Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Design patterns are a valuable mechanism to capture and disseminate best practice in software design. The oft-cited definition of an Alexandrian pattern, , stimulates the definition of patterns from knowledge and expertise in any domain. Indeed, their application has spread from the object-oriented community, who first adopted them, through different software areas including human-computer interaction, virtual environments, ubiquitous computing, hypermedia and web engineering. This kind of patterns that describe successful solutions to recurring design problems in terms of a specific domain of application are known as domain-specific patterns.

The increasing number of available design patterns is making difficult to find the most appropriate one given a specific problem since this task requires mastery on existing design patterns. Hence, there is a need to introduce a formalism to describe them accurately and to allow a rigorous reasoning process to assist users to retrieve those patterns that solve their problems. With this purpose, we propose a semantic representation for domain-specific patterns based on the domain knowledge for which they were written and for which an ontology-based approach is applied. This representation is used as an underlying armature for complementing the informal textual pattern description by means of semantic annotations. The combination of the literary pattern representation with its formal representation counterpart could assist an intelligent search engine that supports users not just for retrieval purposes but also for the discovery useful design solutions improving, therefore, their ability to develop quality software.

The Model-Driven Development (MDD) describes and maintains models of the system under development. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) supports a set of semantics and notation that addresses all scales of architectural complexity by using a MDD perspective. Use Cases and Activity Charts are two modeling techniques of the UML. The first one helps the designers to identify the requirements of the system discovering its high level functionality. The second one helps them to specify the internal behaviour of a certain entity or subsystem of the software developed, such as a database, a graphical interface, a software component, or any specific software. However, there is not a direct way to relate/model the requirements (use cases) with their internal behavior (activity charts). In this paper we present a method for describing use cases with activity charts. Our technique also allow us to identify the two main use case relationships —include and generalization— by means of activity charts. As a case study, we will show how to use the activity charts to describe graphical user interfaces (GUI) from use cases. In particular, we will show an Internet book shopping system example.

In numerous cases, the modelling of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a difficult task. This fact is partially due to the natural complexity of spatial types and invariants. Based on this observation, the present paper aims at specializing the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and its associated Object Constraint Language (OCL) in order to facilitate the design of GIS. A complete study of the proposed extensions will be presented as well as several in-depth experiments in the domain of agricultural information systems.

Current prototypes of UbiComp environments are bounded to a physical site equipped with a WLAN. However, next generation of UbiComp environments will have to aggregate different physical sites, spread over a wide geographic area, each one equipped with an own WLAN, and interconnected by the internet. The emerging model is a meta-environment that integrates different physical environments. It must provide users with a uniform interaction model independently from the physical site they are in. Clients, active in a site, have to get access only to services available in that site. Moreover, users, who move from one site to another one, must have the possibility of suspending their computations before leaving the site and of resuming them once in the new site. These needs call for advanced location and tracking services. This paper presents a location and tracking service for meta-UbiComp environments. The location function is in charge of determining mobile clients active inside the meta-environment, at every time, in every physical site. Mobile users get access only to services available in the physical site they are in. In addition, users are tracked, and the environment automatically reconfigures itself when they move from one location to another one, or when they definitively leave the environment. This makes the environment able to reliably handle resources and services.

This paper deals with the application of research results from Structural Computing (particularly the grand unified theory) to the domain analysis process. The domain analyzed is knowledge transfer in higher education which includes supporting teaching, researching and learning. In order to create an appropriate knowledge transfer system, concepts of the domain in question are analyzed applying the grand unified theory. The “personal folder” qualifies as the most basic structuring mechanism for this application domain. The personal folder concept is investigated and its properties are discussed from the data, structure and behavior perspective.

We have ever more opportunities to create content, e.g. using digital cameras, or, taking photos with mobile phones and publishing them on the Web, to name just a few. At the same time, as content consumers, we have a growing need for context-aware, tailored content, e.g. location and time-based services delivered via wireless LAN to our PDA. Thus, as content we aim at higher levels of re-use and as we expect individualised content at high quality.

There is a gap, one may call it a “content crisis” even, between the growing opportunities for content creation and the increasing needs raised by content consumption. Content Engineering as a discipline may be a step forward to bridge that gap.

Information technology is supposed to provide services and to support work. The term service is used in different ways, for both parts of a system and for what a company provides in electronic form. Common is that it describes the encapsulation of some functionality so it can be used to process data in a well defined way.

The use of information technology is changing though. It is now supposed to serve individual users with their knowledge work and it is supposed to improve cooperation between organisations and access in general. Applications as they are used now leave too much work to the user and even require extra work around their limitations and to learn to use them.

Structural computing tries to provide a new kind of services working with structures instead of data to support knowledge work. Web services on the other side are an attempt to enable cooperation between organisations. Both have a problem in relation to individual users.

At the same time new applications like blogs and wikis gain ground. They adopt more easily to their users needs and are successfully used both in private and for knowledge work. They express a different view on the use of information technology. This paper tries to show perspectives blogs and similar applications can give on services and system architecture.