IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
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Guest Editorial Foreword to the Special Issue on Semantics-Enabled Software Engineering HE advent of the World Wide Web has led many corporations to Web-enable their business applications and to the adoption of Web service standards in middleware platforms. Marking a turning point in the evolution of the Web, the Semantic Web is expected to provide more benefits to the field of software engineering. Over the past five years, there have been a number of attempts to bring together languages and tools, such as the unified modeling language, originally developed for software engineering, with semantic Web languages such as resource description framework (RDF) and Web ontology language. Recently, more and more researchers are investigating how to use ontologies and rules to improve guidance throughout the software development process. The current special issue on Semantics-enabled Software Engineering was edited with the purpose of depicting the state of the art and practice of the impact of semantic technologies in the field of Software Engineering. We received 22 high-quality submissions from leading researchers in the area and, finally, accepted six papers for inclusion in the special issue. Each paper was reviewed by at least three expert reviewers and was in some cases reviewed up to three rounds to ensure that the highest quality standards were met. In many cases, researchers have focused on the use of semantic technologies to improve the quality of software tools, an approach which is more convenient and better understood by Semantic Web researchers and can be challenging for Software Engineering practitioners. The paper “Incorporating the Ontology Paradigm into Software Engineering: Enhancing DomainDriven Programming in Clojure/Java” by Djuri´c and Devedˇzi´c introduces a new viewpoint by allowing software developers to produce simple domain-driven code with richer semantics, an approach which more closely resembles the typical software development process. This objective is realized by employing meta-programming to incorporate useful semantic information through the introduction of a meta-Domain-Specific Language, which is called Magic Potion. In the paper entitled “Supporting Object-Oriented Programming of Semantic Web Software,” Quasthoff and Meinel explore the possible approaches for the development of Semantic Webenabled software systems. The object triple mapping (OTM) method has been explored as one of the main methods to develop such software systems. The OTM method has been evaluated in several case studies that discover and categorize the relevant experiences in the actual employment of this method.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSMCC.2011.2169011
Not only does the paper explain the development of Semantic Web software using OTM but also provides recommendations on the most useful properties that are needed to develop Semantic Web-enabled software applications. Business Process Models (BPMs) have been extensively used to represent the processes within an enterprise, such that the current process could be understood, documented, and improved if needed. As enterprise processes become more complex, the management of BPMs requires more efficient technology. Ghidini et al. have employed semantic annotations to enrich BPMs with information from domain ontologies. In their work, “Semantics based aspect oriented management of exceptional flows in business processes,” the authors show how the semantic representation of BPMs can be useful to define the details of the business process structure, business domain constraints, and requirements. They also show how reasoning techniques can be helpful to automatically verify constraints on the management of exceptional flows in business processes. Software-intensive systems in industrial automation domains and projects often assemble groups of experts from diverse engineering domains to work together in a heterogeneous and in cases distributed engineering environments to produce a wide range of models, support varying processes, and use tools that were not originally intended to be used collaboratively. The paper, “Semantic Integration of Software and Systems Engineering Environments,” by Moser and Biffl describes an Engineering Knowledge Base model that facilitates collaboration in business IT and industrial automation projects by allowing for the seamless integration of multidisciplinary engineering aspects of a project with a focus on providing links between data structures of engineering tools and systems to support the exchange of information between these tools. This work has been evaluated on two industrial case studies. The paper, “An empirically-grounded conceptual architecture for applications on the Web of Data,” by Heitmann et al. provides an elegant conceptual framework for semantic Webbased applications that use Web of Data (e.g., RDF Stores) as opposed to traditional database-driven models. The work explores and surveys 124 Semantic Web applications based on which a conceptual architecture for Semantic Web applications is developed. The architecture serves as a platform to investigate the main implementation challenges facing developers using semantic technologies. The most notable finding of this work is that although database-driven frameworks exist that provide standard components and architectural design patterns to develop new applications, such frameworks do not yet exist for the development of Semantic Web-based applications.
1094-6977/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS AND REVIEWS, VOL. 42, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
Software engineering development processes need to be closely aligned with tasks related to IT Service Management (ITSM) especially those relevant to Service Level Agreement monitoring, fulfillment and control. The integration of the software engineering processes with ITSM is important because of the fact that it leads to a proper alignment between business aspects and IT. In the paper, “Applying ontology-based models for supporting integrated software development and IT service management processes,” Valiente et al. review existing knowledge-enhanced approaches in both the software engineering and IT service management domains and describe the most influential aspects and properties of these approaches that allow for the smooth integration of ITSM/SE.
EBRAHIM BAGHERI, Guest Editor Athabasca University Athabasca, AB T9S 3A3, Canada
[email protected] DRAGAN GASˇ EVIC´ , Guest Editor Athabasca University Athabasca, AB T9S 3A3, Canada
[email protected] JEFF Z. PAN, Guest Editor The University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, U.K.
[email protected]
Ebrahim Bagheri received the Ph.D. degree from the Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, New Brunswick, Canada. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the AU School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University, Athabasca, AB, Canada, a Visiting Professor with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, an Honorary Research Associate with the University of New Brunswick, and an IBM Center Advanced Studies Faculty Fellow. Previously, he was affiliated with the Institute for Information Technology at the National Research Council Canada.. His work on collaborative modeling is one of a kind in providing tools and techniques for collaborative risk management and quality engineering. He has extensively published more than 80 papers in top-tier international journals and conferences.
Dragan Gaˇsevi´c received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia, in 2004. He is currently a Canada Research Chair in Semantic Technologies and an Associate Professor with the School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University, Athabasca, AB, Canada. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, an Associated Research Member of the GOOD OLD AI Research Network at the University of Belgrade, and an IBM Center Advanced Studies Faculty Fellow. Being a (co-)author of numerous research papers, often keynote speaker, and strongly committed to both the development of international research community and the concept of cross-community engineering, he has (co-)founded several new events (e.g., Software Language Engineering Conference and Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference).
Jeff Z. Pan received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from The University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K., in 2004. He joined the Faculty in the Department of Computing Science, The University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, U.K., in 2005. He is currently the Coordinator of the Knowledge Technology Group and the Deputy Director of Research of the department. He is a Key Contributor to the W3C OWL2 standard. He leads the work of the TrOWL Tractable OWL2 reasoning infrastructure. He is widely recognized for his work on scalable and efficient ontology reasoning; he gave tutorials on this topic in, e.g., Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2010, European Semantic Web Conference 2010, ESWC 2011, SemTech 2011, and the Reasoning Web Summer Schools in 2010 and 2011.
