Zoran Budimac

Protus 2.0: Ontology-based semantic recommendation in programming tutoring system

With the development of the Semantic web the use of ontologies as a formalism to describe knowledge and information in a way that can be shared on the web is becoming common. The explicit conceptualization of system components in a form of ontology facilitates knowledge sharing, knowledge reuse, communication and collaboration and construction of knowledge rich and intensive systems. Semantic web provides huge potential and opportunities for developing the next generation of e-learning systems. In previous work, we presented tutoring system named Protus (PRogramming TUtoring System) that is used for learning the essence of Java programming language. It uses principles of learning style identification and content recommendation for course personalization. This paper presents new approach to perform effective personalization highly based on Semantic web technologies performed in new version of the system, named Protus 2.0. This comprises the use of an ontology and adaptation rules for knowledge representation and inference engines for reasoning. Functionality, structure and implementation of a Protus 2.0 ontology as well as syntax of SWRL rules implemented for on-the-fly personalization will be presented in this paper.

An overview of ontologies and data resources in medical domains

Abstract The ongoing rapid growth of diversity of data and their wide use to solve different complex tasks requires more sophisticated techniques of knowledge management and automated reasoning. Recent research efforts resulted in a significant number of semantic reference systems enriched with vocabularies, thesauri, terminologies, and ontologies. The extensive use of ontologies in the mainstream computer science has spread to many other branches of knowledge. These branches are included in a new approach to building modern intelligent systems, reusing and sharing pieces of declarative knowledge. In the meanwhile, a lot of effort has been made to produce standard ontologies for medicine and biology. This paper brings an overview and presentation of the state of the art in terminologies, ontologies and important resources/systems and tools for industry and academia in medicine and biology. It could be useful for researchers involved in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research areas and projects that include medicine, biology, and information technology.

On the assessment and self‐assessment in a students teamwork based course on software engineering

For the previous 7 years, under the auspices of a “Stability Pact of South‐Eastern Europe” and DAAD, a joint project for developing an undergraduate course in “Software Engineering” has been conducted. The intention of the project was to enable a usage of shared materials for software engineering courses at wide range of universities in countries participating in the project. During school year 2004/2005: for the first time the same course; with the same case study; and the same assignments; have been conducted at the Humboldt University Berlin and University of Novi Sad. In this article, we share some of the experiences obtained during conducting the same course for the last several school years.

Radigost: Interoperable web-based multi-agent platform

Recent improvements of web development technologies, commonly referred to as HTML5, have resulted in an excellent framework for developing a fully-featured, purely web-based multi-agent platform. This paper presents an architecture of such a platform, named Radigost. Radigost agents and parts of the system itself are implemented in JavaScript and executed inside the clients web browser, while an additional set of Java-based components is deployed on an enterprise application server. Radigost is platform-independent, capable of running, without any prior installation or configuration steps, on a wide variety of software and hardware configurations, including personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and modern television sets. The system is standards-compliant and fully interoperable, in the sense that its agents can transparently interact with agents in existing, third-party multi-agent solutions. Finally, performance evaluation results show that the execution speed of Radigost is comparable to that of a non web-based implementation.

Extensible Java EE-Based Agent Framework – Past, Present, Future

EXtensible Java EE − based Agent Framework (XJAF) is a modular, FIPA-compliant multi-agent system developed by the authors of this chapter. The main motivation behind the development of XJAF was to demonstrate how existing, standardized Java EE technologies, tools, and libraries, such as JNDI, JMS, and EJB, can be used to implement a large subset of functionalities required from a multi-agent system. Immediate direct benefits of this approach are shorter development time of the system itself, delegation of agent load-balancing to the enterprise server, flatter learning curve for new developers of the system, etc. The first implementation of XJAF has been published several years ago and has since been used in several real-life applications. In the meantime, some disadvantages and weaknesses of the system were noticed, and the work is underway to provide a new implementation with an improved quality. The most recent focus of improvements has been on the addition of fault-tolerant techniques, and the increase of interoperability through a SOA-based design and web service interfaces.

A language-independent approach to the extraction of dependencies between source code entities

Context: Software networks are directed graphs of static dependencies between source code entities (functions, classes, modules, etc.). These structures can be used to investigate the complexity and evolution of large-scale software systems and to compute metrics associated with software design. The extraction of software networks is also the first step in reverse engineering activities. Objective: The aim of this paper is to present SNEIPL, a novel approach to the extraction of software networks that is based on a language-independent, enriched concrete syntax tree representation of the source code. Method: The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by the extraction of software networks representing real-world, medium to large software systems written in different languages which belong to different programming paradigms. To investigate the completeness and correctness of the approach, class collaboration networks (CCNs) extracted from real-world Java software systems are compared to CCNs obtained by other tools. Namely, we used Dependency Finder which extracts entity-level dependencies from Java bytecode, and Doxygen which realizes language-independent fuzzy parsing approach to dependency extraction. We also compared SNEIPL to fact extractors present in language-independent reverse engineering tools. Results: Our approach to dependency extraction is validated on six real-world medium to large-scale software systems written in Java, Modula-2, and Delphi. The results of the comparative analysis involving ten Java software systems show that the networks formed by SNEIPL are highly similar to those formed by Dependency Finder and more precise than the comparable networks formed with the help of Doxygen. Regarding the comparison with language-independent reverse engineering tools, SNEIPL provides both language-independent extraction and representation of fact bases. Conclusion: SNEIPL is a language-independent extractor of software networks and consequently enables language-independent network-based analysis of software systems, computation of design software metrics, and extraction of fact bases for reverse engineering activities.

Improving fault-tolerance of distributed multi-agent systems with mobile network-management agents

Large-scale agent-based software solutions need to be able to assure constant delivery of services to end-users, regardless of the underlying software or hardware failures. Fault-tolerance of multi-agent systems is, therefore, an important issue. We present an easy and flexible way of introducing fault-tolerance to existing agent frameworks. The approach is based on two new types of mobile agents that manage efficient construction and maintenance of fault-tolerant multi-agent system networks, and implement a robust agent tracking technique.

Workflow Management System Using Mobile Agents

The paper describes an infrastructure for implementation of workflow management system using mobile agents. The usage of mobile agents in modelling and implementation of a workflow is a novel approach and simplifies the workflow management. Besides, the suggested infrastructure introduces fresh ideas in the field of mobile agents as well.

Svetovid--Interactive Development and Submission System with Prevention of Academic Collusion in Computer Programming.

This paper discusses Svetovid, cross-platform software that helps instructors to assess the amount of effort put into practical exercises and exams in courses related to computer programming. The software was developed as an attempt at solving problems associated with practical exercises and exams. This paper discusses the design and use of Svetovid system along with the advantages it brings to both students and instructors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language independent framework for static code analysis

The aim of this paper is to describe a framework consisting of a set of static analyzers. The main characteristic of all incorporated tools is their independency of input programming language. This independency is based on a universal representation of the source code that is to be analyzed. The overall goal of this research is to provide a framework that is suitable for consistent analysis of the source code with the intention to ensure, check, and consequently increase the quality of the heterogeneous software products. The framework currently integrates three tools: software metrics tool -- SMIILE, extractor of software networks -- SNEIPL and structure change analyzer -- SSCA, with tendency to extend this set of components. Further application of these tools in collaboration with other tools on higher level provides even broader applicability of described framework.