Ontology Augmented Software Engineering

Semantic Web was proposed to make the content machine-understandable by developing ontologies to capture domain knowledge and annotating content with this domain knowledge. Although, the original idea of semantic web was to make content on the World Wide Web machine-understandable, with recent advancements and awareness about these technologies, researchers have applied ontologies in many interesting domains. Many phases in software engineering are dependent on availability of knowledge, and the use of ontologies to capture and process this knowledge is a natural choice. This chapter discusses how ontologies can be used in various stages of the system development life cycle. Ontologies can be used to support requirements engineering phase in identifying and fixing inconsistent, incomplete, and ambiguous requirement. They can also be used to model the requirements and assist in requirements management and validation. During software design and development stages, ontologies can help software engineers in finding suitable components, managing documentation of APIs, and coding support. Ontologies can help in system integration and evolution process by aligning various databases with the help of ontologies capturing knowledge about database schema and aligning them with concepts in ontology. Ontologies can also be used in software maintenance by developing a bug tracking system based upon ontological knowledge of software artifacts and roles of developers involved in software maintenance task.

Development of Enterprise Content Management Systems

Enterprise systems development approaches can be classified into development-centric and procurement centric approaches. Based on the component-based system development methodology (CBSD), this chapter proposes a procurement-centric framework to develop enterprise content management (ECM) system. Adopting CBSD to develop ECM system avoids the drawbacks of the development-centric approaches, and remedies the ECM field lacks where there is no system development method that helps in selecting and implementing the ECM system. To validate the proposed framework, the author applies it to a case study from a large research institution with more than 30,000 students.

Towards a Theoretical “Cybernetic” Framework

In the last decade, there is a common conviction and connectedness for modern e-learning practices to use online virtual environments (or worlds) for arousing students’ interesting in various experiential activities. In this perspective, this chapter creates and proposes a “Cybernetic Planning Framework” (CPF), which combines the diversity of educational theories and practices, yielding in a common basis for their inclusion. The present chapter focuses on Second Life’s qualitative characteristics that can be utilized to construct a “teaching-organizational” framework, which is essential for planning effective and meaningful distance learning courses. This gain averred a “cybernetic model,” in which users enhanced pedagogical authorities and principles of Contemporary Learning Theories that previous studies carried out in Second Life. This premise recapitulates the value-added of this chapter, which can successfully be adapted to any 3D “open” and “sustainable” education system, emphasizing on integration and innovation of teaching methods.

Modeling Transparency in Software Systems for Distributed Work Groups

Software systems require ethics. Several systems fail due to lack of ethics built into them. So, every software engineer needs to have an idea on ethics, so that they can build them into the software systems. Ethics requires accountability. Accountability is to the organization, stakeholders, and to the society. This chapter discusses the ethical issue of transparency. In the previous decade, we have seen a very increased use of this term. Transparency is being considered an indispensable ingredient in social accountability and is necessary for preserving and guaranteeing ethical and fair processes. Transparency is related to visibility of information, and without it, the organization and stakeholders will be left in blind states. Ultimately, the lack of transparency leads to unpleasant surprises due to bad decisions, letdown, increasing doubts, uncertainty, failure, and the breakdown of faith and trust. This is bad for the organizations involved, the people investing in them, stakeholders, suppliers, and employees. It is also bad, as we have seen recently, for the economy. This is true for government agencies and functions just as for businesses and communities. The least transparent governments are the most dictatorial and secretive in their decision-making and governance. An informed citizenship is vital for healthy, free societies, just as informed investors are needed for a healthy, strong economy. The degree of transparency in the software systems, then, becomes a barometer for health and vitality in governments, leadership, and business. The growing importance to the requirement of transparency in all these domains was the motivation to the present chapter.

Trends in Information Security

Information systems have transitioned from being designed for sophisticated users to systems for general populace. Have information security thoughts evolved likewise? The traditional understanding of security gravitated towards physical/network/platform/security and audit logging mechanisms. This chapter looks into evolution of information security, with the current impetus towards boundary-less enterprises, federated identities, the contemporary standards, and the need for federal governments to be involved in information security, ethics, and privacy concerns. With such a gamut of influencing forces, information security needs to be inbuilt with SDLC as a natural process rather than as an afterthought. This chapter covers information security trends in relation to cloud, mobile devices, and Bring Your Own Device. Convergence of information security with risk management and business process continuity is discussed. The authors indicate a few emerging research topics in the field of information security and outline the trends for future.

A Software Engineering Approach for Access Control to Multi-Level-Security Documents

Access control to multi level security documents is very important and challenging issue. Millions of organizations around the globe intend to apply security levels over their confidential documents to protect from unauthorized use. Some numbered access control approaches have been proposed and an optimal solution is the need of the time. This chapter presents an overview of a robust software engineering approach for access control to multi-level security documents. The access control system incorporates stages including data refinement, text comprehension, and understanding of multi-stage protection and application levels. It will scan the document, tag the sections of certain text, understand the meaning of various levels, group-up the text using bottom-up approach, and then classify the levels as per protection norms (set as organization wise) defined. This approach will be very helpful for multi-level protection of precious information. Only authorized users would be able to access the information relevant to them as defined by the authorities.

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) via Binary Diagram Decision (BDD) for Information Systems Design

A fault tree analysis (FTA) is presented as a qualitative method for studying the state of the WT as a system considering to its different sub-systems. The quantitative analysis of the FTA is done by Binary Diagram Decision (BDD). The size of the BDD generated by the transformation from FTA to BDD will depend of the ordering of the FTA events. This work employed the top-down-left-right, the level, and the “and” methods for listing the events. Finally, a classification of the events is done based on their importance measures. The importance measures has been calculated by the Birnbaum (1969), Critically and Structural heuristic methods. A comparative analysis is done, and the main results are presented.

A Comparative Analysis of Software Engineering Approaches for Sequence Analysis

DNA is considered the building block of living species. DNA sequence alignment and analysis have been big challenges for the scientists for many years. This research presents a comparative analysis of state of the art software engineering approaches for sequence analysis, i.e. genome sequences in particular. Sequence analysis problems are NP hard and need optimal solutions. The underlying problems stated are duplicate sequence detection, sequence matching by relevance, and sequence analysis by approximate comparison in general and by using tools, i.e. Matlab and multi-lingual sequence analysis. The usefulness of these operations is also highlighted, and future expectations are described. The proposal describes the concepts, tools, methodologies, and algorithms being used for sequence analysis. The sequences contain the precious information that needs to be mined for useful purposes. There is high concentration required to model the optimal solution. The similarity and alignments concepts cannot be addressed directly with one technique or algorithm; a better performance is achieved by the comprehension of different concepts.

Software Development Methodologies for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is recently taking a significant focus in the information technology fields as a possible future trend for how computer services and applications can be provided to users or businesses. Cloud computing is utilizing the recent large expansion of Internet and network technologies where the increase in the data size and transfer speed made it possible to make the Internet or the cloud a possible host for all or most users’ applications and data. With this new technology, several changes are expected to occur in the information technology fields and systems to adapt to this field or technology. In this chapter, the author focuses on the possible impact on the way software companies will develop their software products. For example, the traditional client server system architecture is expected to be significantly impacted with cloud computing new framework. All software development concepts and activities will be revisited to discuss what things can be different in the cloud computing paradigm.

Software Development Techniques for Constructive Information Systems

This chapter discusses the software engineering lifecycle, history, and software architecture as well as the foundation of Information Engineering and Information Systems. The first part of this chapter discusses the software lifecycle phases and how to make effective use of various technical methods by applying effective technical and other efficient methods at the right time. This chapter also shows the technical similarities between software database design and Information System’s database design. In the second part of this chapter, the author introduces the information engineering life cycle and discusses the key phrases for information engineering as well as Information System. In fact, this part is a good dictionary of information and software engineering. This chapter provides guidance for decision-makers in selecting an appropriate Information System strategy that contributes to the achievement of information engineering sustainability targets and leverages competitiveness.