How to apply Markov chains for modeling sequential edit patterns in collaborative ontology-engineering projects

With the growing popularity of large-scale collaborative ontology-engineering projects, such as the creation of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, we need new methods and insights to help project- and community-managers to cope with the constantly growing complexity of such projects. In this paper, we present a novel application of Markov chains to model sequential usage patterns that can be found in the change-logs of collaborative ontology-engineering projects. We provide a detailed presentation of the analysis process, describing all the required steps that are necessary to apply and determine the best fitting Markov chain model. Amongst others, the model and results allow us to identify structural properties and regularities as well as predict future actions based on usage sequences. We are specifically interested in determining the appropriate Markov chain orders which postulate on how many previous actions future ones depend on. To demonstrate the practical usefulness of the extracted Markov chains we conduct sequential pattern analyses on a large-scale collaborative ontology-engineering dataset, the International Classification of Diseases in its 11th revision. To further expand on the usefulness of the presented analysis, we show that the collected sequential patterns provide potentially actionable information for user-interface designers, ontology-engineering tool developers and project-managers to monitor, coordinate and dynamically adapt to the natural development processes that occur when collaboratively engineering an ontology. We hope that presented work will spur a new line of ontology-development tools, evaluation-techniques and new insights, further taking the interactive nature of the collaborative ontology-engineering process into consideration.     

Software engineering education: A study on conducting collaborative senior project development

Project and teamwork training is recognized as an important aspect in software engineering (SE) education. Senior projects, which often feature industrial involvement, serve the function of a ‘capstone course’ in SE curricula, by offering comprehensive training in collaborative software development. Given the characteristics of student team projects and the social aspects of software development, instructional issues in such a course must include: how to encourage teamwork, how to formalize and streamline stakeholder participation, and how to monitor students’ work, as well as sustain their desired collaborative effort throughout the development. In this paper, we present an exploratory study which highlights a particular case and introduces the meetings-flow approach. In order to investigate how this approach could contribute to the project's results, we examined its quantitative benefits in relation to the development of the project. We also conducted focus group interviews to discuss the humanistic findings and educational effects pertaining to this approach.     

Software engineering projects may fail before they are started: Post-mortem analysis of five cancelled projects

Context

Software project cancellations are often caused by mistakes made during the project, and such cancellations make a strong economic impact. We analyzed five cancelled software engineering projects. One case was an internal product development project of a company that sells products to its customers. The other four cases were different software engineering projects, and outcomes of these projects were planned to be delivered to external customers.

Objective

This study reports a post-mortem analysis of five software engineering projects with the aim of providing more knowledge about the reasons for cancellation decisions and the causes behind those reasons.

Methods

The research method is case study. A method for a document-based post-mortem analysis was developed and post-mortem analysis was performed. All project documentation was available for analysis.

Results

The reasons for the cancellation decisions were well-known ones. In four cases of five, the outcome of the project was to be delivered to an external customer, but in these cases the causes of the cancellation reasons were not found from the normal project documentation. In these cases the cause of the cancellation originated in a phase before the start of the project and therefore the project was doomed before it was started.

Conclusion

It is reasonable to suggest that a remarkable portion of project cancellations are due to mistakes made before the project is started in the case of contract-based software engineering projects.     

Crossing the chasm between ontology engineering and application development: A survey

The adoption of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) by public and private organizations to integrate and publish data has increased in recent years. Ontologies play a crucial role in providing the structure for KGs, but are usually disregarded when designing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable browsing KGs in a developer-friendly manner. In this paper we provide a systematic review of the state of the art on existing approaches to ease access to ontology-based KG data by application developers. We propose two comparison frameworks to understand specifications, technologies and tools responsible for providing APIs for KGs. Our results reveal several limitations on existing API-based specifications, technologies and tools for KG consumption, which outline exciting research challenges including automatic API generation, API resource path prediction, ontology-based API versioning, and API validation and testing.     

Interactive Videoconferencing for collaborative learning at a distance in the school of 21st century: A case study in elementary schools in Greece

The aim of this paper is to present the design, implementation and evaluation of the methodology which focuses on the pedagogical utilization of Interactive Videoconferencing (IVC) in the contemporary elementary school.     

Change the face of software engineering education: A field report from Taiwan

Context: In Taiwan, the supply of software engineers provided by universities has suffered from both a quantity problem and a quality problem. An effort to change the software engineering education is in need.Objective: The Software Engineering Consortium (SEC) of Taiwan sets its objective to increase the number of college graduates that are better prepared for filling software development and maintenance jobs.Method: Four dysfunctions: avoidance of process, inattention to modeling, lack of awareness to software quality, and chasm between application domains and software engineering, of the current situation are identified. The effort to correct the dysfunctions involves design of a module-oriented software engineering curriculum, and organization of people, resource, and activities.Results: In the academic years from 2003 to 2008, both the number of software engineering courses offered and the enrollment size increased significantly by a space of some 250 courses and 5000 enrollments, respectively.Conclusion: The SEC effort to establishing software engineering modules has been received with enthusiasm by faculty members and students of the participating institutes. Inspired by the important foundational work such as SWEBOK and SE2004, we believe that the adopted strategy of identifying dysfunctions and then designing remedies to address these dysfunctions contributed significantly to the success of the SEC effort.