Towards computer support of the soft systems methodology: an evaluation of the functionality and usability of an SSM toolkit

In recent years a number of research projects have investigated computer support of the soft systems methodology (SSM). These typically involve the production of prototype computer-based tools supporting some aspects of SSM, although evaluation of these has been unsystematic and anecdotal. There has also been some debate in the literature about whether SSM is amenable to computer support. This paper reports a more systematic investigation of the potential for computer support of SSM and evaluation of the functionality and usability of an SSM support toolkit (SoftCase) developed by one of the authors. Following a brief review of previous research in this area, and the functionality of the SoftCase toolkit, the design of the evaluation and its outcome are described in detail. The paper concludes with a discussion of computer technology to support SSM and some possible directions for evaluating the impact of computer support on the SSM process.     

Towards a toolkit for building language implementations

The current work of the authors in the area of software tools for automatic construction of compilers is described. This focuses on attempts to provide for automatic production of the semantic-analysis and intermediate-code-generation parts of the Cigale compiler-writing system, developed at the University of Nice. This work relies on use of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) to ensure a full set of optimizers and code generators based on a semi-universal intermediate language, and, therefore, emphasizes the filling of the gap between parsing and the intermediate language. It is intended as a pragmatic contribution to the automation of the production of true compilers (rather than mere program evaluators) that generate efficient machine code.     

IGSTK: an open source software toolkit for image-guided surgery

Image-guided surgery applies leading-edge technology and clinical practices to provide better quality of life to patients who can benefit from minimally invasive procedures. Reliable software is a critical component of image-guided surgical applications, yet costly expertise and technology infrastructure barriers hamper current research and commercialization efforts in this area. IGSTK applies the open source development and delivery model to this problem. Agile and component-based software engineering principles reduce the costs and risks associated with adopting this new technology, resulting in a safe, inexpensive, robust, shareable, and reusable software infrastructure.     

Jane: an advanced freely available hierarchical machine translation toolkit

In this article we will describe the design and implementation of Jane, an efficient hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) toolkit developed at RWTH Aachen University. The system has been used by RWTH at several international evaluation campaigns, including the WMT and NIST evaluations, and is now freely available for non-commercial application. We will go through the main features of Jane, which include, among others, support for different search strategies, different language model formats, support for syntax-based enhancements to the HPB machine translation paradigm, string-to-dependency translation, extended lexicon models, different methods for minimum-error-rate training and distributed operation on a computer cluster. Special attention has been paid to the efficiency of the decoder, clean code and quality assurance through unit and regression testing. Results on current machine translation tasks are reported, which show that the system is able to obtain state-of-the-art performance.     

Toward an interoperable dynamic network analysis toolkit

To facilitate the analysis of real and simulated data on groups, organizations and societies, tools and measures are needed that can handle relational or network data that is multi-mode, multi-link and multi-time period in which nodes and edges have attributes with possible data errors and missing data. The integrated CASOS dynamic network analysis toolkit described in this paper is an interoperable set of scalable software tools. These tools form a toolchain that facilitate the dynamic extraction, analysis, visualization and reasoning about key actors, hidden groups, vulnerabilities and changes in such data at varying levels of fidelity. We present these tools and illustrate their capabilities using data collected from a series of 368 texts on an organizational system interfaced with covert networks in the Middle East.     

Formal analysis of the Shlaer-Mellor method: Towards a toolkit of formal and informal requirements specification techniques

In this paper, we define a number of tools that we think belong to the core of any toolkit for requirements engineers. The tools are conceptual and hence, they need precise definitions that lay down as exactly as possible what their meaning and possible use is. We argue that this definition can best be achieved by a formal specification of the tool. This means that for each semi-formal requirements engineering tool we should provide a formal specification that precisely specifies its meaning. We argue that this mutually enhances the formal and semi-formal technique: it makes formal techniques more usable and, as we will argue, at the same time simplifies the diagram-based notations.At the same time, we believe that the tools of the requirements engineer should, where possible, resemble the familiar semi-formal specification techniques used in practice today. In order to achieve this, we should search existing requirements specification techniques to look for a common kernel of familiar semi-formal techniques and try to provide a formalisation for these.In this paper we illustrate this approach by a formal analysis of the Shlaer-Mellor method for object-oriented requirements specification. The formal specification language used in this analysis is LCM, a language based on dynamic logic, but similar results would have been achieved by means of another language. We analyse the techniques used in the information model, state model, process model and communication model of the Shlaer-Mellor method, identify ambiguities and redundancies, indicate how these can be eliminated and propose a formalisation of the result. We conclude with a listing of the tools extracted from the Shlaer-Mellor method that we can add to a toolkit that in addition contains LCM as formal specification technique.     

Towards an ICT-based psychology: E-psychology

Cognitive science is the scientific domain which studies, analyzes, simulates and infers for various aspects, functions and procedures of human mentality such as, thinking, logic, language, knowledge, memory, learning, perception and the ability to solve problems. E-psychology is in close relation with the cognitive science domain, but expands beyond it, as e-psychology is the efficient convergence of psychology and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). E-psychology offers a number of services such as supporting, diagnosis, assessment, therapy, counseling, intervention and tests through an effective exploitation of ICTs. This article presents a user-friendly, flexible and adaptive electronic platform, which supports both synchronous and asynchronous e-psychology activities through the use of informative and communicative tools and services, which can be adapted to support various methods of e-psychology activities. It is important to underline that e-psychology is not an alternative psychology field, but a resource to enhance the conventional psychology process.     

JOINT: Java ontology integrated toolkit

In the past few years, the use of ontologies for creating more intelligent and effective application has increased considerably. This growth is due to the fact that ontologies attempt to provide semantics to the data consumed by machines so that they can reason about this data. However, developing complex ontology-based applications is still difficult and time-consuming because the existing tools do not provide a simple and unified environment for developers. Most of these tools only provide data manipulation using RDF triples, complicating the development of applications that need to work with the object orientation paradigm. Furthermore, tools that provide instances manipulation via object orientation do not support features such as manipulating ontologies, reasoning over rules or querying data with SPARQL. In this context, this work proposes a framework and a tool for supporting the efficient development of ontology-based applications through the integration of existing technologies. Furthermore, we also define a methodology to use this tool efficiently. In order to evaluate the benefits of our work, a controlled experiment with eight developers (unfamiliar with ontologies) was performed to compare the proposed tool, JOINT, with another one, Jastor/Jena, frequently used by the community. The results suggest that our tool helps novice developers to create ontology-based applications faster and with few errors in the code. In addition, a real educational application with 10 ontologies, more than 200 ontology concepts (classes) and more than a million triples is already using the proposed tool successfully.     

A search space toolkit: SST

The Search Space Toolkit (SST) is a suite of tools for investigating the properties of the continuous search spaces which arise in designing complex engineering artifacts whose evaluation requires significant computation by a numerical simulator. SST has been developed as part of NDA, a computational environment for (semi-)automated design of jet engine exhaust nozzles for supersonic aircraft which resulted from a collaboration between computer scientists at Rutgers University and design engineers at General Electric and Lockheed. Though the design spaces for this sort of engineering artifact are mainly continuous, they typically include features such as unevaluable points, multiple local optima, and large derivatives which cause difficulties for standard numerical optimization methods. The search spaces which SST explores also differ significantly from the discrete search spaces that typically arise in artificial intelligence research, and properly searching such spaces requires a synergistic combination of numerical methods and AI techniques and is a fundamental Al research area. By promoting the design space to be a first class entity, rather than a “black box” buried in the interface between an (unconstrained) optimizer and a simulator, SST allows a more principled approach to automated design.     

Jena: a semantic Web toolkit

HP Labs developed the Jena toolkit to make it easier to develop applications that use the semantic Web information model and languages. Jena is a Java application programming interface that is available as an open-source download from www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/jena-top.html.     

Metkit: toolkit for metrics education

Metkit, one of the ESPRIT II, information-processing system and software projects, is described. The organization of Metkit, the teaching packages, and the prototype CAI system are discussed. Metkit responded to the need for more material with which to teach measurement techniques as they apply to software engineering     

Towards aspectual problem frames: an example

Abstract: Problem frames provide an approach to an initial requirements structure which can subsequently help the developer to analyse a problem and to understand its nature. Aspect-oriented software development offers complementary techniques to handle crosscutting concerns in a systematic and effective way, providing improved support for software maintenance and evolution. This paper explores the integration of aspect concepts with problem frames with the eventual aim of providing a more modular, evolvable requirements structure.     

信息爆炸时代的控制

信息技术的高速发展和信息的日益丰富, 为控制应用提供了空前的机遇, 也使控制理论面临新的挑战. 如何抓住机遇迎接挑战? 2000年4月由美国AFOSR(Air Force Ofice Of Scientific Research)发起成立了控制、动力学和系统未来发展方向的专家小组, 在与学术界、工业界和政府机关等各界人士广泛讨论的基础上, 2002年6月形成了题为Control in an Information Rich World的报告, 阐述了控制领域的成就和影响, 以及所面临的机遇与挑战, 为政府     

Start/Pat: a parallel-programming toolkit

The authors address the question of how to use existing sequential Fortran code on multiprocessors. Their answer is Start/Pat, an interactive toolkit that automates the parallelization of sequential Fortran as it teaches the programmer how to exploit and understand parallel structures and architectures. The Start/Pat prototype has been installed at several user sites. The authors discuss the choice of PCF Fortran, the toolkit components, and the features of Pat and Start     

Application-level network emulation: the EmuSocket toolkit

EmuSocket is a portable and flexible network emulator that can easily be configured to mimic the communication characteristics, in terms of bandwidth and delay, that occur with low-performance networks. The emulator works with Java applications by intercepting and perturbing application traffic at the socket API level. As traffic shaping takes place in the user-space by means of an instrumented socket implementation, using the toolkit does not require a modified interpreter. The way the emulator perturbs the communication preserves the TCP connection-oriented byte stream semantics.     

Innovation and HRM: Towards an Integrated Framework

This paper explores the connection between innovation (management) and human resource management. Much has been written about the both concepts separately, but there is no integrated conceptual framework available for the combination of the two. Our goal here is to develop such a framework. We do this in a number of steps, starting with a presentation of the existing approaches and models with respect to innovation (management) and HRM. This is followed by a search for the linkage between the two traditions, as a starting point for an integrated model and an in‐depth case study regarding the link between innovation and HRM, in order to further develop our model. We conclude with the presentation of our model and with suggestions for further research.