Marzia Adorni

Engineering spatial concepts

The success of a software system strongly depends on the ability of turning a precise domain analysis into a concrete architecture. Even if the domain model relies on sound ontological bases, there is often a wide semantic gap between the conceptual model and the concrete components that should reify it. To fill the semantic gap, relevant domain concepts should be engineered by identifying the corresponding architectural abstractions, which can be realized by concrete software components. Space plays a crucial role in many application domains, but surprisingly, related architectural abstractions have not emerged yet. This paper proposes space-related abstractions derived from the application of classical software engineering principles; in particular, the information hiding principle that leads to an operational definition of space. Basic abstractions are refined to deal with architectural aspects. As the underlying software engineering principles are close to principles that underlie the definition of space ontologies, the conjecture is that the proposed space architectural abstractions might be the basis for a formalization in ontological terms.

Dynamic Adaptive Navigation via MAIS Reflective Framework

The wide diffusion of mobile devices and the increasing availability of wireless networks claim applications able to adapt their behaviour with respect to the running context. This paper presents dynamic adaptive navigation (DAN), a novel approach that may be exploited to build adaptive information systems. DAN provides the user with different navigation modalities. The observation of QoS features concerning the users, the devices, and the network drive the selection of the actual navigation modality that is intended as the best available. The navigation modalities are modelled via graphs describing the synthesis/expansion process that must be performed on the information. Applications to be adaptive, either implicitly or explicitly, rely on reflection. Since DAN may be used to build adaptive applications, it should rely on reflective mechanisms too. DAN exploits the ones provided by the MAIS (multichannel adaptive information system) architecture. Indeed, MAIS provides via reflective classes the visibility of the QoS-related aspects of the underlying system objects, being them devices or users. Finally, to verify the usefulness of the ideas, DAN approach has been chosen to develop a new version of PDBudget, a system that supports the academic administration in analysing and evaluating the didactic workload for each lecturer at the University of Milano-Bicocca