical and environmental benefits, but also due to its flexibility for establishing dynamically new cross-organizational and cross-cultural innovative teams. Virtual collaborative spaces should support their joint activities. In order to design and realize such spaces, an understanding of the tasks to be carried out by the virtual community is necessary, as well as an understanding of the related processes, contexts, and knowledge. In our paper, we introduce a reference model of a Cross-Cultural Cyber Space (CCS) for context-based knowledge creation and sharing between the members of the cross-cultural collaborative community. We also describe the prototype implementation of the CCS, a 3D cross-cultural art museum system.

Context and User-Centered Approaches: Icons in Cross-Cultural Context

Culture is embodied in how people interact with other individuals and with their environment. It is a way of life formed under specific historical, natural and social conditions. Cross-cultural communication environment, user/actor and task/situation is the key triplet in our context research. In this chapter, context is discussed as a multidimensional concept and icons in cross-cultural environments are introduced. The authors present Kiyokis semantic associative search method, and introduce an example of applying an icon-based platform for cross-cultural communication with Kiyoki’s method for searching and creating context-dependent cross-cultural information. This cross-cultural communication platform realizes mutual understanding between two cultures by contextual data structuring and computing.

Modelling Contexts in Cross-Cultural Communication Environments

In our research, context is defined as a situation a user has at hand. The focus in our study is on modelling contexts in cross-cultural communication environments. These environments can be physical, virtual or hybrid. Cross-cultural communication environment --user --situation is the key triplet in our context research. In our paper we discuss context as a key to situation-specific computing. We introduce our cross-cultural communication context tree and context flow architecture and an example of implementation i.e. Context-Based e-Assistant for Cross-Cultural Communication (CeACCC).

Content Aware Music Analysis with Multi-Dimensional Similarity Measure

Music players and cloud solution for music recommendation and automatic playlist creation are becoming increasingly more popular, as they intent to overcome the issue of the difficulty for users to find fitting music, based on context, mood and impression. Much research on the topic has been conducted, which has recommended different approaches to overcome this problem. This paper suggests a system which uses a multi-dimensional vector space, based on the music’s key elements, as well as the mood expressed through them and the song lyrics, which allows for difference and similarity finding to automatically generate a contextually meaningful playlist.

Cross-cultural and Environmental Data Analysis in Data Mining Processes for a Global Resilient Society

Humankind faces a most crucial mission; we must end eavour, on a global scale, to restore and improve our natural an d social environments. In this environmental study, we will use context-dependent differential computation to analyse changes in various factors (temperatures, c olours, level of CO2, habitats, sea levels, coral areas, etc.). In this paper, we w ill discuss a global environmental computing methodology for analysing the diversity o f nature and animals, using a large amount of information on global environments.

Icon Representations in Supporting Requirements Elicitation Process

This paper considers the difficulties faced by the stakeholders in general requirements engineering (RE). These difficulties range from the complexity of requirements gathering to requirements presentation. Affordable visualization techniques have been widely implemented to support the requirements engineering community. However, no universal characteristics that could be associated with requirements completion have been identified so far. The research focus of this paper is driven by the above considerations to introduce the icon-based language comprising a set of icon notations, syntactic and semantics. Icon-based language would support the requirements engineering tasks that normally executed by stakeholders and provide a visual modelling language to unify the requirement activities. Research approach is recapitulate, firstly, by identifying the requirements engineering artefact, secondly by refining the icon artefact, and thirdly, by integrating those two artefacts by means of requirements engineering process. The result aimed at to make communications more interactive and manageable by facilitating the exchange of information and to promote global understanding in any requirements development context across cultural and national boundaries.

Representation and retrieval of uncertain temporal information in museum databases

An implementation-oriented model to represent uncertain temporal information in databases is proposed. Temporal information is presented to the user as anchored time intervals with optional beginning and end dates. The model accounts for both instants and intervals, and can be applied to uncertain dates by leaving days and months optional, or by using symbolic constraints that present additional time granularities. The model is defined using conventional relational database structures to support ease of deployment and integration to legacy systems with efficient query capabilities. The model is based on experiences with an existing museum database and highlights challenges related to temporal representation of cultural-historical data in practice. The model is compared with temporal representations used in other museum information systems and collections management standards. Possible opportunities to extend the model in the future research include defining a formal algebraic presentation or utilizing an explicit time ontology.

On Context Modelling in Systems and Applications Development

Context is a multi-dimensional concept. It is hard to define context generally for computer science. Which information is considered as context, which is not? Why are the certain context elements relevant for a certain case, but irrelevant for another? How to explain this to computers? Can computers learn these issues as humans do? In our paper we present different viewpoints to the concept of context and to context modelling starting from requirements engineering and ending up to multi-disciplinary education. Based on context related literature research and discussions in our paper, we can summarize that a complete and comprehensive definition and model of context is difficult to achieve and may not even be appropriate at all. However we can conclude that there is a common understanding that context always relates to an entity, context is used to solve a problem, context depends on the domain of use, context depends on time and context is evolutionary.

Developing Time-Sensitive Hypertext Linking and Navigation Support

Hypertext links play an important role in tracking the relationships within and among sets of documents. In our paper we discuss two approaches to creating dynamic workflow charts with time-sensitive linking and navigation support for training time-based project management in distributed Web-based environments. A bottom-up approach is based on the XML Linking Language (XLink) and the top-down approach is based on the XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 specification.