Radziah Mohamad

Medical Ontology in the Dynamic Healthcare Environment

Abstract Advances in medical care and computer technology in recent decades have expanded the parameters of the traditional domain of medical services. This scenario has created new opportunities for building applications to provide enterprise services in an efficient, diverse and highly dynamic environment. Yet the involvement of multiple factors in healthcare systems, such as diverse professionals and embedded devices, has made IT-based healthcare systems expensive, competitive and complex. The deployment of different programming languages, platforms and data management standards has led to restrictions in flawless exchange, integration and reuse of information across different systems. In this regard, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an advanced methodology that can be used for developing loosely coupled, dynamic, flexible, distributed and cost-effective applications. SOA relies on services and can handle complexity and heterogeneity with the help of ontologies. In this paper, we show our development of domain ontology for the effective handling of IT-based healthcare system problems especially during an emergency.

Service based meta-model for the development of distributed embedded real-time systems

The development complexity of Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems (DERTS) can be reduced by the use of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). However, the existing modeling methods allow modeling of either DERTS or SOC concepts and there is a lack of meta-model for Service-Oriented development of DERTS. This paper proposes a service-based meta-model for DERTS, along with the constraints of the elements of the meta-model. A Smart Home case study was designed to validate the meta-model. This meta-model could not only be beneficial for Service-Oriented development of DERTS, but can also be used at the Platform Independent Model (PIM) level of MDD.

Service identification guideline for developing distributed embedded real-time systems

Analysis and design are the key phases in any software development life cycle. Service identification is one of the most important steps performed in the analysis phase of service-oriented software development life cycle. Service-orientation has been applied successfully in the domain of distributed embedded real-time system because of the advantages it provides such as reusability and interoperability. However, a systematic service-oriented development methodology for distributed embedded real-time system is still missing. A step-by-step guideline for service identification is presented in this study as part of an attempt to define the analysis phase of service-oriented software development life cycle for distributed embedded real-time system. The Smart Home case study is applied to verify the guidelines. This study provides profound descriptions on how to identify services for distributed embedded real-time system. Moreover, this work can be used as a first step towards a systematic service-oriented software development life cycle for distributed embedded real-time systems.

Quality of service ontology languages for web services discovery: an overview and limitations

Web services discovery, ranking and selection based on QoS parameters is remained a hot topic for research since the start of the semantic web. Quality of service (QoS) plays an important role to resolve the issue of best service among the functional similar services. Semantic web relies on the ontologies for providing metadata schema and the vocabulary of concepts used in semantic annotation; resulting improved accuracy of web search. This is why; the success of semantic web depends on the proliferation of ontologies. Depending on the nature of the application, different companies may use different ontology languages and QoS models for web services selection which lead to the issue of heterogeneity. In this paper we have presented ontology evaluation criteria that if satisfied, can solve the problem of heterogeneity and interoperability. Moreover, ontology developers may also use these criteria to evaluate their developed ontology for the refinements. We have evaluated different ontologies in-order to know their strengths and limitations along with the new research directions.

Effective Regression Test Case Selection: A Systematic Literature Review

Regression test case selection techniques attempt to increase the testing effectiveness based on the measurement capabilities, such as cost, coverage, and fault detection. This systematic literature review presents state-of-the-art research in effective regression test case selection techniques. We examined 47 empirical studies published between 2007 and 2015. The selected studies are categorized according to the selection procedure, empirical study design, and adequacy criteria with respect to their effectiveness measurement capability and methods used to measure the validity of these results. The results showed that mining and learning-based regression test case selection was reported in 39% of the studies, unit level testing was reported in 18% of the studies, and object-oriented environment (Java) was used in 26% of the studies. Structural faults, the most common target, was used in 55% of the studies. Overall, only 39% of the studies conducted followed experimental guidelines and are reproducible. There are 7 different cost measures, 13 different coverage types, and 5 fault-detection metrics reported in these studies. It is also observed that 70% of the studies being analyzed used cost as the effectiveness measure compared to 31% that used fault-detection capability and 16% that used coverage.

A comparative evaluation of web service discovery approaches for mobile computing

Nowadays, with the advancement in mobile technologies, the use of web services has seen an explosion in interest for mobile computing environment. However, the heavyweight nature of conventional web services to be deployed on mobile devices brings new challenges in mobile computing in the coming future. Web services technology and mobile computing domains are converging at their intersection which leads to Mobile Web Services (MWS) which enables the service access in users’ mobile device. As the numbers of web services are increasing dramatically, the web service discovery becomes more important to discover the usable web services in effective and efficient manner. This paper discusses an overview of mobile challenges in MWS recent research, and a summary of the issues. Moreover, current approaches of Mobile Web Services Discovery are classified and these approaches are compared to some criteria. The results of this study will help researchers to deliver more applicable solutions with the most appropriate approaches for Mobile Web Services Discovery.

Systematic Mapping Study in Automatic Test Case Generation.

Test case generation is a painstaking task in software testing and has a strong influence on the efficiency and the effectiveness of software tests. It is an important subject in software testing research that has led to the development of several tools and approaches over the decades. This paper presented a systematic mapping study to get an overview about the current studies of distinct techniques for generation of test cases automatically. The techniques presented in this paper are random-based methods, search-based methods and data mining-based methods. Each technique is explored briefly to give the basic idea behind it. In general, the paper’s objective is to give an up-to-date introduction and short review of the research in generation of test cases automatically. Systematic mapping study is the process of finding and collecting as much literature as possible, provides a structure of the type of research reports and the results that have been published by categorizing them depending on specific search questions to provide a background for further research. This study was based on a comprehensive set of 85 papers published in conference and journals between 2002 and 2013 obtained after using multistage selection criteria in the field of automatic test cases generation. The results from our systematic mapping study include information about the researches techniques used to generate test cases automatically and types of coverage within a specific period that can help researchers in this field through providing an overview of the current researches in this area. Furthermore, it may serve as a first step towards a great explanation of the topic with the help of systematic literature review.

Formalization of UML class diagram using description logics

Unified Modelling Language (UML) is as a standard object-oriented modelling notation that is widely accepted and used in software development industry. In general, the UML notation is informally defined in term of natural language description (English) and Object Constraint Language (OCL) which makes difficult to formally analyzed and error-prone. In this paper, we elucidate the preliminary result on an approach to formally define UML class diagram using logic-based representation formalism. We represent how to define the UML class diagram using Description Logics (DLs).

Ontology-based service discovery framework for dynamic environments

With all the recent advancements in the electronic world, hardware is becoming smaller, cheaper and more powerful; while the software industry is moving towards service-oriented integration technologies. Hence, service oriented architecture is becoming a popular platform for the development of applications for distributed embedded real-time system (DERTS). With rapidly increasing diversity of services on the internet, new demands have been raised concerning the efficient discovery of heterogeneous device services in the dynamic environment of DERTS. Context-awareness principles have been widely studied for DERTS; hence, it can be used as an additional set of service selection criteria. However, in order to use context information effectively, it should be presented in an unambiguous way and the dynamic nature of the embedded and real-time systems should be considered. To address these challenges, the authors present a service discovery framework for DERTS which uses context-aware ontology of embedded and real-time systems and a semantic matching algorithm to facilitate the discovery of device services in embedded and real-time system environments. The proposed service discovery framework also considers the associated priorities with the requirements posed by the requester during the service discovery process.

Comparative evaluation of semantic web service composition approaches

As web services are gaining more popularity over the web, there are multiple web services available for different tasks. At run time, the composition of these services based on the requester’s functional and non-functional requirements is a difficult task due to the heterogeneous nature of results of the services. This paper introduced some requirements that when fulfilled, a successful composition process can be achieved. In order to find the best approach, various composition approaches on these requirements were evaluated. Suggestions were provided on what approach can be used in which scenario in order to gain the best results.