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International Review on
Computers and Software - Papers
Managing the Quality of Small Hospitality Businesses via Semantic Web Services
by D. Kanellopoulos, S. Kotsiantis
Abstract
- Small hospitality businesses are vital to the economic health of both
developed and developing countries. Although small hospitality businesses have a
crucial role in creating tourist satisfaction, they are neither a uniform group,
nor able to give consistently high service quality. In the hospitality sector,
excellence is synonymous to the quality of provided hospitality services. In
this paper, we propose a novel web management system that informs its users
about qualities of small hospitality businesses that belong to a consortium. The
key-idea of the proposed web service oriented architecture is that the web
services of participating members (e.g., small hospitality businesses) share
their qualities and related resources, resulting to the overall system capacity
increase. Mechanisms and techniques are presented concerning: (a) an
“information desk” which provides an adaptive search user interface for quality
of hospitality business, (b) discovery functions based on semantic
representation of the qualities, (c) mining into qualities of hospitality
business based on their semantic representation, (d) dynamic ranking of
retrieved content list, (e) consumption mechanisms for the local Web Services,
(g) e-payment and (h) universal usability access. This analysis can be exploited
in the practice of a new hospitality management policy.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Semantic web; web services; hospitality business intelligence; excellence.
The Need for a Software Process Improvement Model for the Medical Device
Industry
by F. Mc Caffery, G. Coleman
Abstract
-
Software is becoming an
increasingly important aspect of medical devices and medical device regulation.
Software enables highly complex systems to be built. However, complexity is the
enemy of safety, therefore strict adherence to well documented processes is
important within the domain of medical device software. Medical devices can only
be marketed if compliance and approval from the appropriate regulatory bodies
(e.g. the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)) is achieved. This paper outlines
the development of a software process improvement (SPI) model specifically for
the medical device industry. The paper details how medical device regulations
may be satisfied by adopting relevant practices from the Capability Maturity
Model Integration (CMMI®).
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Medical device, Software Process Improvement Model, CMMI®.
An
Approach for an Efficient Software Engineering Course Project
by Z. A. Alzamil
Abstract
- The course project is a major part of the software engineering course.
Instructors are required to train their students on the professional skills to
be ready for the real world businesses, which require the students to work on
real projects. However, because of the low quality of the students' work, not
all of the professional organizations are cooperating to offer the chance for
the software engineering students to work on real projects. Therefore, most of
the software engineering courses' projects are in-class project, in which the
instructors represent the clients. In this paper, I propose an approach that
contributes to solving this problem. This approach is based on my experience in
involving the software engineering students in real world projects. The proposed
approach suggests that, the instructor should take advantage of the local
community centers' needs by assigning the students to work on projects that
provide these local centers with systematic solution to their systems' needs.
This approach has been measured based on a study of the students' perceptions of
involving them with the analysis, design, and development of real software
systems that are needed by the local community centers. The results of this
study have shown that, this approach enables the students to work on real
projects and deal with real clients. Also, this approach helps the students to
gain professional skills as well as inspiring them with the ethics that are
necessary for the software engineers. In addition, this approach showed the
students that they can apply the software engineering principles on the real
world software systems. Although this approach provides solution to some
challenges of the software engineering education, it faces some obstacles,
specifically, the project's size and the technical writing skills. The software
engineering instructors should select a course project that is small enough to
be completed on one academic semester, and provide their students with a
standard guide for the technical writing.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Software Engineering Education, Course Project.
Steganography in Artistic Websites
by M. Shirali-Shahreza
Abstract
- In line with the expansion of the Internet, the issue of information security
has gained special importance. Many methods have been provided in order to
establish hidden communications. In the meanwhile, steganography is one of a
relatively new method. This paper introduces a new method for exchanging
information by steganography on artistic websites. The main idea in this method
is to hide data by changing the color of artistic websites items like tables,
hyperlinks and texts. The suggested method is implemented by using the Java
language.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
HTML (HyperText Markup Language), Information Hiding, Internet Security,
Artistic Websites, Steganography.
by A. Alti, T. Khammaci, A. Smeda
Abstract
- A key aspect of the design of any software system is its architecture. An
architecture description provides a formal model of the architecture in terms of
components and connectors and how they are composed together. The Unified
Modeling Language (UML) is widely used in the design of software systems and has
recently been extended to better support software architecture description. This
paper presents the UML 2.0 Profile for representing and formally modeling
software architectures. It describes a UML profile for the model COSA
(Component-Object based Software Architecture), which is a software architecture
model that describes systems as a collection of components and connectors. It
briefly presents COSA and its UML 2.0 Profile, then it illustrates through an
example how the Profile can be used to describe the architecture of software
systems.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Software Architecture, COSA, Architecture Description Languages, UML 2.0
Modeling Language, UML Profile, Mapping.
Agent Based Architecture for Parallel and Distributed Complex Information
Processing
by M. Khemakhem, A. Belghith
Abstract
- Information processing is a rather multidisciplinary field of research
involving various communities resulting in a wealth of applications and
solutions. Many effective solutions have been proposed to solve several specific
problems. Fortunately, these solutions are generally complementary and can
cooperate together in order to solve more complex problems or to improve some
specific solutions. Consequently, we propose in this paper a flexible open
architecture able to integrate complementary solutions according to the simple
rule of plug and play. The proposed architecture is based on agent technology
which provides especially autonomy and intelligence. Such aspects generate
important added values in building open architectures. The proposed architecture
has the great advantage to offer to users a flexible infrastructure where they
can easily govern the response time of their own applications to be processed.
This flexibility is due to the polyvalence of the corresponding agents. An
analytical study has been made to ascertain and evaluate the key performance
parameters of this proposed architecture. Conducted experiments show first that
this architecture is indeed an efficient framework to support the integration of
complementary solutions. Second, we found that the number of agents to be used,
the achievable speedup and efficiency factors depends mainly on the task
granularity which can be easily governed by users and the capacity of the
underlying network. Finally, we found that even a loosely coupled architecture
such as a LAN or a grid computing can support effectively the proposed approach.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
agent technology, open architecture, parallel and distributed complex
information processing, solutions integration, performance evaluation.
Development of Information Systems Design Models: An Empirical Investigation of
Indian Electronic Industry
by A. Kalia, D. P. Goyal
Abstract
- The system design phase plays an important role in the development of
Information Systems (ISs). The success of an information system largely depends
on this phase. Stepwise Refinement; Level of Abstraction; Structured Design;
Integrated Top-down Design and Jackson Structured Programming are some of the
most commonly used system design models. Also the developers use various design
tools like 'Top-down'; 'Bottom-up'; 'Modular'; 'HIPO/IPO chart'; 'Structured
Walk Through'; 'Object Oriented Approach' and 'CASE Tools'. In order to know and
analyze the IS design models so as to suggest the best practices and their
applications for the successful design of the information systems, the
researchers have undertaken a study in some of the large organization in India.
The data was collected through interview-cum-questionnaire method from the
developers of ISs in Electronic Industry in India. In all 49 developers
participated in the study from public, private and joint sector organizations.
The data analysis was done by using various statistical tools like average
scores, test of significance (t-test) critical ratio etc. On the basis of the
findings, several suggestions and recommendations have been made so as to help
developers systematically select appropriate models and tools. It is expected
that the recommendations made will go a long way in improving the information
systems design, which in turn will improve the efficiency of the systems in
general and in the Indian electronics industry in particular.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Design Methods, Design Tools, Efficiency, Information System Development.
Fast, Simple and Memory Efficient Algorithm for Mining Association Rules
by M. H. Marghny, A. A. Shakour
Abstract
- One of the important problems in data mining is discovering association rules
from databases of transactions where each transaction consists of a set of
items. The most time consuming operation in this discovery process is the
computation of the frequency of the occurrences of interesting subset of items
(called candidates) in the database of transactions. In this paper, we introduce
algorithms that overcome major drawbacks of previous work. First, for
small-scale database, both the processing time has been improved significantly.
Second, for large-scale database, the proposed algorithms can deal with a
database that is substantially larger than the size of available memory. The
contributions made in this paper are particularly important because the rate of
increase in database size and response time requirements has out-paced
advancements in processor and mass storage technology.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Data Mining, Association Rules, Time Consuming, Memory Requirements.
Resource Reservation in Advance for QoS Based Mobile Applications
by I. Miloucheva, D. Hetzer, R. Pascotto, K. Jonas
Abstract
- Resource reservation in advance in mobile Internet can be used to provide
enhanced QoS guarantee for specific applications and better resource utilization
of the network infrastructure. Currently, for fixed Internet, resource
reservation in advance was proposed for different kind of applications (Grid,
content, video and streaming on-demand). The trend for convergence of fixed and
mobile Internet services requires also technologies supporting resource
reservations in advance of QoS-aware mobile applications in heterogeneous
Internet environment. This includes interfaces for users and network
administrators to specify advance resource reservation requests for applications
of mobile users, negotiation of advance resource reservation for mobile
applications and proactive mobility support according QoS/SLA agreements,
algorithms for planning and optimization of resource allocations in advance
considering the specific of mobile services. This paper summarises the
state-of-the-art of resource reservation in advance for fixed and mobile
applications. Components and services for advance resource reservation in Mobile
Internet are discussed. Example scenario for advance reservation is described
based on enhancement of the QoS management architecture for heterogeneous mobile
IPv6 networks developed in European IST project DAIDALOS.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
resource reservation in advance, mobile Internet, QoS based mobile application,
mobile RSVP.
Pedagogical Scenarios in SACA: a Collaborative Learning System
by Y. Lafifi, T. Bensebaa
Abstract
- SACA is a collaborative learning system based on agent model in which learners
collaborate to learn the concepts’ knowledge of the subject to be taught and to
resolve the assessment exercises. The aim of this paper is to present the
different scenarios for using SACA. These scenarios concern the various tasks
which the system provides to its learners: learning, assessment and
collaboration between them. Each function is dedicated to an artificial agent
composing SACA. Agents’ role will be presented in order to know more about the
interactions carried out. This paper shows results of the experiment done at
Guelma University.
Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
Keywords:
Intelligent agent, Collaborative learning, CSCL, Interaction, Collaboration.
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