ICEIS 2006 Abstracts

Area 1 - Databases and Information Systems Integration
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 2 - Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 3 - Information Systems Analysis and Specification
Full Papers Short Papers Rejecteds
Area 4 - Software Agents and Internet Computing
Full Papers Short Papers
Area 5 - Human-Computer Interaction
Full Papers Short Papers

Area 1 - Databases and Information Systems Integration

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 24
Title:

RANDOM SAMPLING ALGORITHMS FOR LANDMARK WINDOWS OVER DATA STREAMS
Authors:

Longbo Zhang, Zhanhuai Li, Min Yu, Yong Wang and Jiang Yun
Abstract: In many applications including sensor networks, telecommunications data management, network monitoring and financial applications, data arrives in a stream. There are growing interests in algorithms over data streams recently. This paper introduces the problem of sampling from landmark windows of recent data items from data streams and presents a random sampling algorithm for this problem. The presented algorithm, which is called SMS Algorithm, is a stratified multistage sampling algorithm for landmark window. It takes different sampling fraction in different strata of landmark window, and works even when the number of data items in the landmark window varies dramatically over time. The theoretic analysis and experiments show that the algorithm is effective and efficient for continuous data streams processing.
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Paper Nr: 50
Title:

A PROTOTYPE FOR TRANSLATING XSLT INTO XQUERY
Authors:

Ralf Bettentrupp, Sven Groppe, Jinghua Groppe, Stefan Böttcher and Le Gruenwald
Abstract: XSLT and XQuery are the languages developed by the W3C for transforming and querying XML data. XSLT and XQuery have the same expressive power and can be indeed translated into each other. In this paper, we show how to translate XSLT stylesheets into equivalent XQuery expressions. We especially investigate how to simulate the match test of XSLT templates by two different approaches which use reverse patterns or match node sets. We then present a performance analysis that compares the execution times of the translation, XSLT stylesheets and their equivalent XQuery expressions using various current XSLT processors and XQuery evaluators.
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Paper Nr: 62
Title:

INVESTIGATING THE IMPROVEMENT SPACE OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ORGANISATIONS
Authors:

Joseph Trienekens, Rob Kusters, Frans van Veen, Dirk Kriek, Daniel Maton and Paul Siemons
Abstract: Actual results of software process improvement projects happen to be quite disappointing in practice. Although many software development organisations have adopted improvement models such as CMMI, it appears to be difficult to improve software development processes in the right way, e.g. tuned to the actual needs of the organisation and taking into account the environment (e.g. the market) of an organisation. This paper presents a new approach to determine the direction of improvement for an organisation. This approach is based on literature research as well as an empirical investigation among eleven software development organisations in The Netherlands. The results of the research show that software development organisations can be classified and can be positioned on the basis of their internal and external entropy, c.q. the level of (dis)order in the business system and its environment. Based on a possible imbalance between the internal and external entropy, directions for software process improvement can be determined. As such the new approach can complement and improve the application of current software process improvement methodologies, e.g. CMMI.
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Paper Nr: 143
Title:

IMPLEMENTING A HIGH LEVEL PUB/SUB LAYER FOR ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Mario Antollini, Mariano Cilia and Alejandro Buchmann
Abstract: Enterprise application interactions based on events has been receiving increasing attention. It is based on the exchange of small pieces of data (called events) typically using the publish/subscribe interaction paradigm. Most pub/sub notification services assume a homogeneous namespace and do not support the interaction among heterogeneous event producers and consumers. In this paper we briefly describe the concept-based approach as a high-level dissemination mechanism for distributed and heterogeneous event-based applications. We focus on the design and implementation issues of such a mechanism and show how it can be integrated on research prototypes or products and platforms.
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Paper Nr: 403
Title:

CONTINUOUS RANGE QUERY PROCESSING FOR NETWORK CONSTRAINED MOBILE OBJECTS
Authors:

Dragan Stojanovic, Slobodanka Djordjevic-kajan , Apostolos Papadopoulos and Alexandros Nanopoulos
Abstract: In contrast to regular queries that are evaluated only once, a continuous query remains active over a period of time and has to be continuously evaluated to provide up to date results. We propose a method for continuous range query processing for different types of queries, characterized by mobility of objects and/or queries which follow paths in an underlying spatial network. The method assumes an available 2D indexing scheme for indexing spatial network data. An appropriately extended R∗ -tree provides matching of queries and objects according to their locations on the network or their network routes. The method introduces an additional pre-refinement step which generates main memory data structures to support efficient, incremental reevaluation of continuous range queries in periodically performed refinement steps.
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Paper Nr: 407
Title:

USING RELATIONAL DATABASES IN THE ENGINEERING REPOSITORY SYSTEMS
Authors:

Erki Eessaar
Abstract: Repository system can be built on top of the database management system (DBMS). DBMSs that use relational data model are usually not considered powerful enough for this purpose. In this paper, we analyze these claims and conclude that they are caused by the shortages of SQL standard and inadequate implementations of the relational model in the current DBMSs. Problems that are presented in the paper make usage of the DBMSs in the repository systems more difficult. This paper also explains that relational system that follows the rules of the Third Manifesto is suitable for creating repository system and presents possible design alternatives.
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Paper Nr: 462
Title:

MERGING, REPAIRING AND QUERYING INCONSISTENT DATABASES WITH FUNCTIONAL AND INCLUSION DEPENDENCIES
Authors:

Luciano Caroprese, Sergio Greco and Ester Zumpano
Abstract: In this paper a framework for merging, repairing and querying inconsistent databases is presented. The framework, considers integrity constraints defining primary keys, foreign keys and general functional dependencies. The approach consists of three steps: i) merge of the source databases by means of integration operators or general SQL queries, to reduce the set of tuples coming from the source databases which are inconsistent with respect to the constraints defined by the primary keys, ii) repair of the integrated database by completing and/or cleaning the set of tuples which are inconsistent with respect to the inclusion dependencies (e.g. foreign keys), and iii) compute consistent answers over repaired databases which could be still inconsistent with respect to the functional dependencies. The complexity of merging, repairing and computing consistent answers will be show to be polynomial and a prototype of a system integrating databases and computing queries over possible inconsistent databases will be presented.
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Paper Nr: 475
Title:

DATA COMPLIANCE IN PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY - Interoperability to Align Business and Information Systems
Authors:

Néjib Moalla, Abdelaziz Bouras, Gilles Neubert, Yacine Ouzrout and Nicolas Tricca
Abstract: The ultimate goal in the pharmaceutical sector is product quality. However this quality can be altered by the use of a number of heterogeneous information systems with different business structures and concepts along the lifecycle of the product. Interoperability is then needed to guarantee a certain correspondence and compliance between different product data. In this paper we focus on a particular compliance problem, between production technical data, represented in an ERP, and the corresponding regulatory directives and specifications, represented by the Marketing Authorizations (MA). The MA details the process for manufacturing the medicine according to the requirements imposed by health organisations such as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Committee for Medicinal Products for Human use (CHMP). The proposed approach uses an interoperability framework which is based on a multi-layer separation between the organisational aspects, business trades, and information technologies for each involved entity into the communication between the used systems.
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Paper Nr: 539
Title:

ENABLING ROBUSTNESS IN EXISTING BPEL PROCESSES
Authors:

Onyeka Ezenwoye and S. M. Sadjadi
Abstract: Web services are increasingly being used to expose applications over the Internet. To promote efficiency and the reuse of software, these Web services are being integrated both within enterprises and across enterprises, creating higher function services. BPEL is a workflow language that can be used to facilitate this integration. Unfortunately, the autonomous nature of Web services leaves BPEL processes susceptible to the failures of their constituent services. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to making existing BPEL processes more fault tolerant by monitoring the involved Web services at runtime, and by replacing delinquent Web services. To show the feasibility of our approach, we developed a prototype implementation that generates more robust BPEL processes from existing ones automatically. The use of the prototype is demonstrated using an existing Loan Approval BPEL process.
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Paper Nr: 648
Title:

ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT AND INNOVATION - Impact on the Research Agenda
Authors:

Charles Møller
Abstract: This paper proposes that ERP-implementation lead to a new post-implementation management challenge: Enterprise Systems Management and Innovation. Enterprise Systems Management and Innovation is a new concept that deals with the management of the enterprise system as a resource, and as a potential for transforming the organization by enabling innovative supply chain processes. The argument is rooted in seven case studies, a survey on ERP adoption and a retrospective analysis on the development of ES. This paper discuses the emerging issues and the implications for management. The paper concludes by outlining the impact on the ERP research agenda.
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Paper Nr: 676
Title:

SCALABLE UPDATE PROPAGATION IN PARTIALLY REPLICATED, DISCONNECTED CLIENT SERVER DATABASES
Authors:

Liton Chakraborty, Ajit Singh and Sagar Naik
Abstract: Modern databases allow mobile clients, that subscribe to replicated data, to process the replica forgoing continuous connectivity, and to receive the updates while connected to the server. Based on the overlap in client interest pattern, the server can do update processing for manageable number of data-groups instead of per-client basis, and hence decouple the update processing cost from the client population. In this paper, we propose an efficient update propagation method that can be applied to a relational database system irrespective of its inherent data organization. We present computationally efficient algorithms for group design and maintenance based on a heuristic function. We provide experimental results that demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant increase in overall scalability over the client-centric approach.
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Paper Nr: 733
Title:

A DISCRETE PARTICLE SWARM ALGORITHM FOR OLAP DATA CUBE SELECTION
Authors:

Jorge Loureiro and Orlando Belo
Abstract: Multidimensional analysis supported by Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems demands for many aggregation functions over enormous data volumes. In order to achieve query answering times compatible with the OLAP systems’ users, and allowing all the business analytical views required, OLAP data is organized as a multidimensional model, known as data cube. The materialization of all the data cubes required for decision makers would allow fast and consistent answering times to OLAP queries. However, this also imply intolerable costs, concerning to storage space and time, even when a data warehouse had a medium size and dimensionality - this will be critical on refreshing operations. On the other hand, given a query profile, only a part of all subcubes are really interesting. Thus, cube selection must be made aiming to minimize query (and maintenance) costs, keeping as a constraint the materializing space. That is a complex problem: its solution is NP-hard. Many algorithms and several heuristics, especially of greedy nature and evolutionary approaches, have been used to provide an approximate solution. To this problem, a new algorithm is proposed in this paper: particle swarm optimization (PSO). According to our experimental results, the solution achieved by the PSO algorithm showed a speed of execution, convergence capacity and consistence that allow electing it to use in data warehouse systems of medium dimensionalities.
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Paper Nr: 737
Title:

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) SYSTEMS SUCCESS MEASUREMENT: AN EXTENDED MODEL
Authors:

Princely Ifinedo
Abstract: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are diffusing globally, and it is important to measure the success of such software in adopting firms. Evidence suggests that firms investing huge sums of money in information systems (IS) sometimes do not assess the success of such systems for a variety of reasons, including the lack of knowledge about what to assess. Also, the IS success evaluations research area is varied, often providing little succour to practitioners. ERP systems success assessment is just beginning to surface, and this paper discusses an effort towards extending an available success measurement model. Essentially, two relevant success dimensions not included in the model proposed by Gable and colleagues (Gable et al., 2003; Sedera and Gable, 2004) were incorporated and tested using criterion analysis and structural equation modeling technique. The implications of our findings for practice and research are discussed.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 109
Title:

PERHAPS A RECIPE FOR CHANGE? - Will e-Voting Have the Desired Effect?
Authors:

Mark Liptrott
Abstract: This work is a progress report and briefly describes the main findings from the literature review of the research into electronic voting as it identifies factors which affect the decision-making processes of the English local authorities which are offered the opportunity to trial electronic voting. The analysis is based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory framework. A key result found that in a voluntary situation where there is one overarching organization trying to introduce an innovation to an agency organization, Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory framework requires modification.
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Paper Nr: 180
Title:

A GUI FOR DATA MART SCHEMA ALTERATION
Authors:

Nouha Bouaziz, Faiez Gargouri and Jamel Feki
Abstract: This paper is interested in the graphical manipulation of data mart schemes described in XML and issued from a generation module of multidimensional models. This manipulation is performed through a set of operations we have defined. These operations consist in adding, deleting and renaming the multidimensional elements.
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Paper Nr: 183
Title:

ELIMINATION OF TIME DEPENDENCE OF INFORMATION VALIDITY BY APPLICATION OF RFID TECHNOLOGY
Authors:

Vladimír Modrák and Viačeslav MoskviČ
Abstract: Following article deals with certain aspects of data acquisition for MRP, ERP and MES type of information systems from a shop floor level. Problems of time dependence of data validity are discussed and method of their elimination by application of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) is suggested.
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Paper Nr: 344
Title:

EFFICIENT MECHANISM FOR HANDLING MATERIALIZED XML VIEWS
Authors:

Jessica Zheng, Anthony Lo, Tansel Özyer and Reda Alhajj
Abstract: Materialized views provide an effective and efficient mechanism to improve query performance. The necessity to keep consistency between materialized views and the underlying data raises the problem of when and how to update views efficiently. This paper addresses the issue of deferred incremental update on materialized XML view. The proposed approach mainly extends our previous work on materialized object-oriented views. The overlap between XML and the object-oriented paradigm has been the main driving motivation to conduct the study described in this paper.
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Paper Nr: 368
Title:

A FRAMEWORK FOR SEMANTIC RECOVERY STRATEGIES IN CASE OF PROCESS ACTIVITY FAILURES
Authors:

Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Sarita Bassil and Manfred Reichert
Abstract: During automated process execution semantic activity failures may frequently occur, e.g., when a vehicle transporting a container has a breakdown. So far there are no applicable solutions to overcome such exceptional situations. Often the only possibility is to cancel and roll back respective process instances what is not always possible and more often not desired. In this paper we contribute towards the system–assisted support of finding forward recovery solutions. Our framework is based on the facility to (automatically) perform dynamic changes of single process instances in order to deal with the exceptional situation. We identify and formalize factors which influence the kind of applicable recovery solutions. Then we show how to derive possible recovery solutions and how to evaluate their quality with respect to different constraints. All statements are illustrated by well–studied cases from different domains.
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Paper Nr: 384
Title:

INCLUSION OF TIME-VARYING MEASURES IN TEMPORAL DATA WAREHOUSES
Authors:

Elzbieta Malinowski and Esteban Zimányi
Abstract: Data Warehouses (DWs) integrate data from different source systems that may have temporal support. However, current DWs only allow to track changes for measures indicating the time when a specific measure value is valid. In this way, applications such as fraud detection cannot be easily implemented since they require to know the time when changes in source systems have occurred. In this work, based on the research related to Temporal Databases, we propose the inclusion of time-varying measures changing the current role of the time dimension. First, we refer to different temporal types that are allowed in our model. Then, we study different scenarios that show the usefulness of inclusion of different temporal types. Further, since measures can be aggregated before being inserted into DWs, we discuss the issues related to different time granularities between source systems and DWs and to measure aggregations.
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Paper Nr: 472
Title:

USING GAZETTEERS TO ANNOTATE GEOGRAPHIC CATALOG ENTRIES
Authors:

Daniela F. Brauner, Marco A. Casanova, Karin Koogan Breitman and Luiz André P. Paes Leme
Abstract: A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary containing a list of geographic names, together with their geographic locations and other descriptive information. A geographic metadata catalog holds metadata describing geographic information resources, stored in a wide variety of sources, ranging from the researchers’ personal computers to large public databases. This paper argues that unique characteristics of geographic objects can be explored to address the problem of automating the generation of metadata for geographic information resources. The paper considers federations of gazetteers and geographic metadata catalogs and discusses in detail two problems, namely, how to use gazetteers to automate the description of geographic information resources and how to align thesauri used by gazetteers. The paper also argues why such problems are important in the context of a federated architecture.
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Paper Nr: 480
Title:

DATA WHAREHOUSES: AN ONTOLOGY APPROACH
Authors:

Alexandra Pomares-Quimbaya and José Abasolo
Abstract: Although dimensional design for data warehouses has been used in a considerable amount of projects, it does have limitations of expressiveness, particularly with respect to what can be said about relations and attributes properties and restrictions. We present a new way to design data warehouses, based on ontologies, that overcomes many of these limitations. In the proposed architecture descriptive ontologies are used to build the data warehouse and taxonomic ontologies are used during data preparation phase. We discuss the expressive power of Ontology approach showing a semantic comparison with dimensional model both applied to a case study.
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Paper Nr: 525
Title:

BUSINESS PROCESS EMBEDDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS - For Flexibility and Adaptability
Authors:

Martin Timmerman
Abstract: In this ever faster changing world, organisations are faced with the need to have flexible processes. This is only possible if these processes have full control over their supporting information systems, which we propose to embed into the business processes, in stead of a global, common enterprise information system. Therefore we are introducing a fifth stage in the architecture maturity model of Ross to implement these Embedded Information Systems.
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Paper Nr: 543
Title:

BUSINESS PROCESS EMBEDDED INFORMATION SYSTEMS - For Flexibility and Adaptability
Authors:

Marc Rabaey, Eddy Vandijck, Koenraad Vandenborre, Herman Tromp and Martin Timmerman
Abstract: In this ever faster changing world, organisations are faced with the need to have flexible processes. This is only possible if these processes have full control over their supporting information systems, which we propose to embed into the business processes, in stead of a global, common enterprise information system. Therefore we are introducing a fifth stage in the architecture maturity model of Ross to implement these Embedded Information Systems.
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Paper Nr: 548
Title:

FILTERING UNSATISFIABLE XPATH QUERIES
Authors:

Jinghua Groppe and Sven Groppe
Abstract: Empty results of queries are a hint for semantic errors in users’ queries, and erroneous and unoptimized queries can lead to highly inefficient processing of queries. For manual optimization, which is prone to errors, a user needs to be familiar with the schema of the queried data and with implementation details of the used query engine. Thus, automatic optimization techniques have been developed and have been used for decades in database management systems for the deductive and relational world. We focus on the satisfiability problem for the queries formulated in the XML query language XPath. We propose a schema-based approach to check whether or not an XPath query conforms to the constraints given in the schema in order to detect semantic errors, and in order to avoid unnecessary evaluations of unsatisfiable queries.
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Paper Nr: 549
Title:

FUZZY XML MODEL FOR REPRESENTING FUZZY RELATIONAL DATABASES IN FUZZY XML FORMAT
Authors:

Jessica Zheng, Anthony Lo, Krista Spence, Tansel Özyer and Reda Alhajj
Abstract: This paper describes a fuzzy XML schema model for representing a fuzzy relational database in XML format. It outlines a simple translation algorithm to include fuzzy relations and similarity matrices with their associated conventional relation. We also describe an example implementation of a fuzzy relational database and the XML document resulting from the translation according to our schema.
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Paper Nr: 557
Title:

INTEGRATED UNIVERSITY INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Thomas Kudrass
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the integration of heterogeneous databases with the example of a university information system, based on previous experiences in the implementation of some components. The paper stresses the new opportunities for universities resulting from database integration. We outline the target architecture for an integrated information system whose principle is the coupling of existing systems and the definition of global views on them. The services defined on those views can be used for high-level information services in the web or for the definition of workflows in the university administration.
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Paper Nr: 560
Title:

THE BENEFITS OF ACCURATE, AND TIMELY DATA IN LEAN PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS - RFID in Supply Chain Management
Authors:

Vijay Vemuri
Abstract: The usefulness of information systems critically depends on the accuracy of the data contained within it. Errors in capturing data into the information systems are particularly vexing since these errors permeate the entire information system(s), affecting every aspect of information use. The direct and indirect consequences of unreliable data did not attract much attention as there were few alternatives to reduce them. Newer technologies, especially Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), are enabling virtual elimination of data entry errors in inventory management. We investigate the effect of accurate data on the performance of supply chains utilizing lean production systems. Our simulation results indicate that time to fulfil a purchase order (cycle time) is significantly reduced by improving the quality of the inventory data. The simulation model we developed will enable us to examine other performance characteristics of a supply chain. We will also investigate the sensitivity of supply chain performance due to changes in the parameters of the model.
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Paper Nr: 653
Title:

WEB KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZE ENTERPRISES - WebTour: A Case Study From the Tourism Sector
Authors:

María Del Mar Abad Grau, Francisco Araque, Rosana Montes, María V. Hurtado and Miguel J. Hornos
Abstract: The current enterprise world has become global and complex. Knowledge management is a key to have a competitive advantage as it allows detecting in advance customer trends and market evolution. While knowledge management systems are usually unaffordable for small or even medium-size enterprises, a tool to be shared between them is a more realistic solution. The system, based on client/server architecture with a web interface, is able to provide top Information Technology (IT) solutions for a low cost so that small and medium business can also use these systems to acquire competitive advantage. We have developed a solution for a IT enterprise providing an on-line reservation system for small tourist lodgings and travel agencies. It consists of a Data Warehouse (DW) and a Decision Support System (DSS) which is currently being offered as a value-added service for providers and customers. The DSS is also used by the Acquisition Component of a Knowledge Management System (KMS).
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Paper Nr: 679
Title:

DATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEM EVALUATION FOR MOBILE MESSAGING SERVICES
Authors:

David C. Ong, Rytis Sileika, Souheil Khaddaj and Radouane Oudrhiri
Abstract: A mobile messaging revolution for the mobile phone industry started with the introduction of the Short Messaging Service (SMS), which is limited to 160 characters of conventional text. This revolution has become more significant with the additional improvements in mobile devices. They have become relatively powerful with extra resources such as additional memory capacity and innovative features such as colour screen, photo camera, etc. Now Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) takes full advantage of these capabilities by providing longer messages with embedded sound, image and video streaming. This service presents a new challenge to mobile platform architects particularly in the data management area where the size of each MMS message could be up to 100,000 bytes long. This combined with a high volume of requests managed by these platforms which may well exceeded 250,000 requests per second, means that the need to evaluate competing data management systems has become essential. This paper presents an evaluation of SMS and MMS platforms using different data management systems and recommends the best data management strategies for these platforms.
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Paper Nr: 711
Title:

ALGORITHMS FOR INTEGRATING TEMPORAL PROPERTIES OF DATA IN DATA WAREHOUSING
Authors:

Francisco Araque, Alberto Salguero, Cecilia Delgado Negrete, Eladio Garví and José Samos
Abstract: One of the most complex issues of the integration and transformation interface is the case where there are multiple sources for a single data element in the enterprise data warehouse. While there are many facets to the large number of variables that are needed in the integration phase, what we are interested in is the temporal problem. It is necessary to solve problems such as what happens when data from data source A is available but data from data source B is not. This paper presents our work into data integration in the Data Warehouse on the basis of the temporal properties of the data sources. Depending on the extraction method and data source, we can determine whether it will be possible to incorporate the data into the Data Warehouse. We shall also examine the temporal features of the data extraction methods and propose algorithms for data integration depending on the temporal characteristics of the data sources and on the data extraction method.
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Paper Nr: 727
Title:

SYNCHRONIZATION AND MULTIPLE GROUP SERVER SUPPORT FOR KEPLER
Authors:

K. Maly, M. Zubair, H. Siripuram and S. Zunjarwad
Abstract: In the last decade literally thousands of digital libraries have emerged but one of the biggest obstacles for dissemination of information to a user community is that many digital libraries use different, proprietary technologies that inhibit interoperability. Kepler framework addresses interoperability and gives publication control to individual publishers. In Kepler, OAI-PMH is used to support "personal data providers" or "archivelets".". In our vision, individual publishers can be integrated with an institutional repository like Dspace by means of a Kepler Group Digital Library (GDL). The GDL aggregates metadata and full text from archivelets and can act as an OAI-compliant data provider for institutional repositories. The basic Kepler architecture and it working have been reported in earlier papers. In this paper we discuss the three main features that we have recently added to the Kepler framework: mobility support for users to switch transparently between traditional archivelets to on-server archivelets, the ability of users to work with multiple GDLs, and flexibility to individual publishers to build an OAI-PMH compliant repository without getting attached to a GDL.
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Paper Nr: 727
Title:

SYNCHRONIZATION AND MULTIPLE GROUP SERVER SUPPORT FOR KEPLER
Authors:

K. Maly, M. Zubair, H. Siripuram and S. Zunjarwad
Abstract: In the last decade literally thousands of digital libraries have emerged but one of the biggest obstacles for dissemination of information to a user community is that many digital libraries use different, proprietary technologies that inhibit interoperability. Kepler framework addresses interoperability and gives publication control to individual publishers. In Kepler, OAI-PMH is used to support "personal data providers" or "archivelets".". In our vision, individual publishers can be integrated with an institutional repository like Dspace by means of a Kepler Group Digital Library (GDL). The GDL aggregates metadata and full text from archivelets and can act as an OAI-compliant data provider for institutional repositories. The basic Kepler architecture and it working have been reported in earlier papers. In this paper we discuss the three main features that we have recently added to the Kepler framework: mobility support for users to switch transparently between traditional archivelets to on-server archivelets, the ability of users to work with multiple GDLs, and flexibility to individual publishers to build an OAI-PMH compliant repository without getting attached to a GDL.
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Paper Nr: 731
Title:

A MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO THE REPRESENTATION OF THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL MULTI-GRANULARITY
Authors:

Concepción M. Gascueña, Dolores Cuadra and Paloma Martínez
Abstract: Many efforts have been made to the treatment of spatial data in databases both in traditional database systems and decision of support systems or On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) technologies in datawarehouses (DW). Nevertheless, many open questions concerning this kind of data still remain. The work presented in this paper is focused on dealing with the spatial and temporal granularity within a logical multidimensional model. We propose an extension of the Snowflake model to gather the spatial data and to show our proposal to represent the spatial evolution through time in a simple and intuitive way. We represent the temporal and spatial multi-granularity with different levels in the hierarchies of dimensions, and we present a typology of hierarchies to include more semantics in the Snowflake scheme.
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Paper Nr: 740
Title:

A NEW APPROACH TO IMPLEMENT EXTENDED TRANSACTION MODELS IN J2EE
Authors:

Xiaoning Ding, Xiangfeng Guo, Beihong Jin and Tao Huang
Abstract: Extended transaction model (ETM) is a powerful mechanism to ensure the consistency and reliability of complicated enterprise applications. However, there is few implementation of ETM in J2EE. The existing research is deficient in supporting range and requires some special database supporting. This paper explores the obstacle which prevents J2EE from supporting ETMs, and argues it is because of the limitation of J2EE XAResource interface and underlying databases. To overcome the obstacle, we propose a new approach, which processes concurrency control inside J2EE application server instead of in database. Furthermore, we implement TX/E service in JBoss to validate the approach, which is an enhanced J2EE transaction service supporting extended transaction models. Compared to existing work, TX/E supports user-defined transaction models and does not require any special database supporting.
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Paper Nr: 742
Title:

DATABASES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION USING CALOPUS: A CASE STUDY
Authors:

Prabin K. Patro, Pat Allen, Muthu Ramachandran, Robert Morgan-Vane and Stuart Bolton
Abstract: Effective, accurate and timely application integration is fundamental to the successful operation of today’s organizations. The success of every business initiative relies heavily on the integration between existing heterogeneous applications and databases. For this reason, when companies look to improve productivity, reduce overall costs, or streamline business processes, integration should be at the heart of their plans. Integration improves exposure and, by extension, the value and quality of information to facilitate workflow and reduce business risk. It is an important element of the way that the organization’s business process operates. Data integration technology is the key to pulling organization data together and delivering an information infrastructure that will meet strategic business intelligence initiatives. This information infrastructure consists of data warehouses, interfaces, workflows and data access tools. Integration solutions should utilize metadata to move or display disparate information, facilitate ongoing updates and reduced maintenance, provide access to a wide variety of data sources, and provide design and debugging options. In this paper we will discuss integration and a case study on Hybrid Enterprise Integration within a large University using the Calopus system.
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Paper Nr: 757
Title:

SUPPORTING E-PLACEMENT: ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE ITALIAN WORKFARE PROJECT
Authors:

Mariagrazia Fugini, Piercarlo Maggiolini and Krysnaia Nanini
Abstract: This paper presents the basic developments and architectural issues of the Italian “Borsa Continua Nazionale del Lavoro” (BCNL), an eGovernment project aimed at developing a Portal for Services to Employment. It consists in a network of nodes structured at three main levels: the National level, managed by the Ministry of Welfare; the Regional level, in which Regions are grouped in local federations in order to interoperate, and the Provincial level, in turn structured as a federation of local domains. The federation is the structural tool supporting proactive and reactive policies aimed at enhancing job-placement. The paper describes each level, and the cooperation occurring in the domains and across levels. Advantages and drawbacks of this architecture are discussed. Finally, the paper illustrates the basic issues related to security and privacy in the networked environment, in particular presenting cooperative federated authentication.
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Paper Nr: 128
Title:

SPLITTING FACTS USING WEIGHTS
Authors:

Liga Grundmane and Laila Niedrite
Abstract: A typical data warehouse report is the dynamic representation of some objects’ behaviour or changes of objects’ properties. If this behaviour is changing, it is difficult to make such reports in an easy way. It is possible to use the fact splitting to make this task simpler and more comprehensible for users. In the presented paper two solutions of splitting facts by using weights are described. One of the possible solutions is to make the proportional weighting accordingly to splitted record set size. It is possible to take into account the length of the fact validity time period and the validity time for each splitted fact record.
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Paper Nr: 142
Title:

CREATING AND MANIPULATING CONTROL FLOW GRAPHS WITH MULTILEVEL GROUPING AND CODE COVERAGE
Authors:

Anastasis A. Sofokleous , Andreas Andreou and Gianna Ioakim
Abstract: Various researchers and practitioners have proposed the use of control flow graphs for investigating software engineering aspects, such as testing, slicing, program analysis and debugging. However, the relevant software applications support only low level languages (e.g. C, C++) and most, if not all, of the research papers do not provide information or any facts showing the tool implementation for the control flow graph, leaving it to the reader to imagine either that the author is using third party software for creating the graph, or that the graph is constructed manually (by hand). In this paper, we extend our previous work on a dedicated program analysis architecture and we describe a tool for automatic production of the control flow graph that offers advanced capabilities, such as vertices grouping, code coverage and enhanced user interaction.
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Paper Nr: 146
Title:

COMBINING BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING WITH THE DATA WAREHOUSE FOR EVENT-CONTEXT CORRELATION - Examining the Practical Applicability of this BAM Approach
Authors:

Gabriel Cavalheiro, Ajantha Dahanayake and Richard Welke
Abstract: Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a term introduced by Gartner, Inc to define systems that serve to provide real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve speed and effectiveness of business operations. Despite the emphasis of BAM on the provision of low latency views on enterprise performance, literature on BAM also indicates the technical feasibility of a BAM approach, which adds context from historical information stored in a data warehouse to real-time events detected by a BAM system so as to help enterprises improving understanding of current monitoring scenarios. However, at this point, there is a lack of studies that discuss the use of this approach to tackle real-world business problems. To improve practical understanding of the potential applicability of this BAM approach, this paper will present a synthesis of existing research on BAM and data warehouse to provide an objective basis for proposing feasible business scenarios for applying the combination of both technologies. This study reveals that the noted BAM approach empowers operational managers to respond in a more precise manner to the occurrence of events by enabling a better understanding of the nature of the detected event.
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Paper Nr: 346
Title:

A FORMAL TOOL THAT INTEGRATES RELATIONAL DATABASE SCHEMES AND PRESERVES THE ORIGINAL INFORMATION
Authors:

Angel Mora and M. Enciso
Abstract: In this work we face on with the main problem concerning the database design process in a collaborative environment: several users provide different models representing a part of the global model and we must integrate these database sub-shemes to render a unified database schema. In this work we propose a technique to integrate relational database sub-schemes based on a formal language. The extraction, integration and generation tasks are carried out efficiently using the SLFD logic (Substitution Logic for functional dependencies). We have selected this logic because it is appropriated to manage the functional dependencies in a automatic way.
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Paper Nr: 374
Title:

DEPLOYMENT OF ONTOLOGIES IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
Authors:

Carsten Felden and Daniel Kilimann
Abstract: The consideration of integrated structured and unstructured data in management information systems requires a new kind of metadata management. Ontologies constitute a possibility to solve the resulting problems. Process models describe the development of ontologies which can be utilised in the context of management information systems, are discussed.
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Paper Nr: 374
Title:

DEPLOYMENT OF ONTOLOGIES IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
Authors:

Carsten Felden and Daniel Kilimann
Abstract: The consideration of integrated structured and unstructured data in management information systems requires a new kind of metadata management. Ontologies constitute a possibility to solve the resulting problems. Process models describe the development of ontologies which can be utilised in the context of management information systems, are discussed.
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Paper Nr: 379
Title:

ACTIVE MECHANISMS FOR CHECKING PARTICIPATION CONSTRAINTS IN UML
Authors:

Djamel Berrabah, Charles-françois Ducateau and Faouzi Boufarès
Abstract: The automation of the database design process using CASE tools is among the multiple efforts devoted to face the problems of database modeling. These tools often do not take into account all information presented in a conceptual schema. Consequently, the relational elements obtained during these processes do not coincide completely with the conceptual elements, and that produces some semantic losses. The idea is to enrich these tools and to improve them in order to solve some problems of modeling. The goal of this work is to propose an efficient approach to generate mechanisms that preserve the participation constraints during the transformation of a conceptual schema into a relational one.
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Paper Nr: 396
Title:

INTEGRATION OF DATA SOURCES FOR PLANT GENOMICS
Authors:

P. Larmande, C. Tranchant-Dubreuil, L. Regnier, Isabelle Mougenot and Therese Libourel
Abstract: The study of the function of genes, or functional genomics, is today one of the most active disciplines in the life sciences and requires effective integration and processing of related information. Today’s biologist has access to bioinformatics resources to help him in his experimental research. In genomics, several tens of public data sources can be of interest to him, each source contributing a part of the useful information. The difficulty lies in the integration of this information, often semantically inconsistent or expressing differing viewpoints, and, very often, only available in heterogenous formats. In this context, informatics has a role to play in the design of systems that are flexible and adaptable to significant changes in biological data and formats. It is within this framework that this paper presents the design and implementation of an integrated environment strongly supported by knowledge-representation and problem-solving tools.
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Paper Nr: 416
Title:

MISTEL - AN APPROACH TO ACCESS MULTIPLE RESOURCES
Authors:

Thomas Bopp, Thorsten Hampel, Robert Hinn, Jan Pawlowski and Christian Prpitsch
Abstract: Digital documents are widely spread around the web in information systems of all kinds. The approach described in this paper is to unify the access to documents and connect applications to share, search and publish documents in a standardised way. The sample implementation uses web services to integrate knowledge management, a learning management system, and a digital library. We propose a procedure to access resources in heterogenous repositories by negotiating capabilities before sending queries. The result is a unified service model for accessing resources, which can easily be supported by different repositories and clients.
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Paper Nr: 454
Title:

MINIMIZING THE COMPLEXITY OF DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTIONS IN CORPORATE ARCHITECTURES WITH THE USE OF ASYNCHRONOUS REPLICATION
Authors:

Sergio Poltronieri, Silvio De Paula and Luiz Natal Rossi
Abstract: In software architectures commonly adopted by large corporations, the use of the “two-phase commit” protocol for distributed transactions presents inconveniences such as code complexity, long response times for the final user and need of an environment that allows complete simultaneity. We present here an alternative strategy, based on asynchronous replication, successfully implemented since 1997 at the University of São Paulo as infrastructure of integration for its corporate systems, which propitiates distributed transactions in the context of databases deployed at several host servers.
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Paper Nr: 494
Title:

MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCHEMA EVOLUTION - Integrating New OLAP Requirements
Authors:

Mohamed Neji, Ahlem Nabli, Jamel Feki and Faiez Gargouri
Abstract: Multidimensional databases are an effective support for OLAP processes. They improve the enterprise decision-making. These databases evolve with the decision maker requirements evolution and, are sensitive to data source changes. In this paper, we are interested in the evolution of the data mart schema due to the raise of new OLAP needs. Our approach determines first, what functional data marts will be able to cover a new requirement, if any, and secondly, decides on a strategy of integration. This leads either to the alteration of an existing data mart schema or, to the creation of a new schema suitable for the new requirement.
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Paper Nr: 563
Title:

DESIGN OF A MEDICAL DATABASE TRANSFORMATION ALGORITHM
Authors:

Karine Abbas, Christine Verdier and André Flory
Abstract: The aim of this article is to create a unique medical record structure from the metabase of any medical record. The work proposes the design of transformation algorithms which consists in translating the legacy relational database (RDB) into a unique medical record structure by analysing the correlation between the legacy RDB keys and the classification of the relations into four types : base relation, dependent relation, inheritance relation and composite relation.
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Paper Nr: 586
Title:

KEY FACTORS IN LEGACY SYSTEMS MIGRATION - A Real Life Case
Authors:

Teta Stamati, Konstantina Stamati and Drakoulis Martakos
Abstract: Although legacy systems migration as a subject area is often overlooked in favour of areas such as new technology developments and strategic planning of information technology, most migration projects are considered ill-fated initiatives and a rate of over 80% of these projects run over budget, frequently with system functionality falling short of contract. Many practitioners consider that the proposed theoretical migration approaches are myopic and do not take into account a number of key factors that make a migration project a really complex initiative. Our position is that throughout the life cycle of a migration process, there are some critical factors that initially play the role of the “drivers” and afterwards they became the factors that hinder (“hinders”) the migration process. We consider these key factors as Critical Success Factors (CSF) that must be carefully considered. Furthermore, these key factors could be either overt or covert factors. In each case, the migration engineers should consider and analyse them very carefully prior to the initiation of the migration process and a well-defined migration methodological plan should be developed. The work presented is based on a real life initiative putting emphasis on the key success factors revealing at the same time the complexity of a migration process. Emphasis is put on the required management view and planning effort, rather than on the mere technological issues.
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Paper Nr: 655
Title:

FORMAL VERIFICATION OF AN ACCESS CONCURRENCY CONTROL ALGORITHM FOR TRANSACTION TIME RELATIONS
Authors:

Achraf Makni, Rafik Bouaziz and Faïez Gargouri
Abstract: We propose in this paper to formally check the access concurrency control algorithm proposed in (Bouaziz, 2005). This algorithm is based on the optimistic approach and guarantees strong consistency for the transaction time relations. The specification of our model under PROMELA language allowed us to ensure the feasibility of the validation. We then could, using the SPIN model checkers, avoid errors of blocking type and check safety properties specified by temporal logic formulas.
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Paper Nr: 657
Title:

PARALLEL QUERY PROCESSING USING WARP EDGED BUSHY TREES IN MULTIMEDIA DATABASES
Authors:

Lt.s.santhosh Baboo, P. Subashini and K.s. Easwarakumar
Abstract: AbstractThe paper focuses on parallelization of queries execution on a shared memory parallel database system. In this paper, a new data structures, named Warp edged Bushy trees, is proposed for facilitating compile time optimization. The warp edged bushy tree is a modified version of bushy trees , which provides better response time than bushy trees, during query processing.
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Paper Nr: 660
Title:

DESIGNING IMAGING SOLUTIONS FOR AN ORGANIZATION
Authors:

Prasad N. Sivalanka
Abstract: In a business climate where organizations are looking for ways to cut costs and increase productivity, document imaging systems are providing the most dramatic impact. Efficient management of all physical documents is crucial to the success of any organization business community where most (as high as 90%) of corporate information resides in paper documents. A process driven document management system is necessary that converts paper documents into electronic documents for easy filing, retrieval and storage. This paper defines the methodology of system implementation at one of our large financial clients.
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Paper Nr: 683
Title:

COMBINING THE DATA WAREHOUSE AND OPERATIONAL DATA STORE
Authors:

Ahmed E. Ahmed, Yasser Ali Alhabibi and Abdel-Badeeh M. Salem
Abstract: Many of small business organizations tend to combine the operational data stores (ODS) and data warehousing (DW) in one structure in order to save the expenses of building two separate structures for each of them. The purpose of this paper is investigating the expected obstacles that may affect organizations that try to combine the ODS and DW in one structure. Both the analytical and comparative analysis are used to investigate the obstacles and drawbacks that have been faced in combining the ODS and DW in one structure.
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Paper Nr: 692
Title:

CONVERTING TIME SERIES DATA FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
Authors:

Li Peng
Abstract: Most enterprises have an autonomous and heterogeneous information system. The same data may be diversely represented in different information systems. The core of solutions for integrating heterogeneous data sources is data conversion. One of the major issues of data conversion is how to convert data that contains temporal information. In this paper I propose a method to effectively convert time-series data appearing in enterprises. The concept of calendar is integrated into the proposed method. The method is based on a generalized representing form for data. The converting operations and processes are defined and presented.
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Paper Nr: 717
Title:

ANALYSIS-SENSITIVE CONVERSION OF ADMINISTRATIVE DATA INTO STATISTICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Mirko Cesarini, Mariagrazia Fugini and Mario Mezzanzanica
Abstract: In this paper we present a methodological approach to develop a Statistical Information System (SIS), out of administrative archives of the Public Administrations. Such archives are a rich source of information, but an attempt to use them as sources for statistical analysis reveals errors and incompatibilities that do not permit their usage as a statistical and decision support basis. The proposed methodological approach encompasses building a SIS out of administrative data, such as design of an integration model for different and heterogeneous data sources, improvement of the overall data quality, removal of errors that might impact on the correctness of statistical analysis, design of a data warehouse for statistical analysis, and design of a multidimensional database to develop indicators for decision support. We present a case study, the AMeRIcA Project.
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Paper Nr: 761
Title:

CURRENT TRENDS IN DATA WAREHOUSING METHODS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Authors:

Vera Ivanova
Abstract: Data Warehousing (DW) methods and technologies are in a new stage of their evolution and of their amalgamation with the enterprise businesses, they serve. The main goals of this work are to identify, review and analyze the latest trends in DW. A systematic approach is followed to recognize, define and analyze the most important trends. The approach is based on the trends’ corresponding role and value in the business processes and intelligence (BI). For this purpose we start with updated definitions of DW and BI and then consider the generalized Architecture of today’s DW. We then “drill down” to analyze the DW problems and trends in their solving for data quality provisions, regulatory compliance, infrastructure consolidation, and standardization, corporate performance optimization and metadata management. This in-depth logical analyzing approach results in comprehensible conclusions to be considered on the important early phases of DW projects, as it is well known that early project decisions carry impacts for the whole DW system life span.
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Area 2 - Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 105
Title:

A DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM FOR COALITION FORMATION IN LINEAR PRODUCTION DOMAIN
Authors:

Chattrakul Sombattheera and Aditya Ghose
Abstract: Coalition formation is an important area of research in multi-agent systems. The large number of agents can make coalition formation become a complex process. The problem of dealing with large number of agents during coalition formation has received little attention in the literature. Previous studies assume that each coalition value is known a priori. This assumption is impractical in realworld settings. Furthermore, the problem of finding coalition values become intractable for even a relatively small number of agents. This work studies coalition formation among fully cooperative agents in linear production domain, where each coalition value is not known a priori. The common goal of the agents is to maximize the system’s profit. We propose a distributed algorithm that allow agents to i) deliberate profitable coalitions, and ii) compute optimal coalition structure. We show that our algorithm outperforms exhaustive search when generating profitable coalitions, which can be used to achieve optimal coalition structure that yields the system’s maximal profit.
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Paper Nr: 125
Title:

KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING USING THE UML PROFILE - Adopting the Model-Driven Architecture for Knowledge-Based System Development
Authors:

Mohd Syazwan Abdullah, Richard Paige, Ian Benest and Chris Kimble
Abstract: Knowledge engineering (KE) activities are essential to the process of building intelligent systems; it conceptual modelling is exploited so that the problem-solving techniques used may be understood. This paper discusses platform independent conceptual modelling of a knowledge intensive application, focusing on knowledge-based systems (actually, a rule-based KBS) in the context of a model-driven architecture (MDA). It emphasises the use of problem-solving methods for developing the knowledge-level models. An extension to the Unified Modeling Language (UML), using its profile extension mechanism, is presented. The profile discussed in this paper has been successfully implemented in the eXecutable Modelling Framework (XMF) – a Meta-Object-Facility (MOF) based UML tool. A case study demonstrates the use of this profile; the prototype is implemented in the Java Expert System Shell (Jess).
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Paper Nr: 126
Title:

INCREMENTAL PROCESSING OF TEMPORAL OBSERVATIONS IN SUPERVISION AND DIAGNOSIS OF DISCRETE-EVENT SYSTEMS
Authors:

Gianfranco Lamperti and Marina Zanella
Abstract: Observations play a major role in supervision and diagnosis of discrete-event systems (DESs). In a distributed, large-scale setting, the observation of a DES over a time interval is not perceived as a totally-ordered sequence of observable labels but, rather, as a directed acyclic graph, under uncertainty conditions. Problem solving, however, requires generating a surrogate of such a graph, the index space. Furthermore, the observation hypothesized so far has to be integrated at the reception of a new fragment of observation. This translates to the need for computing a new index space every time. Since such a computation is expensive, a naive generation of the index space from scratch at the occurrence of each observation fragment becomes prohibitive in real applications. To cope with this problem, the paper introduces an incremental technique for efficiently modeling and indexing temporal observations of DESs.
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Paper Nr: 381
Title:

COLLABORATIVE FILTERING BASED ON CONTENT ADDRESSING
Authors:

Shlomo Berkovsky, Yaniv Eytani and Larry Manevitz
Abstract: Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular recommendation techniques. It is based on the assumption that users with similar tastes prefer similar items. One of the major drawbacks of the CF is its limited scalability, as the complexity of the CF grows linearly both with the number of available users and items. This work proposes a new fast variant of the CF employed over multi-dimensional content-addressable space. Our approach heuristically decreases the computational effort required by the CF algorithm by limiting the search process only to potentially similar users. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is capable of generate recommendations with high levels of accuracy, while significantly improving performance in comparison with the traditional implementation of the CF.
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Paper Nr: 388
Title:

KNOWLEDGE-BASED MODELING AND NATURAL COMPUTING FOR COORDINATION IN PERVASIVE ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Michael Cebulla
Abstract: In this paper we start with the assumption that coordination in complex systems can be understood in terms of presence and location of information. We propose a modeling framework which supports an integrated view of these two aspects of coordination (which we call knowledge diffusion). For this sake we employ methods from ontological modeling, modal logics, fuzzy logic and membrane computing. We demonstrate how these techniques can be combined in order to support the reasoning about knowledge and very abstract behavioral descriptions. As an example we discuss the notion of distributed action and show how it can be treated in our framework. Finally we exploit the special features of our architecture in order to integrate bio-inspired coordination mechanisms which rely on the exchange of molecules (i.e. uninterpreted messages).
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Paper Nr: 389
Title:

SEMI INTERACTIVE METHOD FOR DATA MINING
Authors:

Lydia Boudjeloud and Francois Poulet
Abstract: Usual visualization techniques for multidimensional data sets, such as parallel coordinates and scatter-plot matrices, do not scale well to high numbers of dimensions. A common approach to solve this problem is dimensionality selection. We present new semi-interactive method for dimensionality selection to select pertinent dimension subsets without losing information. Our cooperative approach uses automatic algorithms, interactive algorithms and visualization methods: an evolutionary algorithm is used to obtain optimal dimension subsets which represent the original data set without losing information for unsupervised tasks (clustering or outlier detection) using a new validity criterion. A visualization method is used to present the user interactive evolutionary algorithm results and let him actively participate in evolutionary algorithm search with more efficiency resulting in a faster evolutionary algorithm convergence. We have implemented our approach and applied it to real data set to confirm it is effective for supporting the user in the exploration of high dimensional data sets and evaluate the visual data representation.
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Paper Nr: 442
Title:

ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN INFORMATION INTEGRATION - Networked Organisation Configuration
Authors:

Alexander Smirnov, Tatiana Levashova and Nikolay Shilov
Abstract: Distributed networks of independent companies (networked organisations) are currently of high interest. This new organisational form provides for flexibility, tolerance, etc. that are necessary in the current market situation characterised by increasing competition and globalisation. Configuration of a networked organisation is a strategic task that requires intelligent decision support and integration of various tasks constituting the configuration problem. Achieving efficient integration of tasks is possible when it is done taking into account semantics. The paper proposes an approach to this problem based on ontology-driven knowledge integration. The knowledge in the approach is presented using formalism of object-oriented constraint networks. Such formalism simplifies problem formulation and interpretation since most of the tasks in the areas of configuration and management are constraint satisfaction tasks. The paper describes the developed approach and the ontological model that is the core of the approach. Application of the developed approach is demonstrated at two levels: (a) at the level of information integration within one company and (b) at the level of information integration across a networked organisation.
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Paper Nr: 459
Title:

A LOGIC-BASED APPROACH TO SEMANTIC INFORMATION EXTRACTION
Authors:

Massimo Ruffolo and Marco Manna
Abstract: Recognizing and extracting meaningful information from unstructured documents, taking into account their semantics, is an important problem in the field of information and knowledge management. In this paper we describe a novel logic-based approach to semantic information extraction, from both HTML pages and flat text documents, implemented in the HıLεX system. The approach is founded on a new two-dimensional representation of documents, and heavily exploits DLP + - an extension of disjunctive logic programming for ontology representation and reasoning, which has been recently implemented on top of the DLV system. Ontologies, representing the semantics of information to be extracted, are encoded in DLP + , while the extraction patterns are expressed using regular expressions and an ad hoc two-dimensional grammar. The execution of DLP + reasoning modules, encoding the HıLεX grammar expressions, yields the actual extraction of information from the input document. Unlike previous systems, which are merely syntactic, HıLεX combines both semantic and syntactic knowledge for a powerful information extraction.
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Paper Nr: 526
Title:

SIMILARITY MEASURES FOR SKILL-PROFILE MATCHING IN ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Ernst Biesalski and Andreas Abecker
Abstract: At DaimlerChrysler’s truck plant in Wörth, we are currently implementing a comprehensive IT solution for integrated and synergistic processes in personnel development. In this paper, we sketch some ontology-based software modules – as well as their interdependencies and synergies – which support streamlined and integrated, comprehensive personnel-development processes. A central element in the software architecture is ontology-based similarity assessment for skill-profile matching which is exemplarily discussed for softwaresupported project staffing.
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Paper Nr: 536
Title:

AROUND THE EMPIRICAL AND INTENTIONAL REFERENCES OF AGENT-BASED SIMULATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Authors:

Nuno David and Helder Coelho
Abstract: The difficulties in constructing and analyzing simulations of social theory and phenomena, even the most simplified, have been underlined in the literature. The experimental reference of simulation remains ambiguous, insofar as the logic of its method turns computer programs into something more than a tool in the social sciences, defining them as the experimental subject itself. The goal of this paper is to construct a methodological perspective that is able to conciliate the formal and empirical logic of program verification in computer science, with the interpretative and multiparadigmatic logic of the social sciences. This is a condensed and revised version of David et al. (2006). We demonstrate that the method of simulation implies at least two distinct types of program verifications, which we call empirical and intentional verification. Furthermore, we clarify the experimental reference of simulation by demonstrating that the process of intentional verification is contingent upon both the behaviors of the programs and the observed social phenomena.
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Paper Nr: 546
Title:

SOURCE SENSITIVE ARGUMENTATION SYSTEM
Authors:

Chee F. Chang, Peter Harvey and Aditya Ghose
Abstract: There exist many approaches to agent-based conflict resolution. Of particular interest are approaches which adopt argumentation as their underlying conflict resolution machinery. In most argumentation systems, the argument source plays a minimal role. We feel that ignoring this important attribute of human argumentation reduces the capabilities of current argumentation systems. This paper focuses on the importance of sources in argumentation and extends this to the notion of credibility of agents.
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Paper Nr: 663
Title:

IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES FOR “EQUATION GURU” - A User Friendly Intelligent Algebra Tutor
Authors:

Senay Kafkas, Zeki Bayram and Huseyin Yaratan
Abstract: We describe the implementation strategies of an intelligent algebra tutor, the “Equation Guru” (EG), which is designed to help students learn the concepts of equation solving with one unknown. EG provides a highly interactive and entertaining learning environment through the use of Microsoft Agents. It consists of two main parts. The first is the “Tutorial” part where students are guided through the steps of solving equations with one unknown. The second, “Drill and Practice” part gives them a chance to practice their skills in equation solving. In this part, equations are automatically generated by EG, and presented to the student. EG monitors the student’s performance and adjusts the difficulty level of the equations accordingly.
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Paper Nr: 707
Title:

PERSONALIZED INCENTIVE PLANS THROUGH EMPLOYEE PROFILING
Authors:

Silverio Petruzzellis, Oriana Licchelli, Ignazio Palmisano, Giovanni Semeraro, Valeria Bavaro and Cosimo Palmisano
Abstract: Total reward management (TRM) is a holistic practice that interprets the growing need in organizations for involvement and motivation of the workers. It is oriented towards pushing the use of Information Technology in supporting the improvement of both organization and people performances, by understanding employee needs and by designing customized incentives and rewards. Customization is very common in the area of e-commerce, where application of profiling and recommendation techniques makes it possible to deliver personalized recommendations for users that explicitly accept the site to store personal information such as preferences or demographic data. Our work is focused on the application of User Profiling techniques in the Total Reward Management context. In the Team Advisor project we experimented the analogies Customer/Employee, Product, Portfolio/Reward Library and Shop/Employer, in order to provide personalized reward recommendations to line managers. We found that the adoption of a collaborative software platform delivering a preliminary reward plan to the managers fosters collaboration and actively supports the delegation of decision-making.
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Paper Nr: 713
Title:

A FOUNDATION FOR INFORMED NEGOTIATION
Authors:

John Debenham and Simeon Simoff
Abstract: Approaches to the construction of agents that are to engage in competitive negotiation are often founded on game theory. In such an approach the agents are endowed with utility functions and assumed to be utility optimisers. In practice the utility function is derived in the context of massive uncertainties both in terms of the agent’s priorities and of the raw data or information. To address this issue we propose an agent architecture that is founded on information theory, and that manages uncertainty with entropy-based inference. Our negotiating agent engages in multi-issue bilateral negotiation in a dynamic information-rich environment. The agent strives to make informed decisions. The agent may assume that the integrity of some of its information decays with time, and that a negotiation may break down under certain conditions. The agent makes no assumptions about the internals of its opponent — it focuses only on the signals that it receives. It constructs two probability distributions over the set of all deals. First the probability that its opponent will accept a deal, and second that a deal will prove to be acceptable to it in time.
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Paper Nr: 734
Title:

INTEGRATING FUZZY LOGIC IN ONTOLOGIES
Authors:

Silvia Calegari and Davide Ciucci
Abstract: Ontologies have proved to be very useful in sharing concepts across applications in an unambiguous way. Nowadays, in ontology-based applications information is often vague and imprecise. This is a well-known problem especially for semantics-based applications, such as e-commerce, knowledge management, web portals, etc. In computer-aided reasoning, the predominant paradigm to manage vague knowledge is fuzzy set theory. This paper presents an enrichment of classical computational ontologies with fuzzy logic to create fuzzy ontologies. So, it is a step towards facing the nuances of natural languages with ontologies. Our proposal is developed in the KAON ontology editor, that allows to handle ontology concepts in an high-level environment.
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Paper Nr: 745
Title:

A KNOWLEDGE-BASED REVERSE DESIGN SYSTEM FOR DECLARATIVE SCENE MODELING
Authors:

Vassilios Golfinopoulos, Vassilios Stathopoulos, Georgios Miaoulis and Dimitri Plemenos
Abstract: Declarative modeling allows the designer to describe a scene without the need to define the geometric properties. The MultiCAD architecture implements the declarative forward design, accepting a declarative description and generating a set of geometric solutions that meet the description. The aim of the presented work is to settle the reverse design process through the RS-MultiCAD component, a knowledge-based system, in order to extend MultiCAD declarative conception cycle to an automated iterative process. The RS-MultiCAD receives a selected geometric solution, which is semantically understood, permits the designer to perform geometric and topological modifications on the scene, and results a declarative description which embodies the designer modifications. That declarative description leads to more promising solutions by reducing the initial solution space.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 10
Title:

DEVELOPMENT OF SUMMARIES OF CERTAIN PATTERNS IN MULTI-BAND SATELLITE IMAGES
Authors:

Hema Nair
Abstract: This paper describes a system that is designed and implemented for interpretation of some patterns in multi-band (RGB) satellite images. Patterns such as land, island, water body, river, fire, urban area settlements in remote-sensed images are extracted and summarised in linguistic terms using fuzzy sets. Some elements of supervised classification are introduced to assist in the development of linguistic summaries. A few LANDSAT images are analysed by the system and the resulting summaries of the image patterns are explained.
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Paper Nr: 11
Title:

UTILIZATION OF CASE-BASED REASONING IN AUDITING - Determining the Audit Fee
Authors:

Robert Zenzerovic
Abstract: Case-based reasoning represents a method for solving problems and decision making support which is based on the previous business experience. It uses cases from the past to solve new problems. Case can be defined as conceptualized piece of knowledge representing the experience that teaches a lesson fundamental to achieving the goals of the decision maker and it usually incorporate input (situation part of the case) and output features (solution part of the case). Many studies tried to explain types and impact of different factors that determine audit fees. Mostly all authors concentrate their research on the impact of following determinants: auditee size, auditee complexity, auditee profitability, ownership control, timing variables, auditor location and auditor size. In paper all mentioned factors are described except auditor size and location since these factors are not significant in Croatian audit service market. All significant audit fee determinants will be appropriately quantified in order to build a case-based reasoning model for determining audit fee for smaller and mid sized auditing firms in Croatia but also for the same firms in the other, particularly transition, countries too.
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Paper Nr: 32
Title:

VARIOUS PROCESS WIZARD FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS - Using Fuzzy Petri Nets for Process Definition
Authors:

Jaroslav Prochazka, Jaroslav Knybel and Cyril Klimes
Abstract: The new approach in information system automation is process or workflow management. For unskilled user is important, when the business processes of company are described. Then, according to this description are users led correctly in their work. The business (application) model can be caught in finite state machines and its variations. Petri net can be used for process definition in process wizard. Sometimes unclear state occurs, for its description can be fuzzy logic IF-THEN rules used. We explain what process wizard is, what should contain and outline how it could be implement in IS QI. We also introduce Petri nets with fuzzy approach for process description.
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Paper Nr: 51
Title:

FREQUENCY CALIBRATIONS WITH CONVENTIONAL TIME INTERVAL COUNTERS VIA GPS TRACEABILITY
Authors:

Juan-Jose Gonzalez De La Rosa, Isidro Lloret Galiana, Carlos G. Puntonet, J. M. Górriz, Antonio Moreno-Munoz, M. Liñán and V. Pallarés
Abstract: Calculation of the uncertainty in traceable frequency calibrations is detailed using low cost instruments, partially characterized. Contributions to the standard uncertainty have been obtained under the assumption of uniform probability density function of errors. Short term instability has been studied using non-classical statistics. A thorough study of the noise processes characterization is made with simulated data by means of our variance estimators. The experiment is thought for frequencies close to 1 Hz.
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Paper Nr: 113
Title:

A SEMI-AUTOMATED QUALITY ASSURANCE TOOLBOX FOR DIAGNOSTIC RADIOLOGICAL IMAGING
Authors:

Christodoulos Constantinou, Andreas Grondoudis, Andreas Christoforou, Christakis Constantinides and Andreas Lanitis
Abstract: Magnetic Resonance (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT) and Ultrasound (US) are three of the most commonly used clinical imaging modalities. The aim of this study was to establish a Quality Assurance program for MRI, CT and US scanners. A well-designed quality assurance program is of utmost importance in the clinical setting, because it indicates whether diagnostic imaging modalities meet the minimum criteria of acceptable performance and because it helps determine those scanner parameters that need adjustment in order to ensure optimum performance. Quality assurance programs that rely on manual data collection and analysis are tedious and time consuming and are often abandoned due to the significant workload required for their implementation. In this paper we describe an integrated software system for automating the process of data collection and management in Quality Assurance for diagnostic radiological imaging. The developed system is comprised of two main units: The Image Processing Unit (IPU) and the Data Management Unit (DMU). The IPU is used for analysing images from different diagnostic modalities in order to extract measurements. The IPU is dynamically linked to the DMU so that measurements are transferred directly to the DMU. This process allows the generation of quality assurance reports for all such modalities.
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Paper Nr: 390
Title:

A LOAD BALANCING SCHEDULING APPROACH FOR DEDICATED MACHINE CONSTRAINT
Authors:

Mingdr Shr, Alan Liu and Peter Chen
Abstract: The constraint of having a dedicated machine for photolithography process in semiconductor manufacturing is one of the new challenges introduced in photolithography machinery due to natural bias. With this constraint, the wafers passing through each photolithography process have to be processed on the same machine. The purpose of the limitation is to prevent the impact of natural bias. However, many scheduling polices or modeling methods proposed by previous research for the semiconductor manufacturing production have not discussed the dedicated machine constraint. In this paper, we propose the Load Balancing (LB) scheduling approach based on a Resource Schedule and Execution Matrix (RSEM) to tackle this constraint. The LB scheduling approach is to schedule each wafer lot at the first photolithography stage to a suitable machine according to the load balancing factors among machines. We describe the algorithm of the proposed LB scheduling approach and RSEM in the paper. We also present an example to demonstrate our approach and the result of the simulations to validate our approach.
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Paper Nr: 469
Title:

COALITION FORMATION WITH UNCERTAIN TASK EXECUTION
Authors:

Hosam Hanna
Abstract: We address the problem of coalition formation in environments where tasks’ executions are uncertain. Although previous works provide good solutions for coalition formation problem, the uncertain task execution problem is not taken into account. In environments where task execution is uncertain, an agent can’t be sure whether he will be able to execute all the subtasks that are allocated to him or he will ignore some of them. That is why forming coalition to maximize the real reward is an unrealizable operation. In this paper, we propose a theoretical approach to form coalition with uncertain task execution. We view the formation of a coalition to execute a task as (1) a decision to make and (2) as an uncertain source of gain. We associate then the allocation of a task to a coalition with an expected reward that represents what agents expect to gain by forming this coalition to execute this task. Also, the agents’ aim is to form coalition to maximize the expected reward instead of the real reward. To reach this objective, we formalize the coalition formation problem by a Markov Decision Process (MDP). We consider the situation where decisions are taken by one agent that develops and solves the corresponding MDP. An optimal coalition formation which maximizes the agents’ expected reward is then obtained.
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Paper Nr: 531
Title:

DATA MINING AS A NEW PARADIGM FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN DATABASE MARKETING PROJECTS
Authors:

Filipe M. Pinto, Pedro Gago and Manuel F. Santos
Abstract: Information technologies provide not only the ability to collect and register in databases many kinds of signals external to the organization, but also the capacity to use them in different ways at different organizational levels. Database Marketing (DBM) refers to the use of database technology to support marketing activities in order to establish and maintain a profitable interaction with clients. Currently DBM is usually approached using classical statistical inference, which may fail when complex, multi-dimensional, and incomplete data is available. An alternative is to apply Data Mining (DM) techniques in a process called Knowledge Discovery from Databases, which aims at automatic pattern extraction. This will help marketers to address customer needs based on what they know about them, rather than a mass generalization of their characteristics. This paper exploits a systematic approach for the use of DM techniques as a new paradigm in Business Intelligence in DBM projects, considering analytical and marketing aspects. A cross-table is proposed to associate DBM activities to the appropriate DM techniques. This framework guides the development of DBM projects, contributing to improve their efficacy and efficiency.
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Paper Nr: 535
Title:

MULTI-CRITERIA EVALUATION OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL TOOLS
Authors:

Nishant Kumar, Jan Vanthienen, Jan De Beer and Marie-francine Moens
Abstract: We propose a generic methodology for the evaluation of Text Mining/Search and Information Retrieval tools based on their functional conformity to a predefined set of functional requirements prioritized by distinguishable user profiles. The methodology is worked out and applied within the context of a research project concerning the assessment of intelligent exploitation tools for unstructured information sources in the police domain. We present the general setting of our work, give an overview of our evaluation approach, and discuss our methodology for testing in greater detail. These kinds of evaluations are particularly useful for both (potential)purchasers of exploitation tools, given the high investments in time and money required in becoming proficient in their use, and developers who aim at producing better quality software products.
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Paper Nr: 540
Title:

LOGICRUNCHER - A Logistics Planning and Scheduling Decision Support System for Emerging EMS and 3PL Business Practices
Authors:

Raymund J. Lin, Jack Huang, Norman Sadeh and Benjamin Tsai
Abstract: LogiCruncher is a dynamic logistics planning and scheduling module developed to support emerging third party logistics practices. Given information about inventory profiles for different product types at different locations, a set of transportation assets as well as a variety of quotes and contractual arrangements with logistics service providers, the system is capable of generating or revising transportation plans and schedules that meet changing customer requirements. These requirements are expressed in the form of demands for delivering different types of SKUs in different quantities to different locations. The system is capable of capturing a rich set of domain constraints and costs. It can be used to support the development and dynamic revision of solutions as well as to support requests for quotes from prospective customers. This includes support for “what-if” analysis through the creation and manipulation of solutions in different contexts, each corresponding to possibly different sets of assumptions. This paper provides an overview of LogiCruncher and summarizes results of initial evaluation.
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Paper Nr: 541
Title:

AN EXTENDABLE JAVA FRAMEWORK FOR INSTANCE SIMILARITIES IN ONTOLOGIES
Authors:

Mark Hefke, Valentin Zacharias, Andreas Abecker, Qingli Wang, Ernst Biesalski and Marco Breiter
Abstract: We present the conceptual basis and a prototypical implementation of a software framework for syntactical and semantical similarities between ontology instances. Our focus comprises both the implementation of specific, ontology-based similarity measures and their flexible, efficient, and extensible combination.
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Paper Nr: 554
Title:

SELECTING AND STRUCTURING SEMANTIC RESOURCES TO SUPPORT SMES KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES
Authors:

Antonio L. Soares, Manuel Silva and Dora Simões
Abstract: Knowledge management intrinsically involves communication and information sharing, which can be strongly affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted. This situation gets worst when complex domains are considered, as it is the case of the Construction Industry domains. The development of ontologies to unify and to put into context the different concepts and terms of the sometimes rather traditional and locally coloured construction industry domains is a necessary step to avoid misinterpretations and inefficient communication. The KNOW-CONSTRUCT project decided, as an approach to this task, to re-use, as far as possible, existing ontologies, classification systems and other semantic resources in order to develop a system that may come to contribute to standards and to the integration, management and reuse of the area specific knowledge via a common knowledge base in order to consolidate and provide access to integrated knowledge, making community emergent knowledge a significant added value. It aims at developing a methodology of common Construction Industry Knowledge (CIK) representation applicable to large sets of SMEs in the construction industry as a basis for the establishment of a knowledge community.
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Paper Nr: 566
Title:

FUZZY INTERVAL NUMBER (FIN) TECHNIQUES FOR CROSS LANGUAGE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
Authors:

Catherine Marinagi, Theodoros Alevizos, Vassilis G. Kaburlasos and Christos Skourlas
Abstract: A new method to handle problems of Information Retrieval (IR) and related applications is proposed. The method is based on Fuzzy Interval Numbers (FINs) introduced in fuzzy system applications. Definition, interpretation and a computation algorithm of FINs are presented. The frame of use FINs in IR is given. An experiment showing the anticipated importance of these techniques in Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is presented.
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Paper Nr: 691
Title:

DYNAMIC REPRESENTATION OF INFORMATION FOR A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM
Authors:

Thierry Galinho, Michel Coletta, Patrick Person and Thierry Galinho
Abstract: This paper presents a system designed to help deciders manage cases of crisis. The system represents, characterises and interprets the dynamic evolution of information describing a given situation and displays the results of its analysis. The core of the system is made up of three multiagent systems (MAS): one MAS for the static and dynamic representation of the information (current situation), the second MAS for dynamically regrouping sets of agents of the former MAS and the upper MAS for matching results between the second MAS and scenarios stored in the persistent memory of the system in order to have a deeper analysis of the situation. The case based reasoning of this last MAS sends its results to the user as a view of the current situation linked to some views of similar situations. In this paper, we will focus on the representation of information MAS. This MAS is dynamic in order to be able to take into account the changes in the description of the information. Current information is represented by a layer of factual agents which is fed by the composite semantic features constituting the atomic data elements of information. The aim of the set of factual agents is both to be a real snapshot of the situation at any time and to model the evolution of information dynamically.
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Paper Nr: 697
Title:

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS BY A META-LEARNING APPROACH BASED ON GRAMMAR EVOLUTION
Authors:

Albert Fornells-Herrera, Elisabet Golobardes I Ribé, Ester Bernadó I Mansilla and Joan Martí Bonmatí
Abstract: The incidence of breast cancer varies greatly among countries, but statistics show that every year 720,000 new cases will be diagnosed world-wide. However, a low percentage of women who suffer it can be detected using mammography methods. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new strategies to detect its formation in early stages. Many machine learning techniques have been applied in order to help doctors in the diagnosis decision process, but its definition and application are complex, getting results which are not often the desired. In this article we present an automatic way to build decision support systems by means of the combination of several machine learning techniques using a Meta-learning approach based on Grammar Evolution (MGE). We will study its application over different mammographic datasets to assess the improvement of the results.
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Paper Nr: 715
Title:

PREDICTING CARDIOVASCULAR RISKS - Using POSSUM, PPOSSUM and Neural Net Techniques
Authors:

Thuy T. Thu and D. N. Davis
Abstract: Neural Networks are broadly applied in a number of fields such as cognitive science, diagnosis, and forecasting. Medical decision support is one area of increasing research interest. Ongoing collaborations between cardiovascular clinicians and computer science are looking at the application of neural networks (and other data mining techniques) to the area of individual patient diagnosis, based on clinical records (from Hull and Dundee sites). The current research looks to advance initial investigations in a number of ways. Firstly, through a rigorous analysis of the clinical data, using data mining and statistical tools, we hope to be able to extend the usefulness of much of the clinical data set. Problems with the data include differences in attribute presence and use across different sites, and missing values. Secondly we look to advance the classification of referred patients with different outcome through the rigorous use of POSSUM, PPOSSUM and both supervised and unsupervised neural net techniques. Through the use of different classifiers, a better clinical diagnostic support model may be built.
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Paper Nr: 728
Title:

BENEFICIAL SEQUENTIAL COMBINATION OF DATA MINING ALGORITHMS
Authors:

Mathias Goller, Markus Humer and Michael Schrefl
Abstract: Depending on the goal of an instance of the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process, there are instances that require more than a single data mining algorithm to determine a solution. Sequences of data mining algorithms offer room for improvement that are yet unexploited. If it is known that an algorithm is the first of a sequence of algorithms and there will be future runs of other algorithms, the first algorithm can determine intermediate results that the succeeding algorithms need. The anteceding algorithm can also determine helpful statistics for succeeding algorithms. As the anteceding algorithm has to scan the data anyway, computing intermediate results happens as a by-product of computing the anteceding algorithm’s result. On the one hand, a succeeding algorithm can save time because several steps of that algorithm have already been pre-computed. On the other hand, additional information about the analysed data can improve the quality of results such as the accuracy of classification, as demonstrated in experiments with synthetical and real data.
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Paper Nr: 730
Title:

APPLICATION OF THE ROUGH SET METHOD FOR EVALUATION OF STRUCTURAL FUNDS PROJECTS
Authors:

Tadeusz A. Grzeszczyk
Abstract: Main subject of the present paper is presentation of the concept for application of rough set theory in evaluation of structural funds projects. Author presents scheme of classification algorithms based on rough set approach. This algorithm can be used for the problem of project proposals classification.
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Paper Nr: 732
Title:

EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF NON REDUNDANT RULES IN LARGE PATTERN BASES: A BITMAP APPROACH
Authors:

François Jacquenet, Christine Largeron and Cédric Udréa
Abstract: Knowledge Discovery from Databases has more and more impact nowadays and various tools are now available to extract efficiently (in time and memory space) some knowledge from huge databases. Nevertheless, those systems generally produce some large pattern bases and then the management of these one rapidly becomes untractable. Few works have focused on pattern base management systems and researches on that domain are really new. This paper comes within that context, dealing with a particular class of patterns that is association rules. More precisely, we present the way we have efficiently implemented the search for non redundant rules thanks to a representation of rules in the form of bitmap arrays. Some experiments show that the use of this technique increases dramatically the gain in time and space, allowing us to manage large pattern bases.
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Paper Nr: 749
Title:

AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF NEGATED CONCEPTS IN NARRATIVE CLINICAL REPORTS
Authors:

Lior Rokach, Roni Romano and Roni Romano
Abstract: Substantial medical data such as discharge summaries and operative reports are stored in textual form. Databases containing free-text clinical narratives reports often need to be retrieved to find relevant information for clinical and research purposes. Terms that appear in these documents tend to appear in different contexts. The context of negation, a negative finding, is of special importance, since many of the most frequently described findings are those denied by the patient or subsequently “ruled out.” Hence, when searching free-text narratives for patients with a certain medical condition, if negation is not taken into account, many of the documents retrieved will be irrelevant. In this paper we examine the applicability of machine learning methods for automatic identification of negative context patterns in clinical narratives reports. We suggest two new simple algorithms and compare their performance with standard machine learning techniques such as neural networks and decision trees. The proposed algorithms significantly improve the performance of information retrieval done on medical narratives.
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Paper Nr: 754
Title:

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FUZZY EXPERT DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR VENDOR SELECTION - Case Study in OIEC IRAN(Oil Industerial Engineering and Construction)
Authors:

Maryam Ramezani and Gholamali Montazer
Abstract: Supplier selection and evaluation is a complicated multi objective process with many uncertain factors. Sealed bid evaluation is the most common approach for supplier selection purpose in Iran. In this paper, a fuzzy expert decision support system is developed for solving the vendor selection problem with multiple objectives, in which some of the parameters are fuzzy in nature. Basic important factors considered for supplier selection are price, quality and delivery time. The designed system has been designed and implemented and evaluated in a lead famous company and the results are discussed.
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Paper Nr: 12
Title:

BUILDING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE VIA CRM BASED ON DATA WAREHOUSE AND DATA MINING
Authors:

Jiejun Huang, Wei Cui and Yanbin Yuan
Abstract: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is providing a novel approach for managing the relationships between a corporation and its customers towards maximal profitability and sustainability. Data mining and data warehouse are the useful information technologies, which provide powerful means for extracting and utilizing the business information from historical data resources and runtime data flows. This paper reviews the objectives, functionalities, and development trends of CRM, discusses the architecture, data model and development methodologies of CRM systems based on data warehouse and data mining, then outlines the applications of integrated CRM systems in decision making, including business administration, marketing, customer service, customer management, and credit evaluation. Eventually, it describes some problems and challenges for further research.
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Paper Nr: 44
Title:

DIAGNOSIS OF DEMENTIA AND ITS PATHOLOGIES USING BAYESIAN BELIEF NETWORKS
Authors:

Julie Cowie, Lloyd Oteniya and Richard Coles
Abstract: The use of artificial intelligence techniques in medical decision support systems is becoming more commonplace. By incorporating a method to represent expert knowledge, such systems can aid the user in aspects such as disease diagnosis and treatment planning. This paper reports on the first part of a project addressing the diagnosis of individuals with dementia. We discuss two systems: DemNet and PathNet; developed to aid accurate diagnosis both of the presence of dementia, and the pathology of the disease.
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Paper Nr: 45
Title:

DECISION SUPPORT ON THE MOVE - Mobile Decision Making for Triage Management
Authors:

Julie Cowie and Paul Godley
Abstract: This paper describes research investigating ways in which a mobile decision support system might be implemented. Our view is that the mobile decision maker will be better supported if he/she is aware of the Quality of the Data (QoD) used in deriving a decision, and how QoD improves or deteriorates while he/she is on the move. We propose a QoD model that takes into account static and dynamic properties of the mobile decision making environment, uses multicriteria decision analysis to represent the user’s decision model and to derive a single QoD parameter, and investigates the use of powerful graphics to relay information to the user.
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Paper Nr: 61
Title:

SIMULATION MODELLING OF IRON ORE PRODUCTION SYSTEM AND QUALITY MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Jim Everett
Abstract: Iron ore is railed several hundred kilometres from open-cut mines inland, to port facilities, then processed to lump and fines products, blended and the lump product re-screened ready for shipment, mainly to Asia. Customers use the ore as principal feed in steel production. Increasing demand and price, especially from China, requires expansion of existing mines and planning of new operations. Expansion planning of the operational logistics, maintaining acceptable product quality, has been greatly helped by simulation modelling described in this paper.
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Paper Nr: 112
Title:

METHOD FOR DRAWING UP A ROAD MAP THAT CONSIDERS THE SYNERGY EFFECT AND RISK FOR IT INVESTMENT
Authors:

Tadasuke Nakagawa, Shigeyuki Tani, Masaharu Akatsu and Norihisa Komoda
Abstract: IT governance lacks a comprehensive vision of investment in two or more projects. It is necessary to decide the priority levels that maximize the effects under constrained conditions. It is a complex problem, because while sometimes a greater effect can be obtained by introducing two or more measures at the same time, other times the effect of two measures introduced at the same time might not be significant. Although there is a synergy effect when two or more measures are introduced, no method for drawing up an investment-decision road map has considered that effect. Therefore, we developed one. What a decision-maker must think about when considering the introduction of two or more measures, can be visualized by drawing up a comprehensive road map that satisfies constraint conditions, such as the effectiveness of the measure, budget, time, staff size, order of introduction, and the synergy effect. Road map users can easily reach a consensus because the map, by taking into account the constraint conditions and the investment decision-making process, helps them logically explain the order in which the measures should be introduced.
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Paper Nr: 117
Title:

THE USE OF THE NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING AGENTS WITH CONCEPTUAL MODELS
Authors:

Olegas Vasilecas and Algirdas Laukaitis

Abstract: In this paper AI agents for natural language interfaces in data exploration domain are presented. The experiment done with the IBM natural language toolbox has shown that the black box approach in this case leads to misclassification. Unsatisfactory results of the experiment triggered the present research aimed at improving the user interface with the natural language modality at architectural and algorithm levels. We extended traditional natural language interfaces in data exploration domain in the following direction: the use of feedforward neural network as concepts indexes in the users natural language interfaces are suggested. All presented concepts are realized as the open source project JMining Dialog.
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Paper Nr: 130
Title:

QUALITY LEARNING OBJETCS MANAGEMENT - A Proposal for E-learning Systems
Authors:

Erla M. Morales Morgado, Ángela Barrón and Francisco García Peñalvo
Abstract: Web development is promoting important advantages for educational area specially e-learning systems. By one side Learning Objects (LOs) aim the possibility to reuse specific information and by the other side they can be interchanged though different context and platforms according to the user’s needs. However an urgent necessity exists to guarantee the LOs quality content. There exists a plethora of quality criteria to value digital sources but there are only a few suggestions about how to evaluate LOs to structure quality courses. Our proposal consists on a system to evaluate LOs as a continued process taking into account quality criteria related to metadata information, especially the educational category, together with a strategy to ensure a continued LOs quality contents.
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Paper Nr: 131
Title:

INTRODUCING INTELLIGENT AGENTS TO OUTSOURCING
Authors:

Hemal Kothari, Bernadette Sharp, Luke Ho and Anthony Atkins
Abstract: In the last few years, agent technology has significantly emerged as a new paradigm for software developers to solve complex problems. This paper extends the use of multi-agent systems into a new domain of outsourcing. It highlights the various issues associated with outsourcing decision making i.e. the complexity and the risks involved in outsourcing. The paper outlines the HABIO framework which proposes a tri-perspective approach focusing on the organisational, information and business perspective to facilitate the outsourcing decision-making and formulating an effective outsourcing strategy. The main focus of this paper is to describe how agents can assist the experts in their decision to support outsourcing. A call-centre scenario illustrating a 3-layered agent architecture is proposed which aims to capture the strategic, tactical, and communicational layers of outsourcing and supports the experts in their outsourcing decision-making.
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Paper Nr: 144
Title:

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR RAMP-UP - Approach for Knowledge Management for Ramp-up in the Automotive Industry
Authors:

Sven Thiebus, Ulrich Berger and Ralf Kretzschmann

Abstract: Enterprises in the automotive industry are facing new challenges from increasing product diversification, decreasing product life cycle times and permanent need for cost reduction. The ramp-up as linking phase between development phase and production phase has a crucial role for the success of a project. The performance of a ramp-up depends on the maturity of the product and manufacturing processes. Knowledge management is an extraordinary driver for maturity of both product and manufacturing process. The existing solutions for knowledge management show insufficient results. The new approach bases on the cycle of organizational learning. The cycle consists of four phases: socialization, externalization, combination and internalization. The cycle of organizational learning is also known as SECI cycle. It provides opportunities to improve ramp-up performance in the automotive industry. Part of the new approach is a sophisticated concept for a solution using Information Technology as enabler for Knowledge management.
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Paper Nr: 461
Title:

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT NOVEL APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Vasso Stylianou and Andreas Savva
Abstract: Knowledge Management (KM) is a process through which an enterprise gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes the knowledge of individuals and groups across the organization in ways that directly affect performance. Numerous businesses have implemented KM systems in an effort to achieve commercial effectiveness. This paper has collected information about a number of KM systems developed and used by modern businesses. It then presents the development steps leading to the implementation of a Web Content Management System to be used as a Research Management System. This will manage the acquisition, analysis, perseverance and utilization of knowledge regarding various research projects - including proposed projects, ongoing projects and finalized projects - and research-related emails.
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Paper Nr: 474
Title:

TOWARDS A COMPLETE DATA MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK BASED ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS
Authors:

Iulian A. Negroiu, Octavian P. Rotaru and Mircea Petrescu
Abstract: Applications are more and more complex and the volume of information has an exponentially growth nowadays. In these conditions a huge amount of information needs to be processed while the processing time and power should be kept to a minimum. The increasing amount of data transferred over the Internet and other networks, which are open to a big number of clients, was reflected in the growth of the distributed information systems. Also, there are a multitude of servers distributed among remote locations, which are serving the same purposes. In such cases, traditional models of distributed computing, caching, concurrency control, e.g. are inappropriate in overcoming the actual efficiency problems and in supporting the development of complex applications. We believe that intelligent and autonomous agents can solve this problem. This paper opens the research for creating a complete data management intelligent agent based framework. The possible areas that can be handled using agents are identified and discussed together with the required agents and agencies, while attempting to provide a bird’s eye architectural view of the proposed framework.
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Paper Nr: 484
Title:

A MULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR MOBILE SELF-TRAINING
Authors:

Mourad Ennaji, H. Boukachour and P. Gravé
Abstract: This article is the result of an interdisciplinary meeting between sociologists and didacticiens on the one hand and data processing specialists on the other hand. To develop the theoretical and methodological principles of the design of a training environment, by putting the needs and the difficulties of the student at the center of the design process and data-processing modeling, constitutes the common action of these two research laboratories within the framework of this collaboration. To design a virtual tutor called “teaching agent” in a system of remote formation implies the implementation of a flexible and adaptive system. We propose an multi-agent multi-layer architecture able to initiate the training and to manage a teaching and an individualized follow-up.
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Paper Nr: 584
Title:

GEOSPATIAL SEMANTIC QUERY BASED ON CASE-BASED REASONING SYSTEM
Authors:

Kay K. Win
Abstract: In today’s fast-growing information age, currently available methods for finding and using information on the Web are often insufficient. Today’s retrieval methods are typically limited to keywords searches or substring matches, therefore, users may often miss critical information when searching the web. After reviewing the real world Semantic Web, additional research is needed on the Geospatial Semantic Web. We are rich in geospatial data but poor in up-to-date geospatial information and knowledge that are ready to be used by anyone who wants to use. In this paper, we implement a framework of geospatial semantic query based on case based reasoning system that contributes to the development of geospatial semantic web. It is important to establish a geospatial semantics that support for effective spatial reasoning for performing geospatial semantic query. Compared to earlier keyword-based and information retrieval techniques that rely on syntax, we use semantic approaches in our spatial queries.
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Paper Nr: 590
Title:

SOME SPECIAL HEURISTICS FOR DISCRETE OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS
Authors:

Boris Melnikov, Alexey Radionov and Viktor Gumayunov
Abstract: In previous paper we considered some heuristic methods of decision-making for various discrete optimization problems; all these heuristics should be considered as the combination of them and form a common multi-heuristic approach to the various problems. And in this paper, we begin to consider local heuristics, which are different for different problems. At first, we consider two problems of minimization: for nondeterministic finite automata and for disjunctive normal forms. Our approach can be considered as an alternative to the methods of linear programming, multi-agent optimization, and neuronets.
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Paper Nr: 592
Title:

A METHOD BASED ON THE ONTOLOGY OF LANGUAGE TO SUPPORT CLUSTERS’ INTERPRETATION
Authors:

Wagner F. Castilho, Gentil José De Lucena Filho, Hercules Antonio Do Prado and Edilson Ferneda
Abstract: The clusters’ analysis process comprises two broad activities: generation of a clusters set and extracting meaning from these clusters. The first one refers to the application of algorithms to estimate high density areas separated by lower density areas from the observed space. In the second one the analyst goes inside the clusters trying to figure out some sense from them. The whole activity requires previous knowledge and a considerable burden of subjectivity. In previous works, some alternatives were proposed to take into account the background knowledge when creating the clusters. However, the subjectivity of the interpretation activity continues to be a challenge. Beyond soundness domain knowledge from specialists, a consensual interpretation depends on conversational competences for which no support has been provided. We propose a method for cluster interpretation based on the categories existing in the Ontology of Language, aiming to reduce the gap between a cluster configuration and the effective extraction of meaning from them.
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Paper Nr: 659
Title:

SADIM: AN AID SYSTEM FOR MANAGEMENT ENGINEERING DIAGNOSIS USING KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION AND MATCHING TECHNIQUES
Authors:

Jamel Kolsi, Lamia H. Belguith, Mansour Mrabet and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou
Abstract: This paper describes an aid system of management engineering diagnosis "Système d’Aide au Diagnostic d’Ingénierie de Management " SADIM, the aim of which is to detect the dysfunctions related to the enterprise management. This system allows the acquisition of knowledge based on textual data (given in French) related to the diagnosis, the matching and the assignment of witness sentences to the key ideas that correspond to them. SADIM can also serve as a part of a decision aid system as it includes carrying out diagnosis which can helps experts and socio-economic management consultants to take decisions that would make enterprises reach the required standards through council interventions.
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Area 3 - Information Systems Analysis and Specification

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 6
Title:

KEY-PROBLEM AND GOAL DRIVEN REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING - Which Complementarities for Manufacturing Information Systems?
Authors:

Virginie Goepp and François Kiefer
Abstract: The development of manufacturing information systems involves various stakeholders, who are not specialists for information systems. Therefore the stakes of the methods for such projects are to provide models which are understandable for all people involved, and conceptual enough to support the alignment between business, information system and manufacturing strategies of the company. The use of problem based models, stemmed from dialectical approaches, is efficient for the understand ability and a coarse strategic analysis, but it is limited through the project size. At the opposite, goal driven requirements engineering approaches enable to tackle large projects and detailed strategic analysis, but they are limited because of the difficulty to deal with the fuzzy concept of a goal. So, it would be interesting to gain from these two approaches. This paper first presents a problem driven approach for manufacturing information systems. It consists in a key-problem framework and a set of steps to exploit it. The assumption made is to base requirement elicitation on the problems encountered by the stakeholders. Then its matching with goal driven requirements engineering is shown and the complementarities between these two approaches are drawn and further discussed.
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Paper Nr: 49
Title:

TOWARDS A CONTEXTUAL MODEL-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT APPROACH FOR WEB SERVICES
Authors:

Zakaria Maamar, Karim Baina, Djamal Benslimane, Nanjangud Narendra and Mehdi Chelbabi
Abstract: This paper discusses how we develop and apply a contextual model-driven approach to Web services. A Web service is defined using WSDL, posted on an UDDI registry, and invoked through a SOAP request. To deploy adaptable Web services, we consider the environment in which these Web services operate. This environment’s features exist in a structure, which we refer to as context. By adopting a contextual model-driven approach, we aim at developing contextual specifications of Web services. To this end ContextUML, an extension of UML through UMLProfile, permits developing these contextual specifications.
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Paper Nr: 57
Title:

SUPPORTING METHODS OF GENERATING ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS FROM A NORMAL SCENARIO
Authors:

Atsushi Ohnishi
Abstract: A generation method of alternative scenarios using a normal scenario written with the scenario language SLAF is proposed. This method includes (1) generation of alternative plans and (2) generation of alternative scenario by a user’s selection of these plans. Our method enables to lessen the omission of the possible alternative scenarios in the early stages of development and contributes to improve the correctness and effectiveness of the software development.
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Paper Nr: 63
Title:

A FEATURE COMPUTATION TREE MODEL TO SPECIFY REQUIREMENTS AND REUSE
Authors:

E. E. Roubtsova and Serguei Roubtsov
Abstract: A large subset of requirements for complex systems, services and product lines is traditionally specified by hierarchical structures of features. Features are usually gathered and represented in the form of a feature tree. The feature tree is a structural model. It represents mainly composition and specialization relations between features and does not provide the possibility to specify requirements in the form of ordering relations defined on functional features. Use case scenarios are usually employed for specification of the ordering relations. However, use case scenarios comprise isolated sequences of features, and therefore they may be inconsistent and even may contradict each other and the feature tree. Moreover, some use case scenarios defining relations on features may be incomplete. In order to support consistent specification of requirements, we suggest using a pair of related models: a feature tree model and a feature computation tree model. The pair of such related feature tree models provides the basis for the method of consistency checks of requirements. It introduces a united view on the system’s behavior at the stage of requirement specification and facilitates specification of forbidden sequences and construction complete sequences from incomplete ones. It allows designers to precisely specify the desired reuse and to find that a certain sort of reuse is not possible. Understanding already at the stage of requirements engineering that a subsystem cannot be reused without modification saves effort and money spent on development. The proposed method and models are explained using a case study of design of a system for electronic cards production.
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Paper Nr: 97
Title:

MEDIS – A WEB BASED HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEM - Implementing Integrated Secure Electronic Health Record
Authors:

Snezana Sucurovic
Abstract: In many countries there are initiatives for building an integrated patient-centric electronic health record. There are also initiatives for transnational integrations. These growing demands for integration result from the fact that it can provide improving healthcare treatments and reducing the cost of healthcare services. While in European highly developed countries computerisation in healthcare sector begun in the 70’s and reached a high level, some developing countries, and Serbia and Montenegro among them, have started computerisation recently. This is why MEDIS (MEDical Information System) is aimed at integration itself from the very beginning instead of integration of heterogeneous information systems on a middle layer or using HL7 protocol. MEDIS has been implemented as a federated system where the central server hosts basic EHCR information about a patient, and clinical servers contain their own part of patients’ EHCR. Clinical servers are connected to a central server through the Internet and the system can be accessed through a browser from a place that has an Internet connection. A user also has to have a public key certificate to be able to login. As health data are highly sensible, MEDIS implements solutions from recent years, such as Public Key Infrastructure and Privilege Management Infrastructure, SSL and Web Service security as well as pluggable, XML based access control policies.
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Paper Nr: 101
Title:

FLEXIBLE REALIZATION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES USING EXISTING SERVICES
Authors:

Jelena Zdravkovic and Martin Henkel
Abstract: When realizing executable business process models, in most situations process specifications collide with specific properties of existing services. In this paper we propose an approach for relaxation of the business process specification to enable flexible integration between the process and existing services. The approach is based on the notion of visibility, which allows a categorized relaxation of the process specification by not requiring every process state to be distinguished after the process is realised with existing services. The categories of visibility presented in this paper are applied by indicating flexible elements in the process design phase. The presented approach stimulates the alignment between business processes and existing services, facilitating a larger scale of transparent process realisations.
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Paper Nr: 104
Title:

FLEXIBLE COMPLETION OF WORKFLOW ACTIVITIES
Authors:

Georg Peters and Roger Tagg
Abstract: Over the last twenty years business process management has become a central approach to maintaining the competitiveness of companies. However the automation of the business processes utilizing workflow systems have often led to over-structured solutions that lack of the flexibility inherent in the underlying business model. Therefore there is a need to develop flexible workflow management systems that easily and quickly adapt to dynamically changing business models and processes. Lin and Orlowska (2005) introduced partly complete-able activities as one way to make workflow systems more flexible. In our paper, we extend the concept of partly complete-able activities by recognizing separate probability and fuzzy dimensions and by introducing process memory.
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Paper Nr: 122
Title:

ONTOLOGY CONSTRUCTION IN AN ENTERPRISE CONTEXT: COMPARING AND EVALUATING TWO APPROACHES
Authors:

Eva Blomqvist, Annika Öhgren and Kurt Sandkuhl
Abstract: Structuring enterprise information and supporting knowledge management is a growing application field for enterprise ontologies. Research work presented in this paper focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies. In an experiment, two methods were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is based on automatic ontology construction, the other method is a manual approach based on cookbook-like instructions. The paper compares and evaluates the methods and their results. For ontology evaluation, selected approaches were combined including both evaluation by ontology engineers and evaluation by domain experts. The main conclusion is that the compared methods have different strengths and an integration of both developed ontologies and used methods should be investigated.
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Paper Nr: 137
Title:

THE CONCEPT OF ETHICS IN ELECTRONIC QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Authors:

Nouhad Rizk and Elias Choueiri
Abstract: As a key form of communications technology, the internet has created new methodological approaches for social science research. This study focuses on moral issues created by information technology for qualitative research environments. The primary concern is with ethical analysis and legal issues and how both are applied to, although not limited to, issues of privacy, intellectual property, information access, interpersonal communication, moral and civil rights, responsibility and liability, and professional codes as well as some social implications of technology. The Internet is now exposed to a growing number and a wider variety of threats and vulnerabilities. Moreover, Internet-based research raises several ethical questions and introduces new ethical challenges, especially pertaining to privacy, informed consent and confidentiality and anonymity. This study aims to highlight the main ethical issues in electronic qualitative research and to provide some guidance for those doing or reviewing such research. While recognizing the reservations held about strict ethical guidelines for electronic qualitative research, this study opens the door for further debate of these issues so that the social science research community can move towards the adoption of agreed standards of good practice. In addition, it suggests that empirical research is desirable in order to quantify the actual risks to participants in electronic qualitative studies.
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Paper Nr: 350
Title:

SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN IN A LARGE-SCALE SOFTWARE PROJECT: THE CASE OF TRANSITION TO AGILE DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Yael Dubinsky, Orit Hazzan, David Talby and Arie Keren
Abstract: Agile software development methods mainly aim at increasing software quality by fostering customer collaboration and performing exhaustive testing. The introduction of Extreme Programming (XP) – the most common agile software development method – into an organization is accompanied with conceptual an organizational changes. These changes range from daily-life changes (e.g., sitting together and maintaining an informative project environment) and continue with changes on the management level (e.g., meeting and listening to the customer during the whole process and the concept of the whole team which means that all role holders are part of the team). This paper examines the process of transition to an agile development process in a large-scale software project in the Israeli Air Force as it is perceived from the system analysis and design perspective. Specifically, the project specifications of the agile team are compared with those of a team who continues working according to the previous heavyweight method during the first half year of transition. Size and complexity measures are used as the basis of the comparison. In addition to the inspection of the specifications, the change in the role of the system analysts, as the system analysts conceive of it, is examined.
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Paper Nr: 404
Title:

A PRODUCT ORIENTED MODELLING CONCEPT - Holons for Systems Synchronisation and Interoperability
Authors:

Salah Baïna, Hervé Panetto and Khalid Benali
Abstract: Nowadays, enterprises are confronted to growing needs for traceability, product genealogy and product life cycle management. To meet those needs, the enterprise and applications in the enterprise environment have to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material and that are managed in shop floor level. Nevertheless, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing information systems (informational view). This paper presents the “Holon” modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. Afterwards, we show how the concept of holon can play a major role in ensuring interoperability in the enterprise context.
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Paper Nr: 451
Title:

INCREASING THE VALUE OF PROCESS MODELLING
Authors:

John Krogstie, Vibeke Dalberg and Siri M. Jensen
Abstract: This paper presents an approach to increase the value gained from enterprise modelling activities in an organisation, both on a project and on an organisational level. The main objective of the approach is to facilitate awareness of, communication about, and coordination of modelling initiatives between stakeholders and within and across projects, over time. The first version of the approach as a normative process model is presented and discussed in the context of case projects and activities, and we conclude that although work remains both on sophistication of the approach and on validation of its general applicability and value, our results so far show that it addresses recognised challenges in a useful way.
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Paper Nr: 473
Title:

A GENERATOR FRAMEWORK FOR DOMAIN-SPECIFIC MODEL TRANSFORMATION LANGUAGES
Authors:

Thomas Reiter, Elisabeth Kapsammer, Werner Retschitzegger, Wieland Schwinger and Markus Stumptner
Abstract: Domain specific languages play an important role in model driven development, as they allow to model a system using modeling constructs carrying implicit semantics specific to a domain. Consequently, possibly many reusable, domain specific languages will emerge. Thereby, certain application areas, such as business process engineering, can be jointly covered by a number of conceptually related DSLs, that are similar in a sense of sharing semantically equal concepts. Although, a crucial role in being able to use, manage and integrate all these DSLs comes to model transformation languages with QVT as one of their most prominent representatives, existing approaches have not aimed at reaping benefit of these semantically overlapping DSLs in terms of providing abstraction mechanisms for shared concepts. Therefore, as opposed to a general-purpose model transformation language sought after with the QVT-RFP, this work discusses the possibility of employing domain-specific model transformation languages. These are specifically tailored for defining transformations between metamodels sharing certain characteristics. In this context, the paper introduces a basic framework which allows generating the necessary tools to define and execute transformations written in such a domain-specific transformation language. To illustrate the approach, an example language will be introduced and its realization within the framework is shown.
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Paper Nr: 503
Title:

REFINEMENT OF SDBC BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS USING ISDL
Authors:

Boris Shishkov and Dick Quartel
Abstract: Aiming at aligning business process modeling and software specification, the SDBC approach considers a multi-viewpoint modeling where static, dynamic, and data business process aspect models have to be mapped adequately to corresponding static, dynamic, and data software specification aspect models. Next to that, the approach considers also a business process modeling viewpoint which concerns real-life communication and coordination issues, such as meanings, intentions, negotiations, commitments, and obligations. Hence, in order to adequately align communication and dynamic aspect models, SDBC should use at least two modeling techniques. However, the transformation between two techniques unnecessarily complicates the modeling process. Next to that, different techniques use different modeling formalisms whose reflection sometimes causes limitations. For this reason, we explore in the current paper the value which the (modeling) language ISDL could bring to SDBC in the alignment of communication and behavioral (dynamic) business process aspect models; ISDL can usefully refine dynamic process models. Thus, it is feasible to expect that ISDL can complement the SDBC approach, allowing refinement of dynamic business process aspect models, by adding communication and coordination actions. Furthermore, SDBC could benefit from ISDL-related methods assessing whether a realized refinement conforms to the original process model. Our studies in the paper are supported by an illustrative example.
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Paper Nr: 534
Title:

METHODOLOGY TO SUPPORT SEMANTIC RESOURCES INTEGRATION IN THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR
Authors:

Simona Barresi, Yacine Rezgui, Farid Meziane and Celson Lima
Abstract: Ontologies, taxonomies, and other semantic resources, are used in a variety of sectors to facilitate knowledge reuse and information exchange between people and applications. In recent years, the need to access multiple semantic resources has led to the development of a variety of projects and tools aiming at integrating existing resources. This paper describes the methodology used during the FUNSIEC project, to develop an open infrastructure for the European Construction sector (OSIECS). This infrastructure aims towards facilitating integration among Construction related semantic resources, providing a base for the development of a new generation of e-services for the domain.
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Paper Nr: 547
Title:

BUSINESS PROCESSES: BEHAVIOR PREDICTION AND CAPTURING REASONS FOR EVOLUTION
Authors:

Sharmila Subramaniam, Vana Kalogeraki and Dimitrios Gunopulos
Abstract: Workflow systems are being used by business enterprises to improve the efficiency of their internal processes and enhance the services provided to their customers. Workflow models are the fundamental components of Workflow Management Systems used to define ordering, scheduling and other components of workflow tasks.Companies increasingly follow flexible workflow models in order to adapt to changes in business logic, making it more challenging to predict resource demands. In such a scenario, knowledge of what lies ahead i.e., the set of tasks that are going to be executed in the future, assists the process administration to take decisions pertaining to process management in advance. In this work, we propose a method to predict possible paths of a running instance For instances that deviate from the workflow model graph, we propose methods to determine the characteristics of the changes using classification rules.
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Paper Nr: 555
Title:

SUPPORTING AUTHENTICATION REQUIREMENTS IN WORKFLOWS
Authors:

Ricardo Martinho, Dulce Domingos and António Rito-silva
Abstract: Workflow technology represents nowadays significant added value to organizations that use information systems to support their business processes. By their nature, workflows support the integration of different information systems. As organizations use workflows increasingly, workflows manipulate more valuable and sensitive data. Either by interoperability issues or by the value of data manipulated, a workflow may present several and distinct authentication requirements. Typically, information systems deal with their authentication requirements once, within their authentication process. This strategy cannot be easily applied to workflows since each workflow activity may present its own authentication requirements. In this paper we identify authentication requirements that workflows present and we propose to meet these requirements by incorporating authentication constraints into workflow authorization definitions. With this purpose, we extend a generic Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model and we define an access control algorithm that supports and enforces authorization decisions constrained by authentication information.
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Paper Nr: 656
Title:

BRIDGING THE LANGUAGE-ACTION PERSPECTIVE AND ORGANIZATIONAL SEMIOTICS IN SDBC
Authors:

Boris Shishkov, Jan G. Dietz and Kecheng Liu
Abstract: Achieving an adequate business-software alignment should include capturing essential aspects that concern the studied business reality as well as reflecting them in the software specification. This concerns semantic and pragmatic aspects, such as meanings, intentions, negotiations, commitments, and obligations, whose appropriate consideration is beyond the capabilities of current software design methods which focus just on formal language structures and data records. Organizational Semiotics allows for an adequate consideration of essential semantic aspects in conducting a business process modeling. The Language-Action Perspective is capable of grasping pragmatics on top of that. Some examples of combining LAP and OS have demonstrated benefits when conducting business process modeling, for the purpose of further specification of software. To further this work, it is necessary that LAP and OS are incorporated in a modeling framework which integrates business process modeling and software specification. The SDBC approach applies the LAP and OS theories, in order to address the business-software alignment challenge. They support the business process modeling in SDBC, which results in the identification of re-usable business process models and their mapping to software specification, in consistency with the current software design standards. Thus, it is feasible to expect that a LAP-OS combination could bring value to the current application development, in the context of the approach SDBC. In this paper, we further elaborate our SDBC-driven views on how LAP and OS can be combined for a sound business process modeling which builds a foundation for software specification.
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Paper Nr: 664
Title:

INTEROPERABLITY REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION, VALIDATION AND SOLUTIONS MODELLING
Authors:

Sobah A. Petersen, Frank Lillehagen and Maria Anastasiou
Abstract: This paper describes a methodology and a model-based approach for supporting the requirements elicitation and validation work in the ATHENA project. Numerous interoperability requirements have been gathered by four industrial partners and these requirements are validated against interoperability issues. The process of obtaining requirements from industrial users and developing solutions for them involves several communities such as the users, stakeholders and developers. A model-based methodology and approach are proposed to support the analysis of the requirements and for incorporating the different perspectives and views that are desired by everyone. An example from the telecommunications sector is used to illustrate the methodology and a matrix-based validation approach is supported using a model developed in the Metis modelling environment.
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Paper Nr: 699
Title:

CONFIGURING REFERENCE MODELS - An Integrated Approach for Transaction Processing and Decision Support
Authors:

Ralf Knackstedt, Christian Janiesch and Tobias Rieke
Abstract: Reference models are of normative, universal nature and provide a solution schema for specific problems by depicting best or common-practice approaches. The configuration of these reference models has been a field of research in the past. However, the integrative configuration of different reference models or respectively reference models serving multiple purposes lacks of applicable methods. In practice this is a common problem as the simultaneous implementation of an enterprise resource planning system and a management information system shows. We provide a method that allows the integrative configuration of conceptual models for transaction processing and decision support by integrating meta models for modeling languages. In addition, we exemplarily show its application to extend an existing reference model.
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Paper Nr: 704
Title:

A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR THE SUPPORT OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES
Authors:

Arnaud Lewandowski and Gregory Bourguin
Abstract: Software development is a cooperative activity, since it implies many actors. We focus on CSCW integrated global environments. Many studies have already shown, for a long time, that a ‘good’ cooperative environment should be able to take into account the users’ emergent needs, and should be adaptable. Of course, such properties should also be found in environments supporting software development. However, our study of some existing platforms points out their lacks in terms of tailorability and cooperative support. Eclipse is one of these broadly used platforms. But even if it presents some shortcomings, its underlying framework offers some features particularly interesting for our purpose. Upon results previously obtained in the CSCW field, we propose to extend the Eclipse platform, in order to offer a new support for software development by creating a cooperative context for the activities supported in Eclipse by each integrated plug-in.
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Paper Nr: 704
Title:

A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR THE SUPPORT OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES
Authors:

Arnaud Lewandowski and Gregory Bourguin
Abstract: Software development is a cooperative activity, since it implies many actors. We focus on CSCW integrated global environments. Many studies have already shown, for a long time, that a ‘good’ cooperative environment should be able to take into account the users’ emergent needs, and should be adaptable. Of course, such properties should also be found in environments supporting software development. However, our study of some existing platforms points out their lacks in terms of tailorability and cooperative support. Eclipse is one of these broadly used platforms. But even if it presents some shortcomings, its underlying framework offers some features particularly interesting for our purpose. Upon results previously obtained in the CSCW field, we propose to extend the Eclipse platform, in order to offer a new support for software development by creating a cooperative context for the activities supported in Eclipse by each integrated plug-in.
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Paper Nr: 719
Title:

DOMAIN MODELING WITH OBJECT-PROCESS METHODOLOGY
Authors:

Arnon Sturm, Dov Dori and Onn Shehory
Abstract: Domain engineering can simplify the development of software systems in specific domains. During domain analysis, the first step of domain engineering, the domain is modeled at an abstract level providing guidelines for application modeling within that domain. Most domain analysis approaches suffer from low accessibility and limited expressiveness. In this paper we utilize the application-based domain modelling (ADOM) approach and apply it to the Object-Process Methodology (OPM) modelling language. We do that by extending Object-Process Methodology (OPM) to support domain analysis. We also performed an experiment to verify that the proposed extension improves the model quality compared to quality arrived at without the extension. Our experimental results show that, when presented with a set of requirements, subjects that used OPM with the domain analysis extension arrived at a system model which is ten percents better than the system model arrived at by subjects that used OPM alone in terms of model correctness.
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Paper Nr: 721
Title:

EB3TG: A TOOL SYNTHESIZING RELATIONAL DATABASE TRANSACTIONS FROM EB3 ATTRIBUTE DEFINITIONS
Authors:

Frederic Gervais, Panawé Batanado, Marc Frappier and Regine Laleau
Abstract: EB3 is a formal language for specifying information systems (IS). In EB3, the sequences of events accepted by the system are described with a process algebra; they represent the valid traces of the IS. Entity type and association attributes are computed by means of recursive functions defined on the valid traces of the system. In this paper, we present EB3TG, a tool that synthesizes Java programs that execute relational database transactions which correspond to EB3 attribute definitions.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 53
Title:

STRUCTURED APPROACH FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF INFORMATION SERVICES INTO THE PRIVATE SOCIAL SOLIDARITY INSTITUTIONS
Authors:

Alexandra Queirós and Nelson Rocha
Abstract: The paper presents an overview of a Reference Information Model for the introduction of information services into the social solidarity institutions. The model is based on a complete description of the different institutional process, from a high level to a deep detail perspective, and was used for the implementation of a Client Management Information Service for Private Social Solidarity Institutions.
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Paper Nr: 54
Title:

A PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE WITH NDT - The System to Measure the Grade of Handicap
Authors:

María José Escalona Cuaresma, Dario Villadiego, Javier Jesus Gutierrez, Jesus Torres and Manuel Mejias
Abstract: The necessity of applying technological advances in the medicine environment is an unquestionable fact. In the last years, important applications of new technologies in medical systems to help doctors or to make easier the evaluation, the treatment or, even, the relation between the doctor and the patient have been presented. However, there is sometimes an important gap in the development of these new systems. The specific and complex features of the medical environment often complicate the communication between doctors, when they require a new system, and experts in computer science. This work introduces a methodological proposal to specify and analyze software systems. Its main goal is to make easier the communication between final users and customers and the development team. The report presents our own practical experience by the application of this methodology in a real system to measure the grade of handicap in patients following laws in Spain.
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Paper Nr: 64
Title:

A FORMAL ARCHITECTURE-CENTRIC MODEL-DRIVEN APPROACH FOR THE AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF GRID APPLICATIONS
Authors:

David Manset, Hervé Verjus, Richard McClatchey and Flavio Oquendo
Abstract: This paper discusses the concept of model-driven software engineering applied to the Grid application domain. As an extension to this concept, the approach described here, attempts to combine both formal architecture-centric and model-driven paradigms. It is a commonly recognized statement that Grid systems have seldom been designed using formal techniques although from past experience such techniques have shown advantages. This paper advocates a formal engineering approach to Grid system developments in an effort to contribute to the rigorous development of Grids software architectures. This approach addresses quality of service and cross-platform developments by applying the model-driven paradigm to a formal architecture-centric engineering method. This combination benefits from a formal semantic description power in addition to model-based transformations. The result of such a novel combined concept promotes the re-use of design models and facilitates developments in Grid computing.
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Paper Nr: 103
Title:

REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION FOR DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: A DATA QUALITY APPROACH
Authors:

Alejandro Vaisman
Abstract: Today, information and timely decisions are crucial for an organization’s success. A Decision Support System is a software tool that provides information allowing its users to take decisions timely and cost-effectively. This is highly conditioned by the quality of the data involved. In this paper we show that conventional techniques for requirement elicitation cannot be used in Decision Support Systems, and propose DSS-METRIQ, a methodology aimed at providing a single data quality-based procedure for complete and consistent elicitation of functional (queries) and non functional (data quality) requirements. In addition, we present a method based on QFD (Quality Function Deployment), that, using the information collected during requirements elicitation, ranks the operational data sources from which data is obtained, according to their degree of satisfaction of user information requirements.
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Paper Nr: 115
Title:

MANAGING THE KNOWLEDGE NEEDED TO SUPPORT AN ELECTRONIC PERSONAL ASSISTANT - An End-User Friendly Graphical Ontology Editing Tool
Authors:

Matthias Einig, Roger Tagg and Georg Peters
Abstract: Today’s administrative worker has to handle huge amounts of data of different types, from many different sources and using multiple software tools. The effort in organizing and retrieving this data is often disproportionate to the actual benefit gained. Ontology-based categorization of knowledge has been advocated to provide a common infrastructure to the tools. However, most current software for building and maintaining ontologies is too complicated for the average end-user. This paper describes a prototype ontology editor application that aims to provide a more easily understandable and usable interface.
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Paper Nr: 129
Title:

TOWARDS PRACTICAL TOOLS FOR MINING ABSTRACTIONS IN UML MODELS
Authors:

Michel Dao, Marianne Huchard, M. R. Hacène, C. Roume and P. Valtchev
Abstract: We present an experiment in applying an extension of Formal Concept Analysis to UML class model restructuring. The Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) mines potentially useful abstractions from UML classes, attributes, operations and associations and therefore outscores competing restructuring techniques which usually focus exclusively on classes. Nevertheless, the complexity and the size of the RCA output require interactive tools to assist the human designers in comprehending the corresponding class model. We discuss the benefits of using RCA-based techniques in the light of an initial set of tools that were devised to ease the navigation and the visual analysis of the results of the restructuring process.
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Paper Nr: 132
Title:

VALIDATION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS USING PETRI NETS
Authors:

Asghar Bokhari and Skip Poehlman
Abstract: Enterprise information systems are complex software that are frequently required to adapt to rapid changes in business environments. Although there have been some successes, the research literature is full of horror stories due to failure of these systems. Current software engineering practice requires verification/validation of complex systems at the design stage. Unified Modeling Language (UML), which lacks formal semantics, is the defacto standard for designing the majority of information systems and that means dynamic analysis techniques cannot be used for validation of UML models. Consequently there has been a considerable interest among researchers in formalization of UML models. Early proposals translate UML state diagrams into some kind of mathematical language and input this textual description to a model checker. In this paper we present a rule-based technique to convert UML state diagrams to Object Coloured Petri (OCP) nets. A strong mathematical foundation, more amenable to verification and validation procedures, along with a graphical representation, makes Petri nets ideally suitable for dynamic analysis of UML modelled information systems.
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Paper Nr: 133
Title:

A PROJECT MANAGEMENT MODEL TO A DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Lúcia Enami, Tania Tait and Elisa Huzita
Abstract: This article presents a project management model (PMM) to a distributed environment that will be integrated to the DiSEN (Distributed Software Engineering Environment). The model purpose is to supply to the interested ones in the software project management the pertinent information and treat the aspects of the team member’s physical distribution. It was based in PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) and the issues treated by the PMM include cultural differences between the members, distribution of knowledge, a tool to facilitate the communication between members, standardization of documents and motivating people geographically dispersed.
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Paper Nr: 178
Title:

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FRAMEWORK FOR IT/IS BASED ASSET MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Abrar Haider and Andy Koronios
Abstract: Engineering assets managing businesses use a variety of information and communication technologies for process efficiency, control, and management. Nevertheless, key to all these is the effective measurement of the IT/IS utilisation for existing process such that the underperforming areas are highlighted, and corrective actions are taken to achieve optimal use of IS/IT. There are a variety of performance measurement mechanisms available that stimulate improvement efforts, in so doing helping businesses to translate perceived business strategy into action. However, these approaches are mostly aimed at high level evaluation of an organisation’s performance; whereas the stochastic nature and ever expanding scope of asset management processes demands asset managers to have a comprehensive view of asset lifecycle and the interacting business areas. This paper proposes an evaluation framework for IT/IS based asset management in an engineering enterprise. The paper firstly seeks to present a critique of the asset management paradigm. It then discusses available performance measurement mechanisms and develops a case for the constituents of an effective asset management measurement framework that provides detailed indicators for controls actions required to achieve optimal process efficiency through the use of IT/IS. The paper, then, presents an integrated asset performance measurement framework that not only is derived from business strategy, but informs strategy formulation through a closed loop learning encompassing entire asset management lifecycle.
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Paper Nr: 179
Title:

A REUSE-BASED REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION PROCESS
Authors:

Sangim Ahn and Kiwon Chong
Abstract: Establishing good requirements is important in an initial phase of software development not to make over time and cost of projects and low quality of software products. In the context of Requirements Engineering (RE), reuse is effective in particular because it can help to define requirement explicitly and to anticipate requirement change. We propose a reuse-based process approach to elicit potential requirements from various stakeholders. To achieve our goal, we present (1) analyzing gaps between requirements maps of collected and reused in the repository, and (2) potential requirements elicitation process with these maps. The former is composed of classifying styles of requirements, requirements representation formalism, and gap analysis using generic gap types. The latter is sequential procedure to look for potential requirements in addition to Plus Minus Interests(PMI) method. We illustrate our approach through a credit system case study.
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Paper Nr: 337
Title:

DESIGN OF REAL-TIME SYSTEMS BY SYSTEMATIC TRANSFORMATION OF UML/RT MODELS INTO SIMPLE TIMED PROCESS ALGEBRA SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
Authors:

Kawtar Benghazi Akhlaki, Manuel I. Capel-tuñón and Juan A. Holgado Terriza
Abstract: The systematic translation from a UML/RT model into CSP+T specifications, proposed in a previous paper, may give a way to use jointly UML and CSP in a unified, practical and rigorous software development method for real-time systems. We present here a systematic transformation method to derive a correct system specification in terms of CSP+T from a semi-formal system requirement specification (UML-RT), by applying a set of transformation rules which give a formal semantics to the semi-formal analysis entities of UML/RT, and thus open up the possibility of verifying a software system design that also includes real-time constraints. As to show the applicability of the approach, a correct design of a real-time system is obtained by following the process of development proposed here.
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Paper Nr: 347
Title:

USING ASPECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN REAL-TIME EMBEDDED SYSTEMS SOFTWARE - A Review of Scheduling, Resource Allocation and Synchronization
Authors:

Pericles Cheng and George Papadopoulos
Abstract: Timeliness and criticality of a process are the two main concerns when designing real-time systems. In addition to that embedded systems are bounded by limited resources. To achieve these concerns while at the same time using a minimal amount or resources, real-time embedded systems use different techniques such as task scheduling, resource management and task synchronization. These techniques involve a number of the modules of the system which makes the use of Aspect-Oriented Software Development imperative. AOSD is a programming technique which uses the notion of join points to capture specific locations in code execution and then use advices to insert new code. This paper examines existing work in the development of schedulers, resource allocation agents and synchronization techniques using Aspect-Oriented Software Development in real-time embedded systems. An analysis of the existing research is used to describe the advantages of using AOSD over conventional OOP methods and to identify areas where further research may be required.
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Paper Nr: 359
Title:

BUSINESS PROCESS VISUALIZATION – USE CASES, CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS
Authors:

Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Ralph Bobrik, Manfred Reichert and Thomas Bauer
Abstract: The proper visualization and monitoring of their (ongoing) business processes is crucial for any enterprise. Thus a broad spectrum of processes has to be visualized ranging from simple, short–running processes to complex long–running ones (consisting of up to hundreds of activities). In any case, users shall be able to quickly understand the logic behind a process and to get a quick overview of related tasks. One practical problem arises when different fragments of a business process are scattered over several systems where they are often modeled using different process meta models (e.g., High–Level Petri Nets). The challenge is to find an integrated and user–friendly visualization for these business processes. In this paper we discover use cases relevant in this context. Since existing graph layout approaches have focused on general graph drawing so far we further develop a specific approach for layouting business process graphs. The work presented in this paper is embedded within a larger project (Proviado) on the visualization of automotive processes.
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Paper Nr: 378
Title:

ON IMPLEMENTING INTEROPERABLE AND FLEXIBLE SOFTWARE EVOLUTION ACTIVITIES
Authors:

Mourad Bouneffa, Henri Basson and Yahya Maweed
Abstract: In this paper we present an approach for assistance at software evolution based on an integrated model of representation of the various software artifacts. This model founded on the typed and attributed graphs as well as a representation of these graphs using GXL (eXtensible Graph Language) a language for structuring hyperdocuments. The hyperdocuments GXL are used to facilitate the interoperability between tools intended to represent and handle various aspects of the software evolution. We also use the graph rewriting systems for a simple and flexible implementation of mechanisms required for reasoning by software evolution management. Our approach has been applied to several applications; it is illustrated here on change impact management of applications developed according to multi-tiered architecture Java J2EE and the architecture recovery of these applications.
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Paper Nr: 417
Title:

METHOD FOR USER ORIENTED MODELLING OF DATA WAREHOUSE SYSTEMS
Authors:

Lars Burmester and Matthias Goeken
Abstract: The paper describes a method for data warehouse development. One critical success factor of data warehouse development is determining information requirements. Hence, the method focuses on gathering of requirements and information needs of the users first. An extended data warehouse architecture and a technique for decomposition of the system serve as a developing framework. On the one hand this framework is used to define releases (builds) of the system, which is indispensable for an incremental development process. On the other hand it defines intermediate and final work products (artifacts) that are produced and used during further development stages. Starting with information requirements elicitation, each increment is realized through a series of data models which successively are transformed from conceptual to logical level. These logical data models are then used for implementation as well as for the modelling of ETL processes.
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Paper Nr: 419
Title:

CPN BASED COMPONENT ADAPTATION
Authors:

Yoshiyuki Shinkawa
Abstract: One of the major activities in component based software development is to identify the adaptable components to the given requirements. We usually compare requirement specifications with the component specifications, in order to evaluate the equality between them. However, there could be several differences between those specifications, e.g. granularity, expression forms, viewpoints, or the level of detail, which make the component evaluation difficult. In addition, recent object oriented approaches require many kinds of models to express software functionality, which make the comparison of the specification complicated. For rigorous component evaluation, it is desirable to use concise and simple expression forms of specifications, which can be used commonly between requirements and components. This paper presents a formal evaluation technique for component adaptation. In order to relieve the granularity difference, the concept of a virtual component is introduced, which is the reusable unit of this approach. A virtual component is a set of components that can acts as single component. In order to express requirements and components commonly and rigorously, algebraic specification and Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) are used. Algebraic specification provides the theoretical foundation of this technique, while CPNs help us to use it intuitively.
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Paper Nr: 446
Title:

A SOA-BASED SYSTEM INTERFACE CONTROL FOR E-GOVERNMENT
Authors:

Namho Yoo and Hyeong-Ah Choi
Abstract: In this paper, a SOA-based system approach is presented for system interface control in sustained systems. Once a system is completed developed, it goes into a sustained phase supported by many interfaces. As new technologies develop, updating and maintaining such systems require non-trivial efforts. A clear pre-requisite before the deployment of a new system is to clarify the influence of changes on other systems connected through interfaces. However, as each sustained system manages its own information separately, integrating relevant information among the interfaced systems is a major hurdle to build SOA in E-Gov. Therefore, the XML technology is applied to support system interface control toward SOA using step-by-step approach in E-Government. In particular, I focus on messaging interface issues in Health Level Seven typically used in medical information system and propose SOA framework cube and a scheme to represent message information that can be used for the decision support of interface impact between sustained systems.
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Paper Nr: 449
Title:

APPLYING SOFTWARE FACTORIES TO PERVASIVE SYSTEMS: A PLATFORM SPECIFIC FRAMEWORK
Authors:

Javier Muñoz and Vicente Pelechano
Abstract: The raise of the number and complexity of pervasive systems is a fact. This kind of systems involves the integration of physical devices and software components in order to provide services to the inhabitants of an environment. Current techniques for developing pervasive systems provide low-level abstraction primitives which makes difficult the construction of large systems. Software Factories and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) are two important trends in the software engineering field that can provide sensible benefits in the development of pervasive systems. In this paper, we present an approach for building a Software Factory for pervasive systems, focusing in the definition of a product line for this kind of systems. We introduce a software architecture for pervasive systems, which is supported by a software framework implemented using the OSGi technology. Then, we integrate the framework into the MDA standard defining the framework metamodel and providing tool support for the automatic code generation.
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Paper Nr: 482
Title:

A FORMAL APPROACH TO DETECTING SHILLING BEHAVIORS IN CONCURRENT ONLINE AUCTIONS
Authors:

Yi-Tsung Cheng and Haiping Xu
Abstract: Shilling behaviors are one of the most serious fraud problems in online auctions, which make winning bidders have to pay more than what they should pay for auctioned items. In concurrent online auctions, where multiple auctions for the same type of items are running simultaneously, shilling behaviors can be even more severe because detecting, predicting and preventing such fraudulent behaviors become very difficult. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to detecting shilling behaviors in concurrent online auctions using model checking techniques. We first develop a model template that represents two concurrent online auctions in Promela. Based on the model template, we derive an auction model that simulates the bidding processes of two concurrent auctions. Then we use the SPIN model checker to formally verify if the auction model satisfies any questionable behavioral properties that are written in LTL (Linear Temporal Logic) formulas. Thus, our approach simplifies the problem of searching for shilling behaviors in concurrent online auctions into a model checking problem. Finally, we provide a case study to illustrate how our approach can effectively detect possible shill bidders.
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Paper Nr: 502
Title:

METHODOLOGICAL GUIDELINES FOR SQA IN DEVELOPMENT PROCESS - An Approach Based on the SPICE Model
Authors:

Anna Grimán, María A. Perez and Luis E. Mendoza
Abstract: As far as international standards for promoting Software Process Quality are concerned, one of the most popular and accepted is ISO 15504 (or SPICE model). On the other hand, since a development methodology must guide the main activities in software development, it is necessary that this one fulfils some Quality Base Practices to guarantee a high-level product. The purpose of this research is analyzing a set of five methodologies widely used by developers, to identify its adjustment with respect to the aforementioned standard. This analysis allowed us: (1) determining the degree of alignment of these methodologies with respect to the SPICE model, and (2) proposing a synthesis of methodological guidelines, based on the best practices obtained from these methodologies, that supports the characteristics contained in the studied standard.
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Paper Nr: 505
Title:

VISUAL CONTRACTS - A Way to Reason About States and Cardinalities in IT System Specifications
Authors:

José De La Cruz, Lam-son Lê and Alain Wegmann
Abstract: Visual modeling languages propose specialized diagrams to represent behaviour and concepts necessary to specify IT systems. As a result, to understand a specification, the modeller needs to analyze these two types of diagrams and, often, additional statements that make explicit the relationships between them. In this paper, we define a visual contract notation that integrates behaviour and concepts. Thanks to this notation, the modeler can specify, within one diagram, an action and its effects on the specified IT system. The notation semantics is illustrated by a mapping to Alloy, a light weight formal language.
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Paper Nr: 527
Title:

AN ONTOLOGY FOR ARCHITECTURAL EVALUATION - Case Study: Collaboration Systems
Authors:

Anna Grimán, María A. Perez, José Garrido and María L. Rodríguez Almendros
Abstract: Barbacci et al. (1995) state that the development of systematic ways to relate the quality attributes of a system to its architecture, it constitutes the basis for making objective decisions on design agreements, and helps engineers do reasonably accurate predictions as to the system attributes, free of prejudice and nontrivial assumptions. The aim is being able to evaluate architecture quantitatively to reach agreements among multiple quality attributes and thus globally attain a better system. However, the elements required to incorporate this evaluation into different types of development models, are not clear. This paper proposes an ontology to conceptualize the issues inherent to architectural evaluation within a development process, which will help identify the scope of the evaluation, as well as the issues to be guaranteed to achieve effectiveness within different development processes, both agile and rigorous. The main conclusion of the research allowed us to identify the interaction elements between the development process and an architectural evaluation method, establishing the starting and end points as well as the inputs required for the incorporation into different kinds of processes. This interaction was validated through a case study, a Collaboration Systems Development Methodology.
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Paper Nr: 585
Title:

TECHNOLOGY FOR LEAST-COST NETWORK ROUTING VIA BLUETOOTH AND ITS PRACTICAL APPLICATION - Replacing Internet Access Through Wireless Phone Networks by BT Data Links
Authors:

Hans Weghorn
Abstract: Today, mobile devices are equipped with a variety of wireless communication interfaces. While initially small handheld devices only could use cellular telephony networks for establishing data communication such as Internet downloads, nowadays data contents can be retrieved additionally through communication standards like wireless LAN or Bluetooth. For the latter there exists a variety of technical and scientific papers that discuss how Bluetooth communication can be established in principle – especially between two mobile devices. On the other hand, a description of how data communication between a mobile device and a desktop computer can be implemented is not found in detail. Furthermore, the restrictions of Bluetooth communication like extended search times are not discussed in these qualitative articles. In a technical description here, it shall be displayed how to establish with a minimal effort a streaming data link between handheld devices and integral computer systems in terms of a software implementation recipe. On base of concrete application samples, it is shown that Bluetooth can be employed to construct location-based information services with least-cost Internet data routing, but also the constraints and efficiency of Bluetooth communication technology are investigated and discussed for the given applications.
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Paper Nr: 589
Title:

MOLDING ARCHITECTURE AND INTEGRITY MECHANISMS EVOLUTION - An Architectural Stability Evaluation Model for Software Systems
Authors:

Octavian P. Rotaru
Abstract: The architectural stability of a software system is a measure of how well it accommodates the evolution of the requirements. The link between integrity mechanisms and application’s architecture starts right from the moment the requirements of the application are defined and evolves together with them. The integrity mechanisms used will evolve when the application’s requirements are modified. Apart from the possible architectural changes required, adding a new requirement to an application can trigger structural changes in the way data integrity is preserved. This paper studies the architectural stability of a system based on an integrity oriented case study and proposes a mathematical model for architectural evaluation of software systems inspired from the perturbations’ theory. The proposed mathematical model can be used to mold the evolution of any software system affected by requirements changes; to find the architectural states of the system for which a given set of requirements is not a trigger (doesn’t provoke an architectural change); and to find the architectural configuration which is optimal for a given set of requirements (evolves as less as possible).
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Paper Nr: 591
Title:

APPLYING AGENT-ORIENTED MODELLING AND PROTOTYPING TO SERVICE-ORIENTED SYSTEMS
Authors:

Aneesh Krishna, Ying Guan and Aditya Ghose
Abstract: A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a form of distributed systems architecture, which is essentially a collection of services. Web services are built in the distributed environment of the Internet, enabling the integration of applications in a web environment. In this paper, we show how agent-oriented conceptual modelling techniques can be used to model service-oriented systems and architectures and how these models can be executed. The resulting executable specification environment permits us to support early rapid prototyping of the service-oriented systems, at varying levels of abstraction.
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Paper Nr: 674
Title:

EVOLUTION MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR MULTI-DIMENSIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Nesrine Yahiaoui, Bruno Traverson and Nicole Levy
Abstract: Information Systems (IS) have become key elements in enterprise activities and are now fully embedded into business units. Productivity gained by this proximity is to be balanced with more strategic requirements against the Information System. In particular, due to the proximity to business layers, adaptability property of IS is more than ever required. The framework we have developed aims to keep synchronized multiple descriptions of the same system in case of evolution. Its foundations are based on RM-ODP viewpoints and meta-modelling technology. A prototype tool to support the framework has been developed as an EMF/Eclipse plug-in.
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Paper Nr: 681
Title:

ARGUMENT-BASED APPROACHES IN PRIORITIZED CONFLICTING SECURITY POLICIES
Authors:

Salem Benferhat and Rania El Baida
Abstract: Information security system is an important problem in many domains. Therefore, it is very important to define security policies to restrict access to pieces of information in order to guarantee security properties, i.e. confidentiality, integrity and availability requirements. The joint handling of confidentiality, integrity and availability properties raises the problem of potential conflicts. The objective of this paper is to propose tools, based on the argumentation reasoning, for handling conflicts in prioritized security policies.
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Paper Nr: 720
Title:

AN XML-BASED LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFICATION AND COMPOSITION OF ASPECTUAL CONCERNS
Authors:

Elisabete Soeiro, Isabel Brito and Ana Moreira
Abstract: Separation of concerns refers to the ability of identifying, encapsulating and manipulating parts of software that are crucial to a particular purpose (Dijkstra, 1976). Traditional software development methods were developed with this principle in mind. However, certain broadly-scoped properties are difficult to modularize and keep separated during the lifecycle, producing tangled representations that are difficult to understand and to evolve. Aspect-oriented software development aims at addressing those crosscutting concerns, known as aspects, by providing means for their systematic identification, separation, representation and composition. This paper focuses on the representation and composition activities, by proposing an XML-based language to specify and compose concerns at the requirements level. An illustration of the proposed approach to an example supported by a tool is presented.
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Paper Nr: 723
Title:

AN ARCHITECTURE-CENTRIC APPROACH FOR MANAGING THE EVOLUTION OF EAI SERVICES-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
Authors:

Frédéric Pourraz, Hervé Verjus and Flavio Oquendo
Abstract: The development of large software applications (like EAI solution) is oriented toward the interoperation of existing software components (like COTS and legacy systems). COTS-based systems are built in ad-hoc manner and it is not possible to reason on them no more it is possible to demonstrate if such systems satisfy important properties like Quality Of Service and Quality Attributes. On the other hand, software architecture domain aims at providing formal languages for the description of software systems allowing checking properties (formal analysis) and to reason about software architecture models. The paper proposes an approach that consists in formalizing, deploying and evolving EAI architectures. For that purpose, the ArchWare environment and engineering languages (especially the ArchWare formal ADL, based on the π-calculus) and accompanied tools are used.
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Paper Nr: 729
Title:

SEMANTIC ALIGNMENT OF BUSINESS PROCESSES
Authors:

Saartje Brockmans, Marc Ehrig, Agnes Koschmider, Andreas Oberweis and Rudi Studer
Abstract: This paper presents a method for semantically aligning business processes. We provide a representation of Petri nets in the ontology language OWL, to semantically enrich the business process models. On top of this, we propose a technique for semantically aligning business processes to support (semi)automatic interconnectivity of business processes. This semantic alignment is improved by a background ontology modeled with a specific UML Profile allowing to visually model it. The different parts of our proposal, which reduces communication efforts and solves interconnectivity problems, are discussed.
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Paper Nr: 736
Title:

BUSINESS RULES ELICITATION IN THE PROCESS OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Olegas Vasilecas and Diana Bugaite
Abstract: The paper considers the problems of events modelling in the process of developing business rule-based information systems and determines their significance. The concepts of a rule and an event are defined at different levels of abstraction (business system, information system and software system). According to the suggested definitions of business event, event in the information system and software event, the abstraction levels of modelling are extended by the rule and event modelling facilities and their propagation into the lower levels of an enterprise system. Since ontology represents the real-world domain knowledge and events as well as business rules, making a specific part of all domain knowledge, it is suggested to use ontology as an extra source to improve elicitation of business rules and events.
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Paper Nr: 743
Title:

iWISE: A FRAMEWORK FOR PROVIDING DISTRIBUTED PROCESS VISIBILITY USING AN EVENT-BASED PROCESS MODELLING APPROACH
Authors:

Claire Costello, Weston Fleming, Owen Molloy, Gerard Lyons and James Duggan
Abstract: Distributed business processes such as supply chain processes execute across heterogeneous systems and company boundaries. This research aims to provide an event-based process model to describe business processes spanning disparate enterprise systems. This model will be generic enough to support processes from multiple industry domains. In addition, this paper introduces the iWISE framework as a light-weight process diagnostic tool. The iWISE architecture uses the process model described to provide business process performance monitoring capabilities.
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Paper Nr: 748
Title:

BUSINESS PROCESS DESIGN BASED ON COMMUNICATION AND INTERACTION
Authors:

Joseph Barjis and Isaac Barjis
Abstract: The easiest way that people describe their roles in an organization or the way that members of an organization make promises and commitments to fulfil a task is through communication and interaction. In such a communication language is used as a tool or facilitator of action when a customer requests a service and the supplier promises to provide such a service. In this paper we introduce a language-action based methodology for designing business processes for the Department of University Housing at Georgia Southern University planning to acquire a new information system for managing, supporting and improving the “process of rooms assignment” to some 4000 students. As stated, the methodology is based on language-action perspective and therefore we have used the business transaction concept for mining atomic business processes. Each business transaction identifies an essential activity and reveals the actors and their roles as an initiator or executor of the transaction. Since the transaction concept is used as a conceptual basis, the methodology is complemented with Petri net graphical notations as a modelling technique.
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Paper Nr: 98
Title:

A VIEWPOINTS MODELING FRAMEWORK BASED ON EPISTEMIC LOGIC
Authors:

Min Jiang and Guoqing Wu
Abstract: The approach of viewpoints-oriented requirement engineering hopes that stakeholders in a complex system should describe it from their own perspectives and then generate a more complete requirement specification. Just because of this characteristic, several stakeholders may describe a same problem. These overlapping requirements are the source of inconsistency. This paper puts forward a requirements modeling framework based on problem-domain and viewpoints. We interpret and reason it with epistemic logic in order to make requirements more structured and help stakeholders formally discover those inconsistent overlapping requirements.
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Paper Nr: 100
Title:

TOWARDS A SUITE OF METRICS FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS IN BPMN
Authors:

Elvira Rolón Aguilar, Francisco Ruiz, Félix García Rubio and Mario Piattini
Abstract: AbstractIn this paper we present a suite of metrics for the evaluation of business process models using BPMN notation. Our proposal is based on the FMESP framework, which was developed in order to integrate the modeling and measurement of software processes. FMESP includes a set of metrics to provide the quantitative basis necessary to know the maintainability of the software process models. This previously existent proposal has been used in this work as the starting point to define a set of metrics for the evaluation of the complexity of business process models defined with BPMN. To achieve this goal, the first step has been to adopt the metrics of FMESP, which can be directly used to measure business process models, and then, new metrics have been defined according to the particular aspects of the business processes and BPMN notation.
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Paper Nr: 111
Title:

A SUPPORTING TOOL TO IDENTIFY BOTH SATISFIED REQUIREMENTS AND TOLERANT THREATS FOR A JAVA MOBILE CODE APPLICATION
Authors:

Haruhiko Kaiya, Kouta Sasaki, Chikanobu Ogawa and Kenji Kaijiri
Abstract: A mobile code application can be easily integrated by using existing software components, thus it is one of the promising ways to develop software efficiently. However, using a mobile code application sometimes follows harmful effects on valuable resources of users because malicious codes in such an application can be activated. Therefore, users of mobile code applications have to identify both benefits and risks by the applications and to decide which benefits should be gotten and which risks should be tolerated. In this paper, we introduce a tool to support such users. By using this tool, the users can identify security related functions embedded in each mobile code automatically. The users can also relate these functions to each benefit or risk. By defining a security policy for mobile codes, some functions are disabled, thus some benefits and risks are also disabled. By adjusting the security policy, the users can make decision about the benefits and the risks.
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Paper Nr: 114
Title:

DIFFERENT STRATEGIES FOR RESOLVING PRICE DISCOUNT COLLISIONS
Authors:

Henrik Stormer
Abstract: Managing Discounts is an essential task for all business applications. Discounts are used for turning prospects to new customers and for customer retention. However, if more than one discount type can be applied, a collision may arise. An example is a promotional discount and a discount for a customer. The system has to decide which discount should be applied, eventually also combinations are possible. A bad collision strategy can lead to annoyed customers as they do not get the price that they think is correct. This paper examines three different business applications designed for small and medium sized companies and shows the applied strategies for resolving discount collisions. Afterwards, a new way of defining discounts, called discount tree (dTree) is introduced. It is shown that with dTrees, collisions can be detected directly when the discounts are defined. A detected collision can then resolved by the administrator.
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Paper Nr: 119
Title:

A SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS PATTERNS SPECIFICATION
Authors:

Ricardo Raminhos, M. Pantoquilho, João Araújo and Ana Moreira
Abstract: Analysis Patterns are indicative analysis solutions for a recurrent problem. Many patterns have been proposed and are successfully used. The writing of a pattern follows a specific structure that can be tailored to each author’s needs. We have developed an analysis pattern template that solves some previously identified gaps on other approaches. This paper focuses on the definition of a systematic process to guide developers to fill in that analysis pattern template. This process will contribute to the unification of the analysis patterns representation, and thus for their understandability and completeness.
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Paper Nr: 134
Title:

APPLYING BLOCK ACTIVITY PATTERNS IN WORKFLOW MODELING
Authors:

Lucineia Heloisa Thom and Cirano Iochpe
Abstract: This paper discusses a set of business (sub-)process types represented as “workflow block activity patterns”. We describe all patterns in a common language (UML 2.0) and through some study cases we tried to find out whether they are frequently reused during business/workflow process modeling. The results showed that the patterns are frequently identified in both workflow elements and workflow applications. We believe they can be reused to improve the quality as well as the performance of the design phase in a workflow project.
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Paper Nr: 174
Title:

AN ALGORITHM FOR BUILDING INFORMATION SYSTEM’S ONTOLOGIES
Authors:

Mohamed Mhiri, Sana Chabaane, Achraf Mtibaa and Faiez Gargouri
Abstract: Current applications' modelling becomes increasingly complex. Indeed, it requires a hard work to study the particular studied field in order to determine its main concepts and their relationships. The conceptual representations (CR) results of the modelling of such applications can contain structural and semantic errors which are not detectable by current CASE. The solution that we propose is to associate an ontology, for the studied field, as a help to the designers during IS modelling steps. Building such information system’s ontologies require the use of an approach allowing the determination of the concepts and the relationships between these concepts. Using ontologies makes it possible to ensure conceptual representations' semantic coherence for a given field. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for building an information system’s ontology based on the comparison between the concepts and using a set of semantic relationships.
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Paper Nr: 338
Title:

A NEW PUBLIC-KEY CRYPTOSYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATIONS
Authors:

Akito Kiriyama, Yuji Nakagawa, Tadao Takaoka and Zhiqi Tu
Abstract: We propose in this paper a new public-key crypto-system, called the non-linear knapsack cryptosystem. The security of this system is based on the NP-completeness of the non-linear knapsack problem. We extend the system into secret sharing and access control. That is, an encrypted message can be decrypted only when all members of a group agree to do so with their secret sub-keys. The secret sharing here is equivalent to access control, which establishes multiple identities. That is, when the verifier challenges the prover with encrypted messages with public sub-keys, the prover can prove multiple identities using the secret sub-keys. Some experimental results are given, which demonstrate the efficiency of our system.
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Paper Nr: 402
Title:

TOWARDS A RIGOROUS PROCESS MODELING WITH SPEM
Authors:

Benoit Combemale, Xavier Cregut, Alain Caplain and Bernard Coulette
Abstract: Modeling software process is a good way to improve development and thus quality of resulting applications. The OMG proposes the SPEM metamodel to describe software processes. Its concepts are described through class diagrams. Unfortunately, it lacks a formal description of its semantics that makes it hard to use. So, we propose a specialization of SPEM that clarifies it and we use OCL to formally express constraints on it.
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Paper Nr: 444
Title:

INFORMATION ASSURANCE ASSET MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE USING XML FOR SYSTEM VULNERABILITY
Authors:

Namho Yoo and Hyeong-Ah Choi
Abstract: This paper suggests an XML-based IA asset management architecture for system vulnerability. Once an information assurance vulnerability notice is given for a system, it is important for reducing massive system engineering efforts for IA asset management. When systems are updated by security patch for mitigating system vulnerability, asset management based on vulnerability update and request is trivial, in order to increase accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness of software processes. By employing XML technology, we can achieve seamless and efficient asset management between heterogeneous system format as well as data formats in analysing and exchanging the pertinent information for information assurance vulnerability. Thus, when a system is updated to improve system vulnerability, we proposed XML-based IA asset management architecture. Then, an executable architecture for implementation to verify the proposed scheme and testing environment is presented to mitigate vulnerable systems for sustained system.
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Paper Nr: 450
Title:

GRADUAL MODELING OF INFORMATION SYSTEM - Model of Method Expressed as Transitions Between Concepts
Authors:

Marek Picka and Robert Pergl
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to show a new way of depicting information systems‘ models of design methods. New terms of the method are created by sequential transformations from the existing terms. The model of elements‘ transformation is an instance of this model. It depicts the process of constructing given information system.
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Paper Nr: 456
Title:

UML-BASED BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING (BPR-UML) APPLIED TO IT OUTSOURCING
Authors:

Edumilis M. Ortega, Luis E. Mendoza, María A. Perez and Anna Grimán
Abstract: Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is one of the current approaches organizations take to address global market pressures. BPR allows firms to analyze their internal processes with the view to developing customized goal-oriented solutions. On the other hand, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) can be used: 1) as a tool for new processes defined by reengineering, which allows Information Technology experts to perform the business process involving that know-how; and 2) as part of a BPR, to reorient its implementation regarding quality levels and client satisfaction. This paper presents a methodological proposal that merges the BPR methodology proposed by Jacobson (1994) with Rational Unified Process (RUP). It also describes how this proposal can be applied in a BPR for IT Outsourcing in order to improve efficiency and quality levels in the corresponding business processes, specifically, the Printing Outsourcing Service (POS). This methodological proposal ensures traceability between the models proposed for the business and the features that the technological enablers should have for supporting them, thus reaching higher effectiveness in the reengineering process.
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Paper Nr: 457
Title:

INTRODUCING A UML PROFILE FOR DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
Authors:

Nancy Alexopoulou, Anarguros Tsadimas, Mara Nikolaidou, A. Dais and Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos
Abstract: Distributed system configuration consists of distributed application component placement and underlying network design, thus is a complex process dealing with interrelated issues and comprising various stages. A common metamodel for distributed system representation in all configuration stages is thus required, so that unclear dependencies between discrete stages can be easily identified. This model should also be easily adopted by autonomous software tools used for the automation of discrete configuration stages and for the efficient development of system specifications by designers. We propose such a metamodel using UML 2.0. More specifically, we introduce a UML 2.0 profile facilitating distributed system configuration process. In this profile, different UML 2.0 diagrams are integrated and properly extended, in order to model all aspects of the distributed system configuration process.
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Paper Nr: 497
Title:

ARCHITECTING SOA SOLUTIONS FROM ENTERPRISE MODELS - A Model Driven Framework to Architect SOA Solutions from Enterprise Models
Authors:

Xabier Larrucea and Gorka Benguria
Abstract: The improvement of the operational efficiency is an important concern in the several kinds of enterprises, but it involves the management of a multitude of elements. To be able to cope with such as complexity several enterprises are relaying in the use of enterprise modelling tools. This usually becomes a starting point for business process automation initiatives towards the improvement of the organisation. However, there is still a large gap from these enterprise models to the infrastructure systems. The current paper presents a MDA (Model Driven Architectures) framework over eclipse platform to address this gap for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based solutions and more in deep the notation and transformation aspects of the framework. The framework provides a systematic approach for deriving SOA solutions from enterprises models, ensuring that the information systems really implements the models developed by the business experts and no partial interpretations from IT experts.
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Paper Nr: 501
Title:

TOWARDS A MAINTAINABILITY EVALUATION IN SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES
Authors:

Anna Grimán, Luisana Chávez, María A. Perez, Luis E. Mendoza and Kenyer Dominguez
Abstract: Maintainability is an internal quality characteristic that is contemplated by many users and developers, and therefore is deeply related to software architecture. It presents an organization of its components and relation which promote or obstruct different attributes like testability, changeability, and analyzability. As part of a research in progress, this article analyzes and organizes a set of architectural mechanisms that guarantee software maintainability. To propose the architectural mechanisms we decided first to construct an ontology, which helps identify all concepts related to Maintainability and their relationships. Then we decided to focus and specify mechanisms that promote maintainability, also we present a set of scenarios that will explore the presence at the architecture of those concepts previously identified, including the architectural mechanism analyzed. With the products described in this article we have the bases to develop an architectural evaluation method, which is based on maintainability.
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Paper Nr: 530
Title:

CEO FRAMEWORK ENTERPRISE MODELS CONFORMANCE WITH ISO14258
Authors:

Patrícia Macedo, Carla Ferreira and José Tribolet
Abstract: Several international standards for Enterprise Engineering were developed in order to: promote the quality and reliability of the communication between the partners involved in business processes; upgrade the compatibility and alignment between the systems which support business processes. In this area an international standard was develop – ISO 14258 – which specifies rules and concepts for enterprise modelling. CEO Framework is an analysis framework that provides a formal way of describing enterprises. This article describes the how to verify that an enterprise modelling frameworks generates models in conformance with ISO14248. This sequence of steps is applied to verify CEO framework.
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Paper Nr: 550
Title:

GENERATION AND USE OF ONE ONTOLOGY FOR INTELLIGENT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FROM ELECTRONIC RECORD HISTORIES
Authors:

Miguel Prados De Reyes, Maria Carmen Peña Yañez, M. A. Vila and M. Belen Prados Suarez
Abstract: This paper analyzes the terminology used in the diagnosis, treatment, exploration, and operation descriptions entered by doctors in the electronic healthcare record. From this, expression stability (and the use of a sufficiently limited and controlled language) is shown, which is therefore reasonably valid for a conceptualization process to be employed on it. This conceptualization process is performed by the generation of an ontology which proposes semantic classes according to the different medical concepts to be used on data-base query profiles. By way of summary, we shall propose a semantic organizational method so that classes, attributes and properties in the ontology may act as links between the database and the users, both in information incorporation processes and in queries. It offers a wide range of benefits by extending and making information management possibilities more flexible, and enabling the application of traditional data mining techniques.
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Paper Nr: 587
Title:

COMMONALITY VERSUS VARIABILITY - The Contradictory Nature of Enterprise Systems
Authors:

Stig Nordheim
Abstract: This position paper argues that there is a major contradiction inherent in Enterprise Systems. The evidence for this contradiction is seen in the meta level concepts of commonality and variability that characterize Enterprise Systems. The inherent contradiction between commonality and variability is discussed in the light of Enterprise Systems’ literature, and the contradiction is elaborated. Then an Enterprise Systems’ vendor perspective on commonality and variability is presented, based on interviews. A challenge of this inherent contradiction is its synthesis, finding the right balance between commonality and variability.
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Paper Nr: 588
Title:

TRANSFORMATION OF UML DESIGN MODEL INTO PERFORMANCE MODEL - A Model-Driven Framework
Authors:

Ramrao Wagh, Umesh Bellur and Bernard Menezes
Abstract: Software Performance Engineering is receiving increasing attention in today’s software dominated world. Compared to research work in performance evaluation in hardware and networks, this field is still in its nascent stage. Many methods have been proposed but majority of them are unable to adapt in the software development life-cycle dominated by professionals without substantial performance engineering background. We propose UPE - a Model Driven Software Performance Engineering Framework to facilitate performance engineering within software development life cycle, based on OMG’s MDA initiative.
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Paper Nr: 650
Title:

THE VOCABULARY ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING FOR THE SEMANTIC MODELLING OF HOME SERVICES
Authors:

Jarmo Kalaoja, Julia Kantorovitch, Sara Carro, José María Miranda, Álvaro Ramos and Jorge Parra
Abstract: With great advance in information technology and broadband networks, the interconnected networked home devices are becoming increasingly popular. Number of heterogeneous networked devices and services which belong to the traditionally separated functional islands such as PC (i.e. Internet), mobile, CE broadcasting, and home automation, not working together can be found in our today’s home. Merging of these devices and services would offer home individual residents user-friendly, intelligent, and meaningful interfaces to handle home information and services. The semantic ontology based modelling of home services can enable interoperability of heterogeneous services. The ontology may facilitate clear description on how far each device is suitable for different kinds of information and different interaction demands. This paper is presenting an analysis on the kind of vocabulary ontologies necessary in different functional domains to cope with heterogeneity of service descriptions. The ontology based rich representation of services will facilitate an efficient service discovery, integration and composition.
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Paper Nr: 670
Title:

OBJECT NORMALIZATION AS THE CONTRIBUTION TO THE AREA OF FORMAL METHODS OF OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASE DESIGN
Authors:

Jan Vrany, Zdenek Struska and Vojtech Merunka
Abstract: In the article there is described an overview of current status in the area of formal technique of object database design. It is discussed there, why relational design techniques as normalization, decomposition and synthesis are not able to be easy used in object databases. The article informs with various proposals of object normal forms and it brings own authors evaluation and an example of object normalization.
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Paper Nr: 680
Title:

UNDERSTANDING B SPECIFICATIONS WITH UML CLASS DIAGRAM AND OCL CONSTRAINTS
Authors:

Bruno Tatibouet and I. Jacques
Abstract: B is a formal method (and a specification language) which enables the automatic generation of an executable code through a succession of refinements stemming from an abstract specification. A B specification requires a certain knowledge of mathematical notations (Classical logic and sets) as well as specific terminology (generalized substitutions, B keywords) which may in all likelihood leave a non-specialist of the B notation in the dark. To address this problem, we will extract graphic elements from B specification in an effort to render it more understandable. In a previous work, these visual elements are illustrated in a UML class diagram. These visual elements being insufficient they are completed by OCL constraints allowing to present the invariant and the operations of a B abstract machine.
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Paper Nr: 685
Title:

CODE OF ETHICS FOR PROFESSIONALS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS – CEPIS MODEL
Authors:

Helena D. Campos and Luís Amaral
Abstract: On the area of Information Systems Technology (IST) there is a multiplicity of competences and knowledge. In order the professionals may carry them out with success and great advantage, the existence of a structured and standardized framework that could be used as a reference for any organization, is needed. Parallel to this problematic there still exists the acknowledgement of the impossibility of a technological life without ethics. So, a Code of Ethics for Professionals of Information Systems - CEPIS it will be proposed.
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Paper Nr: 689
Title:

ENABLING OR DISABLING WITH OLD SPECIFICATIONS - A New Information System Based on Old Specifications
Authors:

Raija Halonen
Abstract: This research concentrates on the development of an information system that was based on previously made specifications. We study the influence of before-made specifications and discuss the difficulties in adopting them. In our case we had several universities involved in the development project and the aim was to implement a joint information system to be used by student affairs officials and students in universities. Implementing information systems by several organisations is highly dependent on collaboration between the organisations. We discuss how the collaboration was managed in our case and show what the role of previous specifications was. We conclude that despite the specifications, the information system was finalised.
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Paper Nr: 693
Title:

DEONTIC PROTOCOL MODELLING - Modelling Business Rules with State Machines
Authors:

Ashley Mcneile and Nicholas Simons
Abstract: State machines can be used as a means of specifying the behaviour of objects in a system by describing their event protocols, this being the relationships between the states that the object may adopt and the ability of the object to respond to events of different types presented to it. We describe an extension to this approach whereby different machines in the composition of a single object have different deontic semantics; covering necessary behaviour, encouraged behaviour and discouraged behaviour. This provides a language that has the expressive power to model the way software interacts with the domain in which it is embedded to encourage or discourage behaviours of the domain.
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Paper Nr: 694
Title:

VERIFYING THE VALUE OF OBJECTIVE MEASURES - A Proposal for a Systematic Evaluation of Measures
Authors:

Harald Kjellin
Abstract: The results of work in any section of an enterprise should preferably be described in a way that makes the results suited for benchmarking with other sections of the enterprise. The same goes for individual work results. Results are easily compared if they are measured according to some numerical standard. Numerical measures can be generalized and standardized until they can be considered as having a high degree of “reusability”. There are several types of enterprise models that include the use of reusable “soft” numerical values. With “soft” numerical values I refer to the type of values that cannot be directly measured in relation to objective facts but are artificially constructed measures that includes some kind of subjective estimation for calculating the value. Another requirement on such measures is that it should be possible to use them for comparing performance between individuals or between units of an organization or between organizations. These measures can, for instance, be used for customer appreciation of their relationships with the organization, as is often recommended in the method called “Balanced Scorecards” or they can be used when giving students numerical values as credits (points) for passing university courses. A summary of informal evaluations is presented. The evaluations concern how “soft” measures have been implemented in organizations. The results of the evaluations show that objective values based on facts can be combined with subjective estimations in a way that makes them less vulnerable to people manipulating the measures and less vulnerable to the subjectivity of superiors when estimating the quality of the results.
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Paper Nr: 695
Title:

USER AUTONOMY IN REQUIREMENTS CHANGING SUPPORTED BY ORGANIZATIONAL SEMIOTICS AND TAILORING
Authors:

Carlos Alberto Cocozza Simoni, M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas and Rodrigo Bonacin
Abstract: Nowadays, organizations face the impact of changes from several sources. Literature points out that we still have a gap between the dynamic of the system maintenance and changes in the organizational processes. To cover this gap we consider the use of practices coming from Organizational Semiotics (OS) and Tailoring. OS allows a deep understanding of the organizational context and the technical system embedded in it, and Tailoring proposes to provide autonomy to users in dealing with changes in computer systems. This paper presents a case study developed in our University to explore and extend an existing approach to provide more autonomy to computer system users, according to the evolution of their business requirements.
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Paper Nr: 706
Title:

INFORMATION-CENTRIC VS. STORAGE/DATA-CENTRIC SYSTEMS
Authors:

Charles Milligan, Steve Halladay and Deren Hansen
Abstract: It is essential to recognise that information (i.e., the meaning and value that must be extracted from data for a business to run) is very different from the data itself. Information must be managed using different processes and tools than those used in data management. The current notion of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is really only about making Systems Managed Storage work universally and does not relate to information management at all. However, recent developments of new technologies have potential to open a new paradigm in extracting, organizing and managing the meaning and value from data sources that can allow processes and decision systems to take a quantum leap in effectiveness. The networked structure of a graph database combined with concept modelling will foster this shift.
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Paper Nr: 708
Title:

SECURITY THREATS TO DIGITAL TELEVISION PLATFORM AND SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
Authors:

Jarkko Holappa and Reijo Savola
Abstract: Digital convergence is introducing more diverse digital television services. The return channel, which enables interactive television, is a key to this development and may be considered the most vulnerable element of the terminal device in terms of information security. Accordingly, its protection from threats brought about by Internet use, such as malicious programs, is of the essence. Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) is one of the most important technologies enabling interactive television. The information security threats related to it are examined from the viewpoint of the service developer. Threat analysis presented in this paper is carried out in Finnish companies that include digital-TV broadcasters, MHP-platform developers, service developers and telecom operators.
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Paper Nr: 735
Title:

FORMALISATION OF A FUNCTIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Authors:

Víctor M. Gulías, Carlos Abalde, Laura M. Castro and Carlos Varela
Abstract: This article shows a first approximation to the formalisation of a risk management information system. It is based on our experience in the development of a large, scalable and reliable client/server risk management information system.
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Paper Nr: 752
Title:

A NEW PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION STRATEGY FOR JAVA MESSAGE SERVICE SYSTEM
Authors:

Xiangfeng Guo, Xiaoning Ding, Hua Zhong and Jing Li
Abstract: Well suited to the loosely coupled nature of distributed interaction, message oriented middleware has been applied in many distributed applications. Efficiently transmitting messages with reliability is a key feature of message oriented middleware. Due to the necessary persistence facilities, the performance of transmitting is subject greatly to the persistence action. The Openness of Java platform has made the systems conforming to Java Message Service Specification supported widely. In these applications, many consumers get messages periodically. We bring forward a new efficient strategy using different persistence methods with different kinds of messages, which improves system performance greatly. The strategy also utilizes daemon threads to reduce its influence to the system. The strategy has been implemented in our Java Message Service conformed system, ONCEAS MQ.
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Rejecteds
Paper Nr: 121
Title:

TOWARDS DESIGN RATIONALES OF SOFTWARE CONFEDERATIONS
Authors:

Michal Zemlicka
Abstract: There are two crucial but often neglected properties of business processes -- the extent of user involvement and the process granularity (it is the size of atomic actions of business processes). A business process can be specified in a very detailed way in very small steps (we say that it is of fine granularity). Such processes do not assume that user can modify the process on the fly using his/her intuition or initiative. We discuss the pros and cons of fine granularity. The main issue is that fine granulated processes are difficult to be applied in small enterprises, small european states and especially in the case where there are some cultural pecularities. Fine-grained processes are difficult to be understood by process owners. It is a big disadvnatage. Fine-grained processes can be successful only under some cultural conditions (an example is the concept and structure of the education system). We discuss the implementation of business processses in service-oriented software systems (SOSS) allowing flexibility in user involvment and process granularity. Deep user involvement to a high degree implies coarse granularity of processes and attitudes known from agile development.

Area 4 - Software Agents and Internet Computing

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 37
Title:

OWL-BASED KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY USING DESCRIPTION LOGICS REASONERS
Authors:

Dimitrios Koutsomitropoulos, Dimitrios P. Meidanis, Anastasia N. Kandili and Theodore Papatheodorou
Abstract: The recent advent of the Semantic Web has given rise to the need for efficient and sound methods that would provide reasoning support over the knowledge scattered on the Internet. Description Logics and DL-based inference engines in particular play a significant role towards this goal, as they seem to have overlapping expressivity with the Semantic Web de facto language, OWL. In this paper we argue that DLs currently constitute one of the most tempting available formalisms to support reasoning with OWL. Further, we present and survey a number of DL based systems that could be used for this task. Around one of them (Racer) we build our Knowledge Discovery Interface, a web application that can be used to pose intelligent queries to Semantic Web documents in an intuitive manner. As a proof of concept, we then apply the KDI on the CIDOC-CRM reference ontology and discuss our results.
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Paper Nr: 55
Title:

MAINTAINING PROPERTY LIBRARIES IN PRODUCT CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES
Authors:

Joerg Leukel
Abstract: Semantic interoperability in B2B e-commerce can be achieved by committing to a product ontology that establishes a shared and common understanding of a product domain. This issue is mainly subject of standard product classification schemes. Recently, considerable research and industry work has been carried out on enhancing the semantic richness of these schemes. Providing specific property lists for each product class can be seen as a step towards true product ontologies. Horizontal classification schemes, however, often consist of more than 10,000 classes, several thousand properties, and an even greater number of class-property relations. Given the new requirement towards property-centric classification, maintaining these business vocabularies is mainly determined by strategies for managing the property definitions and their relationships to classes. This paper proposes measures for coping with the problem of extensive and steadily growing property libraries. It can be shown that implementing these measures greatly influences both standards makers and standards adopters.
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Paper Nr: 127
Title:

MIGRATING LEGACY VIDEO LECTURES TO MULTIMEDIA LEARNING OBJECTS
Authors:

Andrea De Lucia, Rita Francese, Massimiliano Giordano, Ignazio Passero and Genny Tortora
Abstract: Video Lectures are an old distance learning approach which do not offer any feature of interaction and retrieval to the user. Thus, to follow the new learning paradigms we need to reengineer the e-learning processes while preserving the investments made in the past. In this paper we present a methodology for semi-automatically migrating traditional video lectures into multimedia Learning Objects. The process identifies the frames where a slide transition occurs and extracts from the PowerPoint Presentation information for structuring the Learning Object metadata. Similarly to scene detection approaches, we iteratively tune several parameters starting from a small portion of the video to reach the best results. Once a slide transition is correctly detected, the video sample is successively enlarged until satisfactory results are reached. The proposed approach has been validated in a case study.
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Paper Nr: 458
Title:

AN OPEN ARCHITECTURE FOR COLLABORATIVE VISUALIZATION IN RICH MEDIA ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Bernd Eßmann, Thorsten Hampel and Frank Götz
Abstract: In this paper we present our approach of combining open and sophisticated technologies in order to establish an integrated rich media environment for collaborative visualization processes. Aiming to support comprehensive visualization settings of spatially separated domain specialists, we deploy remote render farms for producing the visualization of complex datasets as video streams, separately for every collaboration partner. This makes our system capable also for low-end mobile devices, which only have to be able to render MEPG-4 compliant video streams. The cooperation support is provided by a full-featured CSCW system including a shared whiteboard based on the platform independent Eclipse framework. The visualization objects are embedded in the CSCW system’s persistent object space and presented by the rich media view of the shared whiteboard. Starting with a basic scenario of collaborative visualization we will present the architecture of the combined visualization and CSCW systems and the design of the plug-in based shared whiteboard.
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Paper Nr: 466
Title:

TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED IS FRAMEWORK FOR THE DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT OF LEAN SUPPLY CHAINS
Authors:

Emmanuel Adamides, Nikos Karacapilidis, Hara Pylarinou and Dimitrios Koumanakos
Abstract: In this paper we present Co-LEAN, an integrated suite of software tools suitable for the design and management of lean supply chains. In addition to providing full operational support in the planning and execution of the lean supply chain, Co-LEAN supports internet-based collaboration in the innovation and product design, manufacturing strategy, and supply-chain improvement tasks. The paper discusses the information system support requirements of a lean supply chain, describes the main components and the integration mechanisms of Co-LEAN and concludes with a brief description of its pilot use in a major supermarket chain.
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Paper Nr: 481
Title:

CLIENT SYNTHESIS FOR WEB SERVICES BY WAY OF A TIMED SEMANTICS
Authors:

Serge Haddad, Patrice Moreaux and Sylvain Rampacek
Abstract: A complex Web service described with languages like BPEL4WS, consists of an executable process and its observable behaviour (called an abstract process) based on the messages exchanged with the client. The abstract process behaviour is non deterministic due to the internal choices during the service execution. Furthermore the specification often includes timing constraints which must be taken into account by the client. Thus given a service specification, we identify the synthesis of a client as a key issue for the development of Web services. To this end, we propose an approach based on (dense) timed automata to first describe the observable service behaviour and then to build correct interacting clients when possible. The present work extends a previous discrete time approach and overcomes its limitations.
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Paper Nr: 496
Title:

USING SHADOW PRICES FOR RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN A COMBINATORIAL GRID WITH PROXY-BIDDING AGENTS
Authors:

Michael Schwind and Oleg Gujo
Abstract: Our paper presents an agent-based simulation environment for task scheduling in a distributed computer systems (grid). The scheduler enables the simultaneous allocation of resources like CPU time, communication bandwidth, volatile, and non-volatile memory while employing a combinatorial resource allocation mechanism. The resources are allocated by an iterative combinatorial auction with proxy-bidding agents that try to acquire their desired resource allocation profiles with respect to limited monetary budget endowments. In order to achieve an efficient bidding process, the auctioneer provides information on resource prices to the bidding agents. The calculation of explicit resource prices in a combinatorial auction is computationally demanding, especially if the the bid bundles exhibit complementarities or substitutionalities. We therefore propose a new approximate pricing mechanism using shadow prices from a linear programming formulation for this purpose. The efficiency of the shadow price-based allocation mechanism is tested in the context of a closed loop grid system in which the agents can use monetary units rewarded for the resources they provide to the system for the acquisition of complementary capacity. Two types of proxy-bidding agents are compared in terms of efficiency (received units of resources, time until bid acceptance) within this scenario: An aggressive bidding agent with strongly rising bids and a smooth bidding agent with slowly increasing bids.
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Paper Nr: 496
Title:

USING SHADOW PRICES FOR RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN A COMBINATORIAL GRID WITH PROXY-BIDDING AGENTS
Authors:

Michael Schwind and Oleg Gujo
Abstract: Our paper presents an agent-based simulation environment for task scheduling in a distributed computer systems (grid). The scheduler enables the simultaneous allocation of resources like CPU time, communication bandwidth, volatile, and non-volatile memory while employing a combinatorial resource allocation mechanism. The resources are allocated by an iterative combinatorial auction with proxy-bidding agents that try to acquire their desired resource allocation profiles with respect to limited monetary budget endowments. In order to achieve an efficient bidding process, the auctioneer provides information on resource prices to the bidding agents. The calculation of explicit resource prices in a combinatorial auction is computationally demanding, especially if the the bid bundles exhibit complementarities or substitutionalities. We therefore propose a new approximate pricing mechanism using shadow prices from a linear programming formulation for this purpose. The efficiency of the shadow price-based allocation mechanism is tested in the context of a closed loop grid system in which the agents can use monetary units rewarded for the resources they provide to the system for the acquisition of complementary capacity. Two types of proxy-bidding agents are compared in terms of efficiency (received units of resources, time until bid acceptance) within this scenario: An aggressive bidding agent with strongly rising bids and a smooth bidding agent with slowly increasing bids.
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Paper Nr: 672
Title:

SUPPORTING COMPLEX COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES – THE LIBRESOURCE APPROACH
Authors:

Olivera Marjanovic, Hala Skaf-Molli, Pascal Molli, Fethi Rabhi and Claude Godart
Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to describe collaborative technology called LibreSource and how it is used to implement an innovative learning/teaching activity designed for software engineering students. From the educational perspective, this educational activity is based on the principles of problem-based learning and the latest Learning Design theory. The main objective of this activity to offer students a real-life experience in collaborative software development. Compared to the popular Learning Management Systems that only offer collaborative tools and support individual collaborative tasks, this technology enables design and implementation of complex collaborative processes.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 29
Title:

CONTEXT-DRIVEN POLICY ENFORCEMENT AND RECONCILIATION FOR WEB SERVICES
Authors:

Subramanian Sattanathan, Nanjangud Narendra, Zakaria Maamar and G. K. Mostéfaoui
Abstract: Security of Web services is a major factor to their successful integration into critical IT applications. An extensive research in this direction concentrates on low level aspects of security such as message secrecy, data integrity, and authentication. Thus, proposed solutions are mainly built upon the assumption that security mechanisms are static and predefined. However, the dynamic nature of the Internet and the continuously changing environments where Web services operate require innovative and adaptive security solutions. This paper presents our solution for securing Web services based on adaptive policies, where adaptability is satisfied using the contextual information of the Web services. The proposed solution includes a negotiation and reconciliation protocol for security policies.
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Paper Nr: 59
Title:

A POLICY-BASED APPROACH TO SECURE CONTEXT IN A WEB SERVICES ENVIRONMENT
Authors:

Zakaria Maamar, G. K. Mostéfaoui and Djamal Benslimane
Abstract: This paper presents a policy-based approach for securing the contexts associated with Web services, users, and computing resources. Users interact with Web services for personalization needs, and Web services interact with resources for performance needs. To authorize any context change, a security context is developed. The security context reports on the strategies that protect a context using authorization and restriction policies.
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Paper Nr: 93
Title:

RECOVERY SERVICES FOR THE PLANNING LAYER OF AGENTS
Authors:

Khaled Nagi and George Beskales
Abstract: Software agents represent aim at automating user tasks. A central task of an agent is planning to achieve its goals. Unexpected disturbances occurring in the agent execution environment represent a serious challenge for agent planning. In this work, a recovery model for the planning process of agents is proposed to cope with disturbances caused by system failures; which often lead to system crashes. The proposed recovery model supports the Hierarchical Task Networks (HTN) planners which represent a broad family of planners that are widely used in agent systems. A prototype for the proposed recovery services is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. Furthermore, a simulation is built and many simulation experiments were conducted to gain insight about the performance of the proposed recovery model.
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Paper Nr: 116
Title:

SAFETY OF CHECKPOINTING AND ROLLBACK-RECOVERY PROTOCOL FOR MOBILE SYSTEMS WITH RYW SESSION GUARANTEE
Authors:

Jerzy Brzezinski, Anna Kobusinska and Jacek Kobusiński
Abstract: This paper presents rVsRYW checkpointing and rollback-recovery protocol, which preserves Read Your Writes session guarantee and includes the proof of safety property of the proposed protocol. In order to provide RYW guarantee required by mobile clients, despite failures of servers, in rVsRYW protocol semantics of consistency protocol operations is exploited and build in recovery mechanisms.
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Paper Nr: 120
Title:

A MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION SHARING
Authors:

Marco Mari, Agostino Poggi and Michele Tomaiuolo
Abstract: This paper presents RAIS, a peer-to-peer multi-agent system supporting the sharing of information among a community of users connected through the internet. RAIS has been designed and implemented on the top of well known technologies and software tools for realizing multi-agent and peer-to-peer systems, for the searching of information and for the authentication and authorization of users. RAIS offers a similar search power of Web search engines, but avoids the burden of publishing the information on the Web and guaranties a controlled and dynamic access to the information. Moreover, the use of agent technologies simplifies the realization of three of the main features of the system: i) the filtering of the information coming from different users on the basis of the previous experience of the local user, ii) the pushing of the new information that can be of possible interest for a user, and iii) the delegation of access capabilities on the basis of a network of reputation built by the agents of the system on the community of its users.
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Paper Nr: 355
Title:

WSRF-BASED VIRTUALIZATION FOR MANUFACTURING RESOURCES
Authors:

Lei Wu, Xiangxu Meng, Shijun Liu, Chenlei Yang and Xueqin Li
Abstract: Manufacturing Grid (MG) is a cooperation platform and resource sharing system among manufacturing enterprises. To be shared in MG, the manufacturing resources should be virtualized and exposed as web services. The paper presents a WSRF-based approach to virtualize resources conveniently in MG including many resource encapsulation templates and a resource container. The design principle, the implementation of the resource encapsulate template and the resource container are described in detail, where the resource container is a WSRF service deployed in GT java core and can expose resources as WS-Resource. Through these tools, resource providers can encapsulate their resources with the encapsulation template and deploy them in the resource container, then the resource will be virtualized and exposed as web service and can be shared in grid. A prototype platform to demonstrate the validity of the method is introduced at last.
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Paper Nr: 361
Title:

A MULTI-AGENT BASED FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPORTING LEARNING IN ADAPTIVE AUTOMATED NEGOTIATION
Authors:

Rômulo Nunes De Oliveira, Herman Gomes, Alan Silva , Ig Bittencourt and Evandro Costa
Abstract: We propose a multi-agent based framework for supporting adaptive bilateral automated negotiation during buyer-seller agent interactions. In this work, these interactions are viewed as a cooperative game (from the idea of two-person game theory, nonzerosum game), where the players try to reach an agreement about a certain negotiation object that is offered by one player to another. The final agreement is assumed to be satisfactory to both parts. To achieve effectively this goal, we modelled each player as a multi-agent system with its respective environment. In doing so, we aim at providing an effective means to collect relevant information to help agents to make good decisions, that is, how to choose the “best way to play” among a set of alternatives. Then we define a mechanism to model the opponent player and other mechanisms for monitoring relevant variables from the player´ environment. Also, we maintain the context of the current game and keep the most relevant information of previous games. Additionally, we integrate all the information to be used in the refinement of the game strategies governing the multi-agent system.
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Paper Nr: 372
Title:

AOPOA - Organizational Approach for Agent Oriented Programming
Authors:

Enrique González and Miguel Torres
Abstract: This paper presents AOPOA, an agent oriented programming methodology based in an organizational approach. The resulting multiagent system is composed by a set of active entities that aim to accomplish a well-defined set of goals. This approach allows to design complex systems by decomposing them into simpler ones. The organizational approach makes it easier to perform an iterative and recursive decomposition based in the concept of goal; and at the same time to identify the interactions between the entities composing the system; at each iteration an organization level is developed. During the analysis phase, tasks and roles are detected. During the design phase, the interactions are characterized and managed by means of cooperation protocols. At the final iteration, the role parameterization is performed, which allows to specify the events and actions associated to each agent. Finally, the deploy of the agent instances is determined allowing redundancy to achieve the requirements of the system.
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Paper Nr: 412
Title:

THE STATE OF E-BUSINESS ON THE GERMAN ELECTRONIC CONSUMER GOODS INDUSTRY
Authors:

Eulalio C. F. and Wolffried Stucky
Abstract: B2B electronic commerce is an increasing important component of company’s strategy as it provides key support for the business processes and transactions. Therefore, e-business applications were expected to have a high cumulative growth and be widely applied by companies in different sectors of the global economy. This paper outlines the state of e-business on one of the most dynamic sectors in the area of B2B electronic commerce, the electronic consumer goods industry in the highly competitive German market. The intention is to develop a better understanding of the level of information technology application to support business relations as well as the reasons and the course of e-business initiatives in this sector.
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Paper Nr: 483
Title:

DISTRIBUTED BUSINESS PROCESSES IN OPEN AGENT ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Christine Reese, Kolja Markwardt, Sven Offermann and Daniel Moldt
Abstract: In the context of multi-agent systems, a general aim is the inter-operability of agents. One problem remaining unsolved is the control of processes between agents. The need for workflow technology to support business processes on the level of agents becomes obvious. We provide concepts for distributed WFMS where the distribution is realised within the architecture. Given the formal background of Petri nets, this work is innovative regarding the interplay of agent and workflow technologies.
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Paper Nr: 500
Title:

PROVIDING RECOMMENDATIONS IN AN AGENT-BASED TRANSPORTATION TRANSACTIONS MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
Authors:

Alexis Lazanas, Nikos Karacapilidis and Yiannis Pirovolakis
Abstract: Diverse recommendation techniques have been already proposed and encapsulated into several e-business systems aiming to perform a more accurate evaluation of the existing alternatives and accordingly augment the assistance provided to the users involved. Extending previous work, this paper focuses on the development of a recommendation module for transportation transactions purposes and its integration in a web-based platform. The module is built according to a hybrid recommendation technique, which combines the advantages of collaborative filtering and knowledge-based recommendations. The proposed technique and supporting module enable customers to consider in detail alternative transportation transactions satisfying their requests, as well as to evaluate such transactions after their completion.
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Paper Nr: 528
Title:

A NARRATIVE APPROACH TO COLLABORATIVE WRITING - A Business Process Model
Authors:

Peter Henderson and Nishadi De Silva
Abstract: Narratives have been used in the past to enhance technical documents such as research proposals by implementing a single-user writing tool called CANS (Computer-Aided Narrative Support). This study has now been extended to collaborative writing (CW); another area that can greatly benefit from a narrative-based writing tool. Before implementing such an asynchronous, multi-user system, however, it was imperative to do a concrete design for it. Therefore, after studying existing CW tools and strategies, a concise business process (BP) model was designed to describe the process of narrative-based CW. This paper introduces narrative-based CW for technical authors, the BP model for it and discusses the benefits of such an implementation on particular areas of research, such as the development of Grid applications.
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Paper Nr: 533
Title:

ADDING MEANING TO QOS NEGOTIATION
Authors:

Cláudia Maria F. A. Ribeiro, Nelson Rosa and Paulo Cunha
Abstract: Using quality of service (QoS) to discover Web Services that better meet users’ needs became a key factor to differentiate similar services. Treating QoS includes negotiating QoS capabilities, since there is a potential conflict between service provider and service requestor requirements. This paper addresses this problem by using an ontological approach for QoS negotiation that aims to improve user participation. For this purpose, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) ontology that explicitly considers subjective user QoS specification was conceived. Its internal components and the role it plays during service discovery are detailed.
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Paper Nr: 556
Title:

A GRID SERVICE COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT FOR SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Authors:

Sam Chung and George A. Orriss
Abstract: This paper proposes to develop a Grid Service Computing Environment for Supply Chain Management. Current research into Grid Services for distributed systems has resulted in interesting questions being raised as to whether or not the Open Grid Service Architecture can be applied to developing a Supply Chain Management system. If so, how will it affect development of SCM systems as a typical example of Business-to-Business (B2B) application integration? Since as much recent development has been focused on resource allocation in a Grid environment, the B2B application integration using Grid computing is still relatively unexplored. By developing a Supply Chain Management system using the Open Grid Service Architecture and the Globus toolkit, this research will provide an infrastructure for composing existing services into a system that can be utilized for Supply Chain Management. The result of this project is a Grid environment that provides efficient and effective service management of available Supply Chain Management services. Also, we address some of the inherent issues of dynamic binding and automation associated with B2B transactions, such as those surrounding security protocols, service lifecycle, and instance creation.
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Paper Nr: 718
Title:

E-PROCUREMENT ADOPTION AMONG ITALIAN FIRMS BY USING DOMAIN NAMES
Authors:

Maurizio Martinelli, Michela Serrecchia and Michela Serrecchia
Abstract: The digital divide can occur either as a “local” (within a given country) or “global” (between developing and industrialized countries) phenomenon. Our study intends to offer an important contribution by analyzing the digital divide in Italy and the factors contributing to this situation at the territorial level (i.e., macroareas: North, Center, South and at the provincial level) To do this, we used the registration of Internet domains under the “.it” ccTLD as proxy. In particular, we analyzed domain names registered by firms. The analysis produced interesting results: the distribution of domains registered by firms in Italian provinces is more concentrated than the distribution according to income and number of firms, suggesting a diffusive effect. Furthermore, when analyzing the factors that contribute to the presence of a digital divide at the regional level, regression analysis was performed using demographic, social, economic and infrastructure indicators. Results show that Italian regions that have good productive efficiency measured by added value per employee and a high educational level measured by number of firms specialized in the ICT service sale (provider/maintainer) and by number of employees devoted to research and development are the best candidates for utilization of the Internet.
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Paper Nr: 722
Title:

DYNAMIC SERVICE COMPOSITION: A PETRI-NET BASED APPROACH
Authors:

Michael Köhler-Bußmeier, Daniel Moldt and Jan Ortmann
Abstract: Dynamic service composition requires a formal description of the services such that an agent can process these descriptions and reason about them. The amount of detail needed for an agent to grasp the meaning of a service may lead to clumsy specification. Petri nets offer a visual modeling technique for processes, that offers a refinement mechanism. Through this, a specification can be inspected on the level of detail needed for a given objective. In this paper we introduce a Petri net based approach to capture the semantics of services by combining Petri nets ideas from the description logic area focusing on ontologies. The resulting framework can than be used by agents to plan about activities involving services.
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Paper Nr: 20
Title:

MOBILE AGENT IN E-COMMERCE
Authors:

M. Elkobaisi
Abstract: Agent can be enhancing company modelling as well as to offer new techniques for developing intelligent applications. The key aspects of e-commerce agents are their autonomy, their mobility, their abilities to perceive, reason, and act in their surrounding environments, as well as the capability to cooperate with other agents to solve complex problems. Autonomy of agents involves adaptability to engage in negotiations governed by mechanisms not known in advance, while their mobility entails such negotiations taking place at remote locations. This paper aims at combining adaptability with mobility, by describing of agents appearing in the system and their basic interactions. Furthermore, this paper discusses the reasons why use of mobile agents within suggested system.
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Paper Nr: 106
Title:

INTEGRATING SEMANTIC WEB REASONING INTO LEARNING OBJECT METADATA
Authors:

Shang J. Kao and I-ching Hsu
Abstract: One of important functions of Learning Object Metadata (LOM) is to associate XML-based metadata with learning objects. The inherent problem of LOM is that it’s XML specified, which emphasizes syntax and format rather than semantic and knowledge representation. Hence, it lacks the semantic metadata to provide reasoning and inference functions. These functions are necessary for the computer-interpretable descriptions that are critical in the reusability and interoperability of the distributed learning objects. This paper aims at addressing this shortage, and proposes a multi-layered semantic framework to allow the reasoning and inference capabilities to be added to the conventional LOM. To illustrate how this framework work, we developed a Semantic-based Learning Objects Annotations Repository (SLOAR) that offers three different approaches to locate relevant learning objects for an e-learning application - LOM-based metadata, ontology-based reasoning, and rule-based inference.
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Paper Nr: 145
Title:

AN SMS-BASED E-GOVERNMENT MODEL
Authors:

Tony D. Susanto and Robert Goodwin
Abstract: More than one-third of e-government initiatives in developing countries are total failures, half are partial failures and just one sixth are successful, showing that e-government development in developing countries has many problems. According to Heeks (2003), one of the failure factors of e-government in developing countries is unrealistic design. This paper will focus on this factor, particularly the mismatch of the technological design for accessing e-government systems and the skills and access to the technology of the citizens. Many developing countries face problems of lack of internet infrastructure, internet illiteracy and high internet costs. When governments implement web-based e-government models which require citizens to access the system by the Internet/web medium, the failure rate is high as few citizens can participate. There is technology gap between design and reality. In the same countries, mobile phones are widely used, are low in cost, and citizens are more familiar with the short message service application (SMS) than the Internet and Web. This paper proposes an SMS-based e-government system as a first step toward a future Internet/web-based e-government system in order to increase public (citizens and businesses) participation.
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Paper Nr: 453
Title:

POWERING RSS AGGREGATORS WITH ONTOLOGIES - A Case for the RSSOwl Aggregator
Authors:

Felipe Martin, Oscar Díaz and Sergio F. Anzuola
Abstract: Content syndication through RSS is gaining wide acceptance, and it is envisaged that feed aggregators will be provided as a commodity in future browsers. As we consume more of our information by way of RSS feeds, search mechanisms other than simple keyword search will be required. To this end, advances in semantic tooling can effectively improve the current state of the art in feed aggregators. This work reports on the benefits of making a popular RSS aggregator, RSSOwl, ontology-aware. The paper uses three common functions, namely, semantic view, semantic navigation and semantic query, to illustrate how RSS aggregators can be “ontology powered”. The outcome is that location, browsing and rendering of RSS feeds are customised to the conceptual model of the reader, making RSS aggregators a powerful companion to face the “RSSosphere”. The system has been fully implemented, and successfully tested by distinct users.
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Paper Nr: 455
Title:

THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS E-DEMOCRACY - Empirical Evidence from the Viennese Population
Authors:

Alexander Prosser, Yan Guo and Jasmin Lenhart
Abstract: Systems for citizen participation have become technically feasible and are currently being developed. But what are the preferences of the citizens and which factors determine their attitude towards e-democracy? This paper reports the results of a representative survey in the Viennese population investigating the attitude towards e-democracy, the relationship to the respondents’ current Internet usage and possible motives for e-democracy.
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Paper Nr: 467
Title:

THE CASCOM ABSTRACT ARCHITECTURE FOR SEMANTIC SERVICE DISCOVERY AND COORDINATION IN IP2P ENVIRONMENTS
Authors:

Cesar Caceres, Alberto Fernández, Sascha Ossowski and Matteo Vasirani
Abstract: Intelligent agent-based peer-to-peer (IP2P) environments provide a means for pervasively providing and flexibly co-ordinating ubiquitous business application services to the mobile users and workers in the dynamically changing contexts of open, large-scale, and pervasive settings. In this paper, we present an abstract architecture for service delivery and coordination in IP2P environments that has been developed within the CASCOM project. Furthermore, we outline the potential benefits of a role-based interaction modelling approach for a concrete application of this abstract architecture based on a real-world scenario for emergency assistance in the healthcare domain.
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Paper Nr: 470
Title:

E-LEARNING USE IN THE TERTIARY EDUCATION IN CYPRUS
Authors:

Vasso Stylianou and Angelika Kokkinaki
Abstract: The aim of this study has been to investigate e-learning facilities provided in some of the main tertiary education institutions in Cyprus, namely the Intercollege, the University of Cyprus and the Higher Technical Institute. The findings of this investigation, formed as brief case studies, are presented herein and certain conclusions are being made.
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Paper Nr: 583
Title:

THE CONCEPT AND TECHNOLOGY OF PLUG AND PLAY BUSINESS
Authors:

Paul Davidsson, Anders Hederstierna, Andreas Jacobsson, Jan Persson, Bengt Carlsson, Stefan J. Johansson, Anders Nilsson, Gunnar Ågren and Stefan Östholm
Abstract: Several barriers to turn innovative ideas into growth-oriented businesses with a global outlook are identified. The Plug and Play Business concept is suggested to lower these barriers by making it possible for the innovator to plug into a network of actors or potential collaborators with automated entrepreneurial functions. A P2P paradigm with intelligent agents is proposed to realize an environment that manages a dynamic network of roles and business relations. It is suggested that a critical characteristic of the Plug and Play Business software is to facilitate trust in-between the actors.
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Paper Nr: 690
Title:

TOWARDS A WEB PORTAL DATA QUALITY MODEL
Authors:

Angélica Caro, Coral Calero, Ismael Caballero and Mario Piattini
Abstract: The technological advance and the internet have favoured the appearance of a great diversity of web applications, one of them are Web Portals. Through this, organizations develop their businesses in a more and more competitive environment. A decisive factor for this competitiveness is the assurance of data quality. In the last years, several research works on Web Data Quality have been developed. However, there is a lack of specific proposals for web portals data quality. In this paper, we will present a proposal for a model data quality for web portals based on some web data quality works.
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Paper Nr: 726
Title:

A SUCCINCT ANALYSIS OF WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION
Authors:

Wassam Zahreddine and Qusay Mahmoud
Abstract: Numerous standards are being proposed by industry and academia to find ways to best compose web services together. Such standards have produced semi-automatic compositions that can only be applied in a limited number of scenarios. Indeed, the future is moving towards a semantic web and fully automatic compositions will only occur when semantics are involved with web services. This paper presents brief notes on the state of the art in the field of service composition. The paper classifies service composition into two streams: semi-automatic and fully automatic, then compares and contrasts the available composition techniques.
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Area 5 - Human-Computer Interaction

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 96
Title:

MULTI-MODAL HANDS-FREE HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION: A PROTOTYPE SYSTEM
Authors:

Frangiskos Frangeskides and Andreas Lanitis
Abstract: Conventional Human Computer Interaction requires the use of hands for moving the mouse and pressing keys on the keyboard. As a result paraplegics are not able to use computer systems unless they acquire special Human Computer Interaction (HCI) equipment. In this paper we describe a prototype system that aims to provide paraplegics the opportunity to use computer systems without the need for additional invasive hardware. The proposed system is a multi-modal system combining both visual and speech input. Visual input is provided through a standard web camera used for capturing face images showing the user of the computer. Image processing techniques are used for tracking head movements, making it possible to use head motion in order to interact with a computer. Speech input is used for activating commonly used tasks that are normally activated using the mouse or the keyboard. Speech input improves the speed and ease of executing various HCI tasks in a hands free fashion. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated using a number of specially designed test applications. According to the quantitative results, it is possible to perform most HCI tasks with the same ease and accuracy as in the case that a touch pad of a portable computer is used. Currently our system is being used by a number of paraplegics.
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Paper Nr: 364
Title:

PROACTIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH HANDHELD DEVICES
Authors:

Luís Carriço, Marco Sá and Pedro Antunes
Abstract: This paper presents a set of components that support psychotherapy processes on mobile and office settings. One provides patients the required access to psychotherapy artefacts, enabling an adequate and tailored aid and motivation for fulfilment of common therapy tasks. Another offers therapists the ability to define and refine the artefacts, in order to present, help and react to the patient according to his/her specific needs and therapy progress. Two other components allow the analysis and annotation of the aforementioned artefacts. All these components run on a PDA base. Evaluation results validated some of the design choices, and indicate future directions and improvements.
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Paper Nr: 447
Title:

FACE RECOGNITION FROM SKETCHES USING ADVANCED CORRELATION FILTERS USING HYBRID EIGENANALYSIS FOR FACE SYNTHESIS
Authors:

Marios Savvides, Marios Savvides and Vijayakumar Bhagavatula
Abstract: Most face recognition systems focus on photo-based (or video) face recognition, but there are many law-enforcement applications where a police sketch artist composes a face sketch of the criminal and that is used by the officers to look for the criminal. Currently state-of-the-art research approach transforms all test face images into sketches then perform recognition in the sketch domain using the sketch composite, however there is one flaw in such approach which hinders it from being deployed fully automatic in the field, due to the fact that generating a sketch image from a surveillance footage will vary greatly due to illumination variations of the face in the footage under different lighting conditions. This will result imprecise sketches for real time recognition. In our approach we propose the opposite which is a better approach; we propose to generate a realistic face image from the composite sketch using a Hybrid subspace method and then build an illumination tolerant correlation filter which can recognize the person under different illumination variations. We show experimental results on our approach on the CMU PIE (Pose Illumination and Expression) database on the effectiveness of our novel approach.
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Paper Nr: 712
Title:

ENWIC: VISUALIZING WIKI SEMANTICS AS TOPIC MAPS - An Automated Topic Discovery and Visualization Tool
Authors:

Cleo Espiritu, Eleni Stroulia and Tapanee Tirapat
Abstract: In this paper, we present ENWiC (EduNuggets Wiki Crawler), a framework for intelligent visualization of Wikis. In recent years, e-learning has emerged as an appealing alternative to traditional teaching. The effectiveness of e-Learning is depended upon the sharing of information on the web, which makes the web a vast library of information that students and instructors can utilize for educational purposes. Wiki’s collaborative authoring nature makes it a very attractive tool to use for e-Learning purposes; however, its text-based navigational structure becomes insufficient as the Wiki grows in size, and this backlash can hinder students from taking full advantage of the information available. ENWiC’s goal is to provide student with an intelligent interface for navigating Wikis and other similar large-scale websites. ENWiC make use of graphic organizers to visualize the relationships between content pages so that students can gain a cognitional understanding of the content as they navigating through the Wiki pages. We describe ENWiC’s automated visualization process, and its user interfaces for students to view and navigate the Wiki in a meaningful manner, and for instructors to further enhance the visualization. We also discuss our usability study for evaluating ENWiC’s effectiveness as a Wiki Interface.
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Paper Nr: 756
Title:

A SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT TO EVALUATE DRIVER PERFORMANCES WHILE INTERACTING WITH TELEMATICS SYSTEMS
Authors:

Gennaro Costagliola, Sergio Di Martino and Filomena Ferrucci
Abstract: The evaluation of user interfaces for vehicular telematics systems is a challenging task, since it is necessary to understand the effects of interaction on driving performances. To this aim, in 2005 we developed and presented a framework specifically conceived for the indoor evaluation of these systems. In this paper we present some significant improvements of that proposal. In particular, we describe a graphical analysis tool able to provide a clear and deep insight about driver behaviors using the high amount of data generated by the simulator. Moreover, we report on the evaluation analysis that has been performed to assess the effectiveness of the framework for measuring driving performances.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 28
Title:

CONSTRUCTIVIST INSTRUCTIONAL PRINCIPLES, LEARNER PSYCHOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGICAL ENABLERS OF LEARNING
Authors:

Erkki Patokorpi
Abstract: Constructivists generally assume that the central principles and objectives of the constructivist pedagogy are realized by information and communication technology (ICT) enhanced learning. This paper critically examines the grounds for this assumption in the light of available empirical and theoretical research literature. The general methodological thrust comes from Alavi and Leidner (2001), who have called for research on the interconnections of instructional method, psychological processes and technology. Hermeneutic psychology and philosophical argumentation are applied to identify some potential or actual weaknesses in the chain of connections between constructivist pedagogical principles, psychological processes, supporting technologies and the actual application of ICT in a learning environment. One example of a weak link is personalisation technologies whose immaturity hampers the constructivists’ attempts at enabling learners to create personal knowledge. Pragmatism enters the picture as a ready source of criticism, bringing out a certain one-sidedness of the constructivist view of man and learning.
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Paper Nr: 110
Title:

AN INCLUSIVE APPROACH TO COOPERATIVE EVALUATION OF WEB USER INTERFACES
Authors:

Amanda M. Melo and M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas
Abstract: Accessibility has been one of the major challenges for interface design of Web applications nowadays, especially those involving e-government and e-learning. In this paper we present an inclusive and participatory approach to the Cooperative Evaluation of user interfaces. It was carried out with an interdisciplinary research group that aims to include students with disabilities in the university campus and academic life. HCI specialists and non-specialists, with and without visual disabilities, participated as users and observers during the evaluation of a Web site designed to be one of the communication channels between the group and the University community. This paper shows the benefits and the challenges of considering the differences among stakeholders in an inclusive and participatory approach, when designing for accessibility within the Universal Design paradigm.
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Paper Nr: 352
Title:

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ADAPTIVE WEB APPLICATION
Authors:

Raoudha Ben Djemaa, ikram AMOUS and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou
Abstract: Web applications are now widely used for diffusing and processing information over the network. Methodological guidelines which assist web application developers in their task must take into account users’ preferences to generate adaptable web interfaces. This paper presents MCSD-case, a generator of adaptive web application, which addresses the issue of designing and automatically deploying such application. MCSD-case‘s target is to facilitate the automatic execution of the design and the automatic generation of adaptable web interface. Using MCSD-case, designers can specify, at a conceptual level, the features of the web application to be generated. These features are made operational by instantiating different models dedicated to the description of the expected functionalities, the users and some features concerning adaptation. The implementation of MCSD-case is based on HTML and Java Servlets to instantiate the models which are translated in XML files then XSL files to generate the HTML page corresponding to the user aims.
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Paper Nr: 383
Title:

A MULTIMODAL INTERFACE FOR PERSONALISING SPATIAL DATA IN MOBILE GIS
Authors:

Julie Doyle, Joe Weakliam, Michela Bertolotto and David Wilson
Abstract: Recently the availability and usage of more advanced mobile devices has significantly increased, with many users accessing information and applications while on the go. However, for users to truly accept and adopt such technologies it is necessary to address human-computer interaction challenges associated with such devices. We are interested in exploring these issues within the context of mobile GIS applications. Current mobile GIS interfaces suffer from two major problems: interface complexity and information overload. We have developed a novel system that addresses both of these issues. Firstly, our system allows GIS users to interact multimodally, providing them with the flexibility of choosing their preferred mode of interaction for specific tasks in specific contexts. Secondly, it records all such interactions, analyses them and uses them to build individual user profiles. Based on these, our system returns personalised spatial data to users, and hence eliminates superfluous information that might be otherwise presented to them. In this paper we describe the system we have developed that combines multimodal interaction with personalised services, and that can be used by mobile users, whether they are novices or professionals within the field of GIS. The advantages of our multimodal GIS interface approach are demonstrated through a user interaction study.
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Paper Nr: 406
Title:

EVALUATION OF USER INTERFACES FOR GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A CASE STUDY
Authors:

Lucia P. Maziero, Cláudia Robbi, Laura Sanchéz García and Cassio Da Pieva Ehlers
Abstract: This paper presents an evaluation of user interfaces of two Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, ArcView and Spring. This work is related to a specific characteristic of those interfaces, which is to allow the user to view a map. User interfaces were evaluated based on the main cognitive difficulties related to the execution and evaluation bridges employing a cognitive engineering approach and, complementarily, in accordance with the semiotics engineering parameter called “system communicability”. Both evaluated systems are generally considered to be quite complex, not only in terms of understanding the interaction elements present in the interface, but also the knowledge embedded in the tasks that can be accomplished by these systems. Although the study described in this work was focused on a single task it confirmed the general opinion about these kinds of applications: a novice user cannot explore them without some assistance from an expert user or by studying books and manuals. Even an expert user usually faces significant difficulties using those GIS tools.
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Paper Nr: 413
Title:

CONTEXT OF USE ANALYSIS - Activity Checklist for Visual Data Mining
Authors:

Edwige F. Badjio and Francois Poulet
Abstract: In this paper, emphasis is placed on understanding how human behaviour interacts with visual data mining (VDM) tools in order to improve their design and usefulness. Computer tools that are more useful assist users in achieving desired goals. Our objective is to highlight quality in context of use problems with existing VDM systems that need to be addressed in the design of new VDM systems. For this purpose, we defined a checklist based on activity theory. The responses provided by 15 potential users are summarized as design insights. The users respond to questions selected from the activity checklist. This paper describes the evaluation method and shares lessons learned from its application.
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Paper Nr: 445
Title:

INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM: A MODEL FOR STUDENT TRACKING
Authors:

Francesco Colace, Massimo De Santo and Marcello Iacone
Abstract: Thanks to the technological improvements of recent years, distance education today represents a real and effective tool for integrate and support the traditional formative processes. In literature it is widely recognized that an important component of this success is related with the ability “to customize” the learning process for the specific needs of a given learner. This ability is still far to have been reached and there is a lot of interest in investigating new approaches and tools to adapt the formative process on the specific individual needs. In this paper we present and discuss a model to capture information about learning style and capabilities of students; this information is successively used to select the most suitable learning objects and to arrange them in “adapted” learning paths.
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Paper Nr: 552
Title:

AN EVALUATION OF A VISUAL QUERY LANGUAGE FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Authors:

Haifa E. Elariss, Souheil Khaddaj and Ramzi Haraty
Abstract: In recent years, many non-expert user applications have been developed to query Geographic Information Systems. GIS are used to browse and view data about space and time thus naming them spatio-temporal databases. The Location Based Services which are considered as part of the spatio-temporal field, concern the user who asks questions related to his current position by using a mobile phone. Our research aims at designing and developing an International Visual Query Language (IVQL) that allows users to query databases based on their location. The databases are installed on a GIS server computer. The queries are sent to the server from a mobile phone through the Short Messages System (SMS). With the emerging Globalization of user interfaces, IVQL is meant to have a global and international user interface that could be understood by all users worldwide. We propose a user interface consisting of smiley icons that are used to build an international query language. Smiley icons enable the users to access data and build queries easily and in a user-friendly way. IVQL, its user interface, model and evaluation are explained. The query formulation is illustrated using a sample GIS system for tourists, to perform network and proximity analysis.
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Paper Nr: 564
Title:

A FUZZY-BASED DISTANCE TO IMPROVE EMPIRICAL METHODS FOR MENU CLUSTERING
Authors:

Cristina Coppola, Gennaro Costagliola, Sergio Di Martino, Filomena Ferrucci and Tiziana Pacelli
Abstract: An effective menu organization is fundamental to obtain usable applications. A common practice to achieve this is to adopt empirical methods in the menu design phase, by requesting a number of intended final users to provide their ideal tasks arrangements. However, to improve the effectiveness of this approach, it is necessary to filter results, by identifying and discarding data coming from subjects whose mental models are too weak on the considered domain. To this aim, in the paper, we propose a formal tool suited to support menu designers, which is based on a fuzzy-based distance we defined. This measure can be easily calculated on the empirical datasets, thanks to a specifically conceived supporting application we developed. As a result, by exploiting the proposed solution, menu designers can rely on a formal tool to evaluate significance of empirical data, thus leading towards more effective menu clustering.
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Paper Nr: 565
Title:

AUTOMATIC FEEDBACK GENERATION - Using Ontology in an Intelligent Tutoring System for both Learner and Author Based on Student Model
Authors:

Pooya Bakhtyari
Abstract: Presenting feedback to learner is one of the essential elements needed for effective learning. Feedback can be given to learners during learning but also to authors during course development. But producing valuable feedback is often time consuming and makes delays. So with this reason and the others like incomplete and inaccurate feedback generating by human, we think that it’s important to generate feedback automatically for both learner and author in an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). In this research we used ontology to create a rich supply of feedback. We designed all components of the ITS like course materials and learner model based on ontology to share common understanding of the structure of information among other software agents and make it easier to analyze the domain knowledge. With ontologies in fact, we specify the knowledge to be learned and how the knowledge should be learned. In this paper we also show a mechanism to make reason from the resources and learner model that it made feedbacks based on learner.
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Paper Nr: 649
Title:

MEDICAL INFORMATION PORTALS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF PERSONALIZED SEARCH MECHANISMS AND SEARCH INTERFACES
Authors:

Andrea Andrenucci
Abstract: The World Wide Web has become, since its creation, one of most popular tools for accessing and distributing medical information. The purpose of this paper is to provide indications about how users search for health-related information and how medical portals should be implemented to fit users’ needs. The results are mainly based on the evaluation of a prototype that tailors the retrieval of documents from the Web4health portal to users’ characteristics and information needs with the help of a user model. The evaluation is conducted through a user empirical study based on user observation and in-depth interviews.
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Paper Nr: 724
Title:

E-INSTRUMENTATION: A COLLABORATIVE AND ADAPTATIVE INTELLIGENT HCI FOR REMOTE CONTROL OF DEVICES
Authors:

Christophe Gravier and Christophe Gravier
Abstract: What is being discussed here is a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning System. The learning system aims at providing a distant, collaborative and adaptative access to high technological devices. Some strong points in the fields of HCI are to be stressed : the user is expected to access the device while being in a group of users, that is to say ”group awareness” must be supported by some mechanisms. In order to get a generic platform, being ”instrument-independant”, tools are expected to be provided for the graphic user interface to be easily (and without too much user skills) built. Moreover, the notion of sequence of utilization of a device could possibly be a tool enabling new models of evaluation of graphic user interface (consequently HCI) and/or user behaviors.
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Paper Nr: 27
Title:

LIBRARY IN VIRTUAL REALITY - An Innovative Way for Accessing, Disseminating, and Sharing Information
Authors:

Tereza Kirner, Andréa Matos and Plácida L. Costa
Abstract: Abstract.This paper focuses on Virtual Reality (VR) as a very powerful technology that can be applied to the libraries, aiming at contributing to the activities of accessing, disseminating, and sharing information. The paper presents the VR concept and describes some libraries in virtual reality under utilization in different countries. In the final considerations, it is pointed out the use of virtual reality to develop libraries as collaborative virtual environments.
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Paper Nr: 443
Title:

INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM: AN ASSESSMENT STRATEGY FOR TUTORING ON-LINE
Authors:

Francesco Colace, Massimo De Santo and Mario Vento
Abstract: In this paper we introduce a tutoring approach for E-Learning formative process. This approach is strictly related to the assessment phase. Assessment in the context of education is the process of characterizing what a student knows. The reasons to perform evaluation are quite varied, ranging from a need to informally understand student learning progress in a course to a need to characterize student expertise in a subject. Otherwise finding an appropriate assessment tool is a central challenge in designing a tutoring approach. In this paper we propose an assessment method based on the use of ontologies and their representation through a Bayesian Networks. The aim of our approach is the generation of adapted questionnaires in order to test the student’s knowledge in every phase of learning process. Analyzing the results of the evaluation an intelligent tutoring system can help students offering an effective support to learning process and adapting their learning paths.
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Paper Nr: 537
Title:

TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF LMS - A Conceptual Framework
Authors:

Gabriela Diaz-Anton and María A. Perez
Abstract: Learning Management Systems (LMS) are used widely to support training in an organization. Selecting and implementing an LMS can have an impact in cost, time and customer satisfaction in the organization. Due to the existence of a variety of definitions on the subject of e-learning and LMS, it is necessary a conceptual framework using an ontology. This article presents a research in progress whose final objective is to develop a method to select, deploy and integrate an LMS into an organization with a systemic quality approach. As a first step, in this article is presented an ontology to conceptualize the terms associated to LMS, unifying them through their relations.
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Paper Nr: 698
Title:

MODELING THE TASK - Leveraging Knowledge-in-the-head at Design Time
Authors:

George Christou, Robert Jacob and Pericles Cheng
Abstract: A key problem in Human Computer Interaction is the evaluation and comparison of tasks that are designed in different interaction styles. A closely related problem is how to create a model of the task that allows this comparison. This paper tries to tackle these two questions. It initially presents a structure (Specific User Knowledge Representation) that allows the creation of task models which allow direct comparisons between different interaction styles. The model allows the researcher or the designer to evaluate an interaction design very early in the design process.
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Paper Nr: 739
Title:

GDIT - Tool for the Design, Specification and Generation of Goals Driven User Interfaces
Authors:

Antonio Carrillo, Juan Falgueras and Antonio Guevara
Abstract: In previous works, we have made the proposal of, firstly , a new style of interaction called Goals Driven Interaction (GDI), specially appropriate for those software applications in which a zero learning time is necessary, and secondly , a methodology and a notation for the specification of these Goals Driven user Interfaces. Now, we introduce a software tool which brings support and facilitate the design and the specification of this type of user interfaces, using that specialized methodology and notation. In addition, the tool generates the corresponding prototype, from a model or specification made previously.
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Paper Nr: 746
Title:

PERSONALIZATION IN INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS - The Generation of Compliance?
Authors:

Stephen Sobol
Abstract: This paper examines applications of personalization in interactive systems and seeks to map success in this area into a general theory of database and narrative. It is argued that conventions of human communication established well before the digital age play a large part in determining user responses to personalization. The analysis offers a logic to help determine when to apply personalization. The results of an experiment to detect personalization effects are reported which provide evidence of the value of personalization.
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Paper Nr: 755
Title:

UBIQUITOUS KNOWLEDGE MODELING FOR DIALOGUE SYSTEMS
Authors:

Porfírio Filipe and Nuno Mamede
Abstract: The main general problem that we want to address is the reconfiguration of dialogue systems to work with a generic plug-and-play device. This paper describes our research in designing knowledge-based everyday devices that can be dynamically adapted to spoken dialogue systems. We propose a model for ubiquitous knowledge representation that enables the spoken dialogue system to be aware of the devices belonging to the domain and of the tasks they provide. We consider that each device can be augmented with computational capabilities in order to support its own knowledge model. A knowledge-based broker adapts the spoken dialogue system to deal with an arbitrary set of devices. The knowledge integration process between the knowledge models of the devices and the knowledge model of the broker is depicted. This process was tested in the home environment domain.
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