Guy Caplat

Software-as-a-Service and Versionology: Towards Innovative Service Differentiation

Version control plays an important role in software industries to manage changes and code development. It is also recognized as embedded parts in various software types such as Content Management Systems, Wikis and Word processors. The emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud computing stimulate the provision of online services via the Internet. Traditional version control systems still provide control over changes to source codes in software engineering, but they are expected to play a major role in service innovation. Incremental changes in service provisions increase value, productivity and consumer satisfaction. From a business perspective, the challenge arises when the revision control helps in to decide whether a new version of a SaaS application should be released and define metrics to determine that users should migrate to a new version after several minor or major revisions. Based on the versionology theory, we introduce a metric-based system to evaluate the distance between successive versions and extrapolate users’ resistance to change and their capacity to integrate a new version. We also conducted experiments to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in service differentiation.

Managing difference of opinion in semantic structures

Evaluation of automatic indexing is a common practice. Whenever new algorithms are created to generate semantic structures, it is necessary for their designers to demonstrate how better they are in the particular context for which they have been developed. However, the evaluation depends on the availability of a result of reference. Should such a reference be missing, evaluation is replaced by confrontation. There the structures themselves have to be compared instead of shared metrics, sometimes without even the option to choose the best one. Our work takes place in this context. We present a method for human-driven confrontation of specialized semantic structures. Our aim is to improve the users ability to use another persons work to enhance his.

Software versioning and evolution in digital ecosystems

A digital ecosystem consists of distributed adaptive socio-technical systems. It mainly relies on software and exhibits properties of self-organization, scalability, flexibility and sustainability, inspired by natural ecosystems. Digital ecosystems are complex systems and continuously follow an incremental evolutionary process. In this paper, we study successive versions of digital ecosystems by examining evolutions and variations of software components with respect to different points of view, namely “Being,” “Doing” and “Becoming.” A new version helps to define a threshold which makes a transition from a current state to a new state. In order to reason on software versions, we distinguish between endogenous and exogenous evolutions and classify software into four categories: primitive, adaptive, evolutionary and self-aware. The digital ecosystem version results in diverse changes due to variations in software components.

Adaptive Query Processing for Semantic Interoperable Information Systems

We present an adaptive query processing approach for semantic interoperable information systems. The algorithm is self-adapted to the changes of the environment, offers a wide aptitude and solves the various data conflicts in a dynamic way, it reformulates the query using the schema mediation method for the discovered systems and the context mediation for the other systems. Another advantage of our approach consists in the exploitation of intelligent agents for query reformulation and the use of a new technology for the semantic representation.