Abstract

From a maintenance perspective, only software that is well understood can evolve in a controlled and high-quality manner. Software evolution itself is a knowledge-driven process that requires the use and integration of different knowledge resources. The authors present a formal representation of an existing process model to support the evolution of software systems by representing knowledge resources and the process model using a common representation based on ontologies and description logics. This formal representation supports the use of reasoning services across different knowledge resources, allowing for the inference of explicit and implicit relations among them. Furthermore, an interactive story metaphor is introduced to guide maintainers during their software evolution activities and to model the interactions between the users, knowledge resources and process model.

Abstract

Traceability links provide support for software engineers in understanding relations and dependencies among software artefacts created during the software development process. The authors focus on re-establishing traceability links between existing source code and documentation to support software maintenance. They present a novel approach that addresses this issue by creating formal ontological representations for both documentation and source code artefacts. Their approach recovers traceability links at the semantic level, utilising structural and semantic information found in various software artefacts. These linked ontologies are supported by ontology reasoners to allow the inference of implicit relations among these software artefacts.

As of June 1st, 2008, I'm now working as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Coinciding with the new position, I'm also building a new website, www.semanticsoftware.info. There are two main ideas behind this website: First, to inform about the research and teaching activities of my Semantic Software Lab, which I'm establishing at Concordia; and second, to establish a community portal for selected topics in the area of semantic systems — for example, for people interested in the applications of NLP in software engineering.

Abstract

Providing access to cultural heritage data beyond book digitization and information retrieval projects is important for delivering advanced semantic support to end users, in order to address their specific needs. We introduce a separation of concerns for heritage data management by explicitly defining different user groups and analyzing their particular requirements. Based on this analysis, we developed a comprehensive system architecture for accessing, annotating, and querying textual historic data. Novel features are the deployment of a Wiki user interface, natural language processing services for end users, metadata generation in OWL ontology format, SPARQL queries on textual data, and the integration of external clients through Web Services. We illustrate these ideas with the management of a historic encyclopedia of architecture.

Abstract

Reported speech in the form of direct and indirect reported speech is an important indicator of evidentiality in traditional newspaper texts, but also increasingly in the new media that rely heavily on citation and quotation of previous postings, as for instance in blogs or newsgroups. This paper details the basic processing steps for reported speech analysis and reports on performance of an implementation in form of a GATE resource.

We extended the paper submission deadline for our workshop on Semantic Technologies in System Maintenance (STSM) to April 25th.

CASCON 2007 Workshop Report

IBM Technical Report: TR-74-211

October 25, 2007

Abstract

Many changes have occurred in software engineering research and practice since 1968, when software engineering as a research domain was established. One of these research areas is traceability, a key aspect of any engineering discipline, enables engineers to understand the relations and dependencies among various artifacts in a system.

Together with Jürgen Rilling, Dragan Gašević, and Jeff Z. Pan I'm organizing the first International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in System Maintenance (STSM 2008), which will be co-located with the 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2008) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Detailed information on the workshop, submission guidelines, and other news are now available from the workshop's webpage.

It's official: I'm co-organizing the (first) International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in System Maintenance (STSM) at the next IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2008) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Some preliminary information are available on the ICPC website. A call for papers and more details are coming soon!

Abstract

In this paper, we present a formal process model to support the comprehension and maintenance of software systems. The model provides a formal ontological representation that supports the use of reasoning services across different knowledge resources. In the presented approach, we employ our Description Logic knowledge base to support the maintenance process management, as well as detailed analyses among resources, e.g., the traceability between various software artifacts. The resulting unified process model provides users with active guidance in selecting and utilizing these resources that are context-sensitive to a particular comprehension task. We illustrate both, the technical foundation based on our existing SOUND environment, as well as the general objectives and goals of our process model.

Keywords: Software maintenance, process modeling, ontological reasoning, software comprehension, traceability, text mining.