Thomas Reichherzer

Terraforming cyberspace

Like preterraformed Mars, cyberspace currently offers a lonely, dangerous, and relatively impoverished environment for software agents. Although promoted as collaborative, agents do not easily sustain rich, long-term, peer-to-peer relationships, let alone any semblance of meaningful community involvement. Rather than just building smarter and stronger agents, researchers must transform the wasteland of cyberspace itself, making it a safe and habitable environment for both agents and humans. The paper discusses how the basic infrastructure for beginning a terraforming effort is becoming more available. Designed specifically to exploit next-generation Internet capabilities, grid-based approaches provide a universal source of dynamically pluggable, pervasive, and dependable computing power, while guaranteeing levels of security and duality of service that will make new kinds of applications possible.

Knowledge modeling and the creation of El-Tech: a performance support and training system for electronic technicians

Abstract This paper contains a description of a unique approach to the creation of an expert system to provide performance support and training for electronics technicians. The starting point for development of the system was the creation of a semantically rich knowledge model comprised of Concept Maps and other digital media. The knowledge model was used to create the inference part of the system, and then retained to furnish explanation of the inference components behaviors, and as content for training. The paper starts with a survey of relevant approaches to knowledge elicitation and modeling for performance support, and a review of other systems that have been created to assist with electronics troubleshooting. Following this, El-Tech (Electronic Technician), an expert advisory and training system that was created as part of a joint research effort with the Chief of Naval Education and Training, Pensacola, FL, is described.

Understanding Interoperable Systems: Challenges for the Maintenance of SOA Applications

Software interoperability is a pressing need to allow governments and businesses to function efficiently. The most commonly recommended technology for interoperability is Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) implemented using web services. Several authors have argued that SOA systems may be particularly challenging to maintain, largely due to difficulties in program comprehension. Program comprehension for SOA could be aided by appropriate software tools to provide information to SOA maintainers. However, there is little experience regarding the questions that SOA maintainers will need to ask. This paper describes use of a prototype SOA search tool in an informal requirements elicitation study to gather feedback from practicing programmers about what SOA maintainers will want to know. Several specific information needs were identified, including the need for a compact way of representing data types used in services, and the need for ontology support to help understand the many different elements and attributes in web services descriptions.

Maintenance of service oriented architecture composite applications: static and dynamic support

Several authors have suggested that service‐oriented architecture (SOA) applications will present new program comprehension challenges for future software maintainers. We review the literature on program comprehension for SOA and describe exploratory work on static and dynamic program analysis, using two prototype tools to aid in addressing these challenges. SOAMiner is a static search tool to extract information from XML‐structured SOA files such as Web Services Description Language, XML Schema Definition Language, and Business Process Execution Language. Feature sequence viewer is a dynamic message trace analysis tool that extracts a sequence diagram highlighting the path of messages involved in processing a particular Web service request. Several case studies were conducted involving both static and dynamic analysis. Use of these tools has helped to clarify what SOA maintainers will need to know and how software tools might help them. Results revealed various types of static and dynamic information that can be useful to maintainers of SOA composite applications. Copyright

Open SOALab: case study artifacts for SOA research and education

Both SOA researchers and SOA educators need simple example systems for case studies and courseware. Open SOALab provides three such documented applications which are available for download. This paper briefly describes the applications and some of the case studies and educational activities that have used them.

An Agent-Based Architecture for Sensor Data Collection and Reasoning in Smart Home Environments for Independent Living

There has been a tremendous growth in new sensor technology and wireless, handheld computing devices that give rise to new opportunities for smart home applications. With advances in the technology, reduced costs of operation, and the ubiquity of WiFi and cellular networks, the reach and value of smart home technology is growing giving rise to applications of smart home systems to support independent living of the elderly. Such systems must collect and analyze data in the home to recognize unusual activities and alert care givers and/or family members in emergency situations. To address this challenge we developed a flexible and scalable multi-agent system for sensor data collection, integration, processing, and alert management. A prototype system for activity recognition has been built and preliminary tests demonstrate that activities can be successfully recognized based on data captured in the home. As a next step, the sensor network will be deployed in an inpatient residence facility to collect real-world data for evaluating the systems performance and to develop new applications.

Towards intelligent search support for web services evolution identifying the right abstractions

Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a popular style for building complex systems-of-systems that allow businesses to work together across organizational boundaries. However concerns have been raised about the comprehensibility and maintainability of SOA composite applications. Integrating and deploying SOA applications requires artifacts in a variety of web-based languages (WSDL, XSD, BPEL, etc.) often produced by code-generation tools. It becomes difficult for a human to discover and understand the dependencies between these artifacts in an existing system. In this paper, we describe ongoing research on using search techniques to facilitate SOA maintenance by allowing users to query collections of artifacts making up a SOA composite application. The main focus in this paper is a case study using our prototype search tool SOAMiner to identify a set of abstractions that extract useful and critical information for maintainers, thereby bridging the heterogeneity of SOA artifacts while opportunistically exploiting their structure. Results of the study indicate that the highest priority abstractions for SOA are datatype summaries, service invocation (calling) relationships, and data usage relationships.

Application of Structural Case-Based Reasoning to Activity Recognition in Smart Home Environments

Improvements in sensor technology and small, handheld wireless communication devices provide new opportunities for smart home applications to support independent living for elder care. However, with addition of new sensing technology in the smart home, intelligent methods are needed that process data collected by the sensors to recognize activities for monitoring the well-being of the homes inhabitants. To address this challenge, we designed a smart home system with a multi-agent middle layer to study case-based reasoning methods and constraint satisfaction for activity recognition. The study includes the development of an ontology encoded in RDF to match features of cases and their constraints against observed events in the home. Initial results show that activity recognition can be done successfully using the proposed methods.

A Knowledge-Based System Approach for Extracting Abstractions from Service Oriented Architecture Artifacts

Rule-based methods have traditionally been applied to develop knowledge-based systems that replicate expert performance on a deep but narrow problem domain. Knowledge engineers capture expert knowledge and encode it as a set of rules for automating the expert’s reasoning process to solve problems in a variety of domains. We describe the development of a knowledge-based system approach to enhance program comprehension of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) software. Our approach uses rule-based methods to automate the analysis of the set of artifacts involved in building and deploying a SOA composite application. The rules codify expert knowledge to abstract information from these artifacts to facilitate program comprehension and thus assist Software Engineers as they perform system maintenance activities. A main advantage of the knowledge-based approach is its adaptability to the heterogeneous and dynamically evolving nature of SOA environments.

Knowledge-Based Approaches to Information Management in Coalition Environments

The community of interest information-sharing model lets coalition partners publish and disseminate data in a controlled fashion. In this vein, the authors have extended the Phoenix information management system to improve document selection and filtering.