Stefan Seedorf

Applications of Ontologies in Collaborative Software Development

Making distributed teams more efficient is one main goal of Collaborative Software Development (CSD) research. To this end, ontologies, which are models that capture a shared understanding of a specific domain, provide key benefits. Ontologies have formal, machine-interpretable semantics that allow to define semantic mappings for heterogeneous data and to infer implicit knowledge at run-time. Extending development infrastructures and software architectures with ontologies (of problem and solution domains) will address coordination and knowledge sharing challenges in activities such as documentation, requirements specification , component reuse, error handling, and test case management. The purpose of this article is to provide systematic account of how ontologies can be applied in CSD, and to describe benefits of both existing applications such as “semantic wikis ” as well as visionary scenarios such as a “Software Engineering Semantic Web ”.

Towards Formal Ontologies for Technology Risk Measurement in the Banking Industry

Formal ontologies are well suited for embodying different types|of domain knowledge and they provide reasoning capabilities to|various applications. Our paper proposes a basic approach for|applying ontologies to risk measurement in todays banking industry. This industry is constantly driven by international capital|regulation like the new Basel Capital Accord (Basel II) which requires substantial management and understanding of operational risk. Therefore, we elaborate on an ontology-based application which can be employed for the formalization of operational risk and used for subsequent measurement. Hereby, we focus on technology-dependent risk which is a subcategory of operational risk. The paper proposes a formal representation in|Description Logic based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL).|Further, we discuss the application of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as graphical notation for visualizing the domain|knowledge. The overall architecture embraces a simulation environment which measures technology risk in proprietary trading. Finally, we discuss practical considerations and demonstrate the benefits of this approach.

Leveraging Semantic Web technologies for business component specification

Although component-based development (CBD) is among the predominant software engineering paradigms today, numerous issues still remain preventing business component marketplaces from taking off. For example, it is state of the practice to apply different notations and modeling languages for the specification of different aspects of a business component. Besides the fact that there is a lack of standards for holistic approaches to multi-faceted business component specification, the individual specification techniques very often are not powerful enough to allow for the reliable and efficient discovery and retrieval of matching components or the automatic deduction of statements about the semantic and syntactic compatibility of components for application composition. In this article, we argue that CBD processes can greatly benefit from the use of Semantic Web technologies for business component specification. The Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, can provide a means to integrate existing specification approaches and add new value by superimposing a common knowledge representation layer on all specification artifacts, thus enabling semantic queries and reasoning about the properties of business components.

STraS: A framework for semantic traceability in enterprise-wide SOA life-cycle management

In recent years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted for enterprise application integration. A SOA not only promotes interoperable, loosely coupled enterprise applications; it also reduces the conceptual gap between business and IT. For SOA life-cycle management it is desirable that business processes can be traced to services and vice versa. However, this is usually not the case because many stakeholders and often more than one organization are involved in the SOA ecosystem. In addition, the various stakeholders employ their own vocabularies and formats. In this paper, we therefore recognize semantic traceability as the missing link between the two worlds and promote an integrated view on the various entities in the SOA life-cycle. First, we describe a SOA life-cycle model. Second, we propose the STraS traceability framework for end-to-end semantic traceability. Finally, we show how our approach contributes to the management of a SOA in business networks.

How increased social presence through co-browsing influences user engagement in collaborative online shopping

Co-browsing enables sharing same view in a browser in real time.We test co-browsing versus traditional chat browsing.Our online experiment shows co-browsing increased presence and engagement.Traditional chat browsing yielded worse experience perceptions.Online retailers thus should consider co-browsing for co-shopping. Traditional online shopping has been a solitary activity, but technology advances are challenging this norm. Collaborative online shopping (i.e., co-shopping) stimulates more purchases than solo shopping does, and it embraces the innate human need to socialize. Thus, it represents a growing form of ecommerce and therefore draws increasing interest from researchers and practitioners. The most recent advancement in co-shopping is the emergence of social co-browsing that enables two or more users to share the same view in a browser in real time. Most existing studies on co-shopping have focused on factors that influence purchasing online, but they have not considered co-browsing. In this paper, we use social presence and engagement theories to explain the roles of co-presence and engagement in increasing endurability for co-shoppers. We tested our model with a free-simulation experiment on 234 consumers on Mechanical Turk, randomized to three conditions of co-presence. Their task involved co-browsing (except for the control condition) on an e-commerce website to shop for Apple products. To invoke the co-browsing IT artifacts, we used Synchronite as a backend to create a queue in which participants were paired in dyads. According to our results, users who perceived greater psychological presence of another shopper were significantly more engaged in the online shopping activity. In particular, co-presence in co-browsing fostered a more rewarding experience than in the chat-only condition. Finally, we outline our contributions to research and practice and discuss the limitations of this work that open up new research opportunities.

A Distributed Simulation Environment for Simulation Modeling in Operational Risk Management

Modeling and simulation has become a well-established approach to efficiently back financial risk management applications. One major challenge though is the task of bringing together the domain-specific knowledge with the technical skills required for implementation. JOntoRisk bridges this gap in the area of operational technology risk. It is an ontology-based platform which allows modeling the problem space from a domain-oriented perspective and automatically deriving a simulation model. However, one problem is the long time required for the actual simulation. We address this problem by presenting a distributed simulation extension. The underlying pattern and prototypical implementation with CORBA is described. Finally, we critically review the gains won by this extension.

Resolving Conceptual Ambiguities in Technology Risk Management

Although the industrialization of financial products and services has been on top of the agenda in the financial service domain for many years now, there is still considerable pressure to lower the cost income ratio. This continuing trend stimulates restructuring of the IT environments (ECB 2004) and thus leads to new types of risk. From the corporate perspective, a major challenge lies in coping with rapid technological change and the increasing complexity of the IT landscape (BCBS 2003). At the same time, the restructuring of business processes and application systems is externally triggered by international regulations, such as the International Accounting Standards (IASB 2004) and the Sarbanes-Oxley act (Sarbanes- Oxley Act 2002). These significant changes are further accompanied by the required integration of IT management activities into the operational risk management process with the advent of Basel II (BCBS 2005a).