Ashley Aitken

An Empirical Approach for Semantic Web Services Discovery

Component retrieval/discovery is a well-established research direction in Software Engineering. With the surge of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), service discovery has become increasingly crucial. However, the public UDDI Business Registry - the primary service discovery mechanism over the Internet - has been shut down permanently since 2006. Moreover, keyword-based service discovery is insufficient in coping with complex discovery requirements posed by modern software developers. In this paper, we propose an empirical semantic- based Web service discovery approach. It provides an automatic Web service discovery mechanism that can locate relevant Web services based on concepts rather than keywords. The major contribution of this paper is three fold. First we articulate three requirements that software developers often raise during the component/service development and discovery process. Next, we propose the application of Latent Semantic Analysis into the area of Web services discovery. To our best knowledge, little work has been done in this area which leverages concept-based Information Retrieval models in service discovery. Last, we provide a proof-of-concept system prototype that can suffice three specific requirements of semantic service discovery.

A Comparative Analysis of Traditional Software Engineering and Agile Software Development

Over the last decade (or two) the pendulum of developer mindshare has swung decidedly towards agile software development from a more traditional engineering approach to software development. To ascertain the essential differences and any possible incompatibilities between these two software development paradigms this research investigates a number of traditional and agile methodologies, methods, and techniques. The essential differences between traditional software engineering and agile software development are found not to be (as one may first suspect from a cursory consideration) related to iteration length or project management, but rather more related to other attributes like the variety of models employed, the purpose of the models, and the approach to modeling. In the end though the two approaches are not seen to be incompatible, leading to the future possibility of an Agile Software Engineering (ASE).

Teaching Business Process Concepts Using Enterprise Systems in a Globalized Context

There is significant growth in global business operations and ERP systems are deemed as important applications in order to unify and improve fragmented and globalised markets. These systems are complex and students struggle to grasp not only the underlying business concepts but also the technology involved. This paper describes the design and implementation of teaching materials for a multinational cross-company collaboration assignment using a commercial ERP system. It includes elements of i) integrated business processes, ii) globalization and iii) experiential learning in Masters courses at two universities - one in Australia and the other in Norway. We discuss the lessons learned from the pilot study including the development of an evaluation tool, inter-university student communication, evaluation of the learning outcome, and the benefits of the cross-country business role play exercise.

Managing Unstructured and Semi-Structured Information in Organisations

This paper considers software systems for the management of unstructured and semi-structured information in organisations. It catalogues and explains information challenges facing organisations, namely the need to lower barriers to information, to provide better version control and collaboration, to provide more consistent productivity tool functionality and more powerful search capabilities, and to reduce information maintenance costs. It catalogues and discusses current (partial) solutions to these challenges (including file servers, web servers, content and document management systems, wiki webs, portals and databases) and points out their limitations. It describes the characteristics of, and sketches, a more complete solution to these challenges (namely a centralised information repository accessible from a rich client application and from Web browsers, on-line and off-line, that allows easier creation and publishing of information, easier access and collaboration from inside and outside the organisation, finer grain access control, automatic versioning, treats different information similarly and with consistent functionality, full content search, and fine-grained reuse of information).

An overview and comparison of three major enterprise application development platforms

This paper presents an overview and comparison of three major industrial-strength enterprise application development (and deployment) platforms. The platforms are Microsoft.Net, Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and WebObjects. The comparison includes discussion of the presentation tier, application tier, persistence tier, deployment, and tools. Although not a complete survey and somewhat subjective in its final recommendations, the paper should provide a general understanding of these three major platforms and how they compare. The choice of development platform is a significant one for developers and organisations (because they generally have a significant learning curve) and should not be made without a good understanding of the alternatives.

Dual Application Model for Agile Software Engineering

There are problems with Traditional Software Engineering and with Agile Software Development. A new approach called Agile Software Engineering that combines the best of both is proposed and an aspect of this approach described. The Dual Application Model involves the development of a logical software application focused on capturing the functional requirements and a physical software application focused on transforming the logical application to meet the non-functional requirements. It has advantages and disadvantages like any approach to software development but meets two of the principles proposed for Agile Software Engineering. Frameworks and tools are proposed to support the Dual Application Model but are not essential to the approach. The approach provides an almost complete separation of concerns between defining and specifying (in code) the domain solution / software problem for which the domain experts are primarily responsible and designing and implementing the software solution to meet the non-functional requirements for which the software developers are primarily responsible.

Describing and Interacting with Functional, Symbolic, and Semantic Systems

A conceptual explanation of descriptions of systems at the physical, functional, symbolic and semantic level is given. A notation for clearly distinguishing physical from functional, symbolic, and semantic states is defined (together with its inverse). The Computational Theory of Mind and its relationship to the description of systems are explained. The interaction of human computational systems with functional, symbolic, and semantic systems is considered. One conclusion is that semantic systems are easier to interact with as long as they can be trusted to really be semantic systems and in the semantic states the human deduces they seem to be in. A general approach to engineering systems is to use subsystems with different levels of description but be clear about what these are for each subsystem.

Introduction to Agile Software Engineering Minitrack

This minitrack seeks to explore the middle ground between traditional software engineering (TSE) and the new agile software development (ASD), or what we call agile software engineering (ASE). The minitrack includes six contemporary and high quality research papers.