Antonia M. Reina Quintero

A DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE TO DESIGN ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION SOLUTIONS

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions cope with two kinds of problems within software ecosystems, namely: keeping a number of applications data in synchrony or creating new functionality on top of them. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides the technology required to implement a variety of EAI solutions at sensible costs, but they are still far from negligible. It is not surprising then that many authors are working on proposals to endow them with domain-specific tools to help software engineers reduce integration costs. In this article, we introduce a proposal called Guarana. Its key features are as follows: it provides explicit support to devise EAI solutions using enterprise integration patterns by means of a graphical model; its DSL enables software engineers to have not only the view of a process, but also a view of the whole set of processes of which an EAI solution is composed; both processes and tasks can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs; and, finally, its runtime system provides a task-based execution model that is usually more efficient than the process-based execution models in current use. We have also implemented a graphical editor for our DSL and a set of scripts to transform our models into Java code ready to be compiled and executed. To set up a solution from this code, a software engineer only needs to configure a number of adapters to communicate with the applications being integrated.

A Novel Approach to Web Information Extraction

Business Intelligence requires the acquisition and aggregation of key pieces of knowledge from multiple sources in order to provide valuable information to customers. The Web is the largest source of information nowadays. Unfortunately, the information it provides is available in semi-structured human-friendly formats, which makes it difficult to be processed by automated business processes. Classical propositional and ILP machine-learning techniques have been applied for this purpose. However, the former have not enough expressive power, whereas the latter are more expressive but intractable with large datasets. Propositionalisation was devised as a means to provide propositional techniques with more expressive power, enabling them to exploit structural information in a propositional way that allows them to be efficient. In this paper, we present a proposal to extract information from semi-structured web documents that uses this approach. It leverages a classical propositional machine learning technique and enhances it with the ability to learn from an unbounded context, which helps increase its precision and recall. Our experiments prove that our proposal outperforms other state-of-art techniques in the literature.

An Architecture for Querying Business Process, Business Process Instances, and Business Data Models

Business data are usually managed by means of business processes during process instances. These viewpoints (business, instances and data) are strongly related because the life-cycle of business data objects need to be aligned with the business process and process instance models. However, current approaches do not provide a mechanism to integrate these three viewpoints nor to query them all together while maintaining the information in the distributed, heterogeneous systems where they have been created. In this paper, we propose the integration of the business process, business process instance, and business data models by using their metamodels and also an architecture to support this integration. The goal of this integration is to make the most of the three models and the technologies that support them in an isolated way. In our approach, it is not necessary to change the source data formats nor transforming them into a common one. Furthermore, the proposed architecture allows us to query the three models even though they come from three different technologies.

On Member Labelling in Social Networks

Software agents are increasingly used to search for experts, recommend resources, assess opinions, and other similar tasks in the context of social networks, which requires to have accurate information that describes the features of the members of the network. Unfortunately, many member profiles are incomplete, which has motivated many authors to work on automatic member labelling, that is, on techniques that can infer the null features of a member from his or her neighbourhood. Current proposals are based on local or global approaches; the former compute predictors from local neighbourhoods, whereas the latter analyse social networks as a whole. Their main problem is that they tend to be inefficient and their effectiveness degrades significantly as the percentage of null labels increases. In this paper, we present Katz, which is a novel hybrid proposal to solve the member labelling problem using neural networks. Our experiments prove that it outperforms other proposals in the literature in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.