Microsoft repository version 2 and the open information model

Microsoft Repository is an object-oriented meta-data management facility that ships in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft SQL Server. It includes two main components:

• •• A repository engine that implements a set of object-oriented interfaces on top of a SQL database system. A developer can use these interfaces to define information models (i.e., schemas) and manipulate instances of the models.
• •• The Open Information Model, which is a set of information models that cover object modeling, database modeling, and component reuse.

The repository system is designed to meet the persistent storage needs of software tools. Its main technical goals are:

• •• Compatibility with Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) architecture
• •• Extensibility by customers and independent software vendors, so they can add behavior to objects stored by the repository engine and extend information models provided by Microsoft and others.
• •• Flexible and efficient versioning, configuration management, and checkout/checkin to support team-oriented activities.

This paper describes the programming interface and implementation of the repository engine and the Open Information Model.     

Daisy: an open soil-crop-atmosphere system model

Daisy is a well tested dynamic model for simulation of water and nitrogen dynamics and crop growth in agro-ecosystems. The model aims at simulating water balance, nitrogen balance and losses, development in soil organic matter and crop growth and production in crop rotations under alternate management strategies. The software, which recently was rewritten, has been carefully designed to facilitate interaction with other models, either by replacing individual Daisy processes or by using Daisy as a part of a larger system, thus making Daisy an open software system.     

APROMORE: An advanced process model repository

Business process models are becoming available in large numbers due to their widespread use in many industrial applications such as enterprise and quality engineering projects. On the one hand, this raises a challenge as to their proper management: how can it be ensured that the proper process model is always available to the interested stakeholder? On the other hand, the richness of a large set of process models also offers opportunities, for example with respect to the re-use of existing model parts for new models. This paper describes the functionality and architecture of an advanced process model repository, named APROMORE. This tool brings together a rich set of features for the analysis, management and usage of large sets of process models, drawing from state-of-the art research in the field of process modeling. A prototype of the platform is presented in this paper, demonstrating its feasibility, as well as an outlook on the further development of APROMORE.     

Usability measurement and metrics: A consolidated model

Usability is increasingly recognized as an important quality factor for interactive software systems, including traditional GUIs-style applications, Web sites, and the large variety of mobile and PDA interactive services. Unusable user interfaces are probably the single largest reasons why encompassing interactive systems – computers plus people, fail in actual use. The design of this diversity of applications so that they actually achieve their intended purposes in term of ease of use is not an easy task. Although there are many individual methods for evaluating usability; they are not well integrated into a single conceptual framework that facilitate their usage by developers who are not trained in the filed of HCI. This is true in part because there are now several different standards (e.g., ISO 9241, ISO/IEC 9126, IEEE Std.610.12) or conceptual models (e.g., Metrics for Usability Standards in Computing [MUSiC]) for usability, and not all of these standards or models describe the same operational definitions and measures. This paper first reviews existing usability standards and models while highlighted the limitations and complementarities of the various standards. It then explains how these various models can be unified into a single consolidated, hierarchical model of usability measurement. This consolidated model is called Quality in Use Integrated Measurement (QUIM). Included in the QUIM model are 10 factors each of which corresponds to a specific facet of usability that is identified in an existing standard or model. These 10 factors are decomposed into a total of 26 sub-factors or measurable criteria that are furtherdecomposed into 127 specific metrics. The paper explains also how a consolidated model, such as QUIM, can help in developing a usability measurement theory. Ahmed Seffah interests are at the intersection of human-computer interaction and software engineering, with an emphasis on human-centered software engineering, empirical studies, theoretical models for quality in use measurement, as well as patterns as a vehicle for capturing and incorporating empirically valid design practices in software engineering practices. He is a co-founder of the Usability and Empirical Studies Lab and the founder and the chair of the Human-Centered Software Engineering Research Group at Concordia University. Harkirat K. Padda is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University (Montreal) since 2003, where she completed her masters’ degree in computer science. Her research interests are software quality measurement, metrics, and empirical software evaluation. Being a member of Human Computer Software Engineering Group, she is exploring the comprehension and usability of software systems—in particular the visualization systems. In her masters’ work, she already defined a repository of different metrics to measure the ‘quality in use’ factors of software products in general. Currently, she is proposing a pattern-oriented measurement framework to measure comprehension of visualization systems.     

Spatial complexity metrics: an investigation of utility

Software comprehension is one of the largest costs in the software lifecycle. In an attempt to control the cost of comprehension, various complexity metrics have been proposed to characterize the difficulty of understanding a program and, thus, allow accurate estimation of the cost of a change. Such metrics are not always evaluated. This paper evaluates a group of metrics recently proposed to assess the "spatial complexity" of a program (spatial complexity is informally defined as the distance a maintainer must move within source code to build a mental model of that code). The evaluation takes the form of a large-scale empirical study of evolving source code drawn from a commercial organization. The results of this investigation show that most of the spatial complexity metrics evaluated offer no substantially better information about program complexity than the number of lines of code. However, one metric shows more promise and is thus deemed to be a candidate for further use and investigation.     

面向对象程序复杂性度量层次模型

程序复杂性度量可以实现定量地分析程序复杂性,从而为估计成本提供一个标准。为了度量面向对象程序复杂性,在讨论了度量的定义．度量的理论基础后,提出了一种面向对象程序复杂性度量的层次模型。该模型分成5个层次：系统层、类簇层、类继承树层、类层和方法层,每个层次都有自己的度量方法。采用这种分层度量模型的好处是：它是一个框架,各度量方法归属到各层中;各层之间相互独立;一层中方法的修改并不影响其它层。     

软件可信性度量模型研究进展

介绍了软件可信性认识的演变,总结了已有的软件可信性描述性概念和观点,提出了一种新的软件可信性描述结构模型;回顾了软件可信性度量模型研究的发展变化,同时进行了分析和点评,并结合已有研究成果,指出了软件可信性度量模型研究取得理论突破的关键以及拓展研究的新方向。     

Business model innovation: an integrated approach based on elements and functions

Business model innovation can be used to acquire competitive advantages. In this paper, we applied an integrative approach to study business model in terms of elements and functions. In the paper, three types of business model innovations were discussed: original innovation, induced innovation, and imitative innovation. The major contributions of this paper are: (1) improving the understanding of the business models; (2) providing a new perspective on business model innovation; and (3) proposing the paths for business model innovation. The paper also discussed how new information technology may promote business model innovation.     

Intranet portal model and metrics: a strategic management perspective

Although many corporations store a great deal of information in their corporate intranets, few have a reliable means of measuring the effectiveness of their intranet portals to use this information to meet specific business needs. Turning information into knowledge capital that corporations can leverage quickly for competitive advantage requires a model and supporting metrics. Most intranet portal measurements are based almost exclusively on usage statistics - with little or no thought given to design or user experience - and corporations apply them in a nonstandardized manner, providing no meaningful insight into how well intranets help corporations achieve their strategic objectives. What has been missing is a comprehensive model and methodology to base measurements on logically related groups of metrics, which, when measured periodically, provide actionable steps to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of intranet portals.     

A model-driven approach for developing a model repository: Methodology and tool support

Several development approaches have been proposed to cope with the increasing complexity of embedded system design. The most widely used approaches are those using models as the main artifacts to be constructed and maintained. The desired role of models is to ease, systematize and standardize the approach to the construction of software-based systems. To enforce reuse and interconnect the process of model specification and system development with models, we promote a model-based approach coupled with a model repository. In this paper, we propose a model-driven engineering methodological approach for the development of a model repository and an operational architecture for development tools. In addition, we provide evidence of the benefits and feasibility of our approach by reporting on a preliminary prototype that provides a model-based repository of security and dependability (S&D) pattern models. Finally, we apply the proposed approach in practice to a use case from the railway domain with strong S&D requirements.     

A metrics suite for UML model stability

Software and Systems Modeling - Software metrics have become an essential part of software development because of their importance in estimating cost, effort, and time during the development phase....     

QoS多层本体的双向度量模型

针对传统质量评估模式中指标权重赋值依据单一的问题,首先将服务描述本体分为共享本体和专属本体两个抽象层次,构建具有“抽象-应用-度量”多层结构的QoS本体,用于QoS度量的对象描述和数据采集;然后建立基于深度信任网络和回归模型的双向度量模型DM-QSM,将服务描述信息和类似服务历史数据作为训练样本数据集对DM-QSM进行正向训练,再结合用户反馈对DM-QSM进行逆向调优,以实现QoS度量指标权重及其偏好度的自适应调节。最后选用可编程建模环境NetLogo为实验平台、公共服务数据集QWS为训练样本集、电子商务应用服务为测试样本集,验证了DM-QSM的可行性和有效性。     

缺陷驱动的Web服务可信性度量模型*

为了避免Web服务可信性正面度量难以收集数据的问题,提出缺陷驱动的Web服务可信性度量模型TWSMM-SD（trustworthy Web services metrics model based on software defect）,利用Web服务中的缺陷数目及类型来间接评测Web服务的可信度。在对Web服务中出现的缺陷进行全面收集、详细分类和可信归类的基础上,TWSMM-SD根据缺陷的演化来确定每种缺陷对最终可信度的影响程度,将其综合形成此种缺陷的初始权重,再利用隐马尔可夫模型对其进行处理,进而利用     

Empirical validation of object-oriented metrics on open source software for fault prediction

Open source software systems are becoming increasingly important these days. Many companies are investing in open source projects and lots of them are also using such software in their own work. But, because open source software is often developed with a different management style than the industrial ones, the quality and reliability of the code needs to be studied. Hence, the characteristics of the source code of these projects need to be measured to obtain more information about it. This paper describes how we calculated the object-oriented metrics given by Chidamber and Kemerer to illustrate how fault-proneness detection of the source code of the open source Web and e-mail suite called Mozilla can be carried out. We checked the values obtained against the number of bugs found in its bug database - called Bugzilla - using regression and machine learning methods to validate the usefulness of these metrics for fault-proneness prediction. We also compared the metrics of several versions of Mozilla to see how the predicted fault-proneness of the software system changed during its development cycle.     

Integration of an energy balance snowmelt model into an open source modeling framework

This paper presents a data model for organizing the inputs and outputs of an energy balance snowmelt model (the Utah Energy Balance Model, UEB) that provides a foundation for its integration into the EPA BASINS modeling framework and enables its coupling with other hydrologic models in this system. Having UEB as a BASINS component has facilitated its coupling with the Geospatial Streamflow Forecast Model (GeoSFM) to compute the melting of glaciers and subsequent streamflow in the Himalayas. The data model uses a combination of structured text and network Common Data Form (netCDF) files to represent parameters, geographical, time series, and gridded space-time data. We describe the design and structure of this data model, integration methodology of UEB and GeoSFM and illustrate the effectiveness of the resulting coupled models for the computation of surface water input and streamflow for a glaciated watershed in Nepal Himalayas.     

Ranking open source application integration frameworks based on maintainability metrics: A review of five-year evolution

Integration frameworks are specialized software tools built and adapted to facilitate the design and implementation of integration solutions. An integration solution allows for the reuse of applications from the software ecosystem of companies to support their business processes. There are several open-source integration frameworks available on the market designed to operate in a business context to manipulate structured data; however, increasingly, they are required to deal with unstructured and large volumes of data, thus requiring effort to adapt these frameworks to work with unstructured and large volume of data. Choosing the framework, which is the easiest to be adapted, is not a trivial task. In this article, we review the newest stable versions of four open-source integration frameworks by analyzing how they have evolved regarding their adaptive maintainability over five years. We rank them according to their maintainability degree and compare past and current versions of each framework. To encourage and enable researchers and developers to replicate our experiments, with the aim of verifying our findings, and to experiment with new versions of the integration frameworks analyzed, we detail the experimental protocol used while also having made all the required software involved available on the Web.