Software designs are mostly modeled as Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams when object oriented software development is concerned. Some popular topics in the industry such as Model Driven Development, generating test cases automatically in the early phases of software development, automated generation of code from design model etc. use the benefits of UML designs. All of these topics have something in common which is the need for accuracy against the meta-model not to face problems in the latter phases of the development process. Support on the full checking of the design models is necessary for the detection of design inconsistencies. This thesis presents an approach for automated verification of UML design models and explains the implementation of the library called UMLChecker.

With the high-level developments in the information technologies, there is a big movement in the e-health area both to give better healthcare services and to reduce cost. Monitoring the patients from their home location is one of the important branches of e-health with the aging societies. In this work, an agentbased alert system is introduced which analyzes the alert message requests and sends the alert messages within the appropriate structure and communication channel to the related healthcare user. A guideline execution system produces the alert requests based on sensor data and informs the alert agents. A multi-agent platform is developed which proactively sends the alert messages on behalf of the system with acknowledgement and message routing abilities. The multi-agent platform has patient alert agents for each patient in the system. A rule engine is cooperated with agents for the analysis of the alert message requests to bind these requests with the healthcare user specifications. E-mail messaging, SMS and MSN Instant messaging are used to reach the healthcare users. Additionally, web-based user interfaces are developed for healthcare users to manage the alert system for intelligent healthcare monitoring by specifying alert message receiving rules, personal and contact information, and some more additional options. The work presented in this thesis is realized as a part of the SAPHIRE project funded by the European Commission.

In this thesis, a new reactive session reconstruction method &#039 / Smart-SRA&#039 / is introduced. Web usage mining is a type of web mining, which exploits data mining techniques to discover valuable information from navigations of Web users. As in classical data mining, data processing and pattern discovery are the main issues in web usage mining. The first phase of the web usage mining is the data processing phase including session reconstruction. Session reconstruction is the most important task of web usage mining since it directly affects the quality of the extracted frequent patterns at the final step, significantly. Session reconstruction methods can be classified into two categories, namely &#039 / reactive&#039 / and &#039 / proactive&#039 / with respect to the data source and the data processing time. If the user requests are processed after the server handles them, this technique is called as &lsquo / reactive&rsquo / , while in &lsquo / proactive&rsquo / strategies this processing occurs during the interactive browsing of the web site. Smart-SRA is a reactive session reconstruction techique, which uses web log data and the site topology. In order to compare Smart-SRA with previous reactive methods, a web agent simulator has been developed. Our agent simulator models behavior of web users and generates web user navigations as well as the log data kept by the web server. In this way, the actual user sessions will be known and the successes of different techniques can be compared. In this thesis, it is shown that the sessions generated by Smart-SRA are more accurate than the sessions constructed by previous heuristics.

Sequential pattern mining constitutes a basis for solution of problems in various domains like bio-informatics and web usage mining. Research on this field continues seeking faster algorithms. WAP-Tree based algorithms that emerged from web usage mining literature have shown a remarkable performance on single-item sequence databases. In this study, we investigated application of WAP-Tree based mining to multi-item sequential pattern mining and we designed an extension of WAP-Tree data structure for multi-item sequence databases, the MULTI-WAP-Tree. In addition, we propose a new mining strategy on WAP-Tree which involves a hybrid traversal strategy in possible sequences search space and a new early prunning idea called Sibling Principle on Pattern Tree. Two algorithms, FOF-PT and MULTI-FOF-PT, applying this strategy on WAP-Tree and MULTI-WAP-Tree respectively, are developed. Experiments showed that FOF-PT outperforms both other WAP-Tree based algorithms and PrefixSpan in terms of execution time. Moreover, experimental results revealed MULTI-FOF-PT finds patterns faster than PrefixSpan on dense multi-item sequence databases with small alphabets.

Software size measurement provides a basis for software project management and plays an important role for its activities such as project management estimations, process benchmarking, and quality control. As size can be measured with functional size measurement (FSM) methods in the early phases of the software projects, functionality is one of the most frequently used metric. On the other hand, FSMs are being criticized by being subjective. The main aim of this thesis is increasing the accuracy of the measurements, by decreasing the number of defects concerning FSMs that are measured by COSMIC FSM method. For this purpose, an approach that allows detecting defects of FSMs automatically is developed. During the development of the approach, first of all error classifications are established. To detect defects of COSMIC FSMs automatically, COSMIC FSM Defect Detection Approach (DDA) is proposed. Later, based on the proposed approach, COSMIC FSM DDT (DDT) is developed.

Importance of web services increases as the technology improves and the need for the challenging e-commerce strategies increases. This thesis focuses on web market analysis of web sites by evaluating from the perspectives of static, dynamic and content. Firstly, web site evaluation methods and web analytic tools are introduced. Then evaluation methodology is described from three perspectives. Finally, results obtained from the evaluation of 113 web sites are presented as well as their correlations.

Healthcare is an important part of life in most societies that attract a significant amount of public investment. Primary healthcare is a fundamental branch of the healthcare system where patients and doctors initially meet. Family Medicine Information Systems are developed in an effort to ease the daily work of family doctors with the help of information technology. Such systems are generally used for handling critical tasks such as managing health records of patients, monitoring pregnancy and keeping track of children&rsquo / s vaccination. Like any medical information technology, the usability of such systems is a vital concern for enabling efficient and effective primary healthcare operations. Family Medicine is a recently established practice in Turkey and there are a number of systems in service to aid the daily work of family doctors. However, none of these systems have been subjected to a systematic usability analysis. In this study, a usability analysis of a popular Family Medicine Information System used in Turkey is conducted. By combining several usability evaluation techniques, the study identified several important usability issues and provided recommendations for further improving the system. The main usability issue observed in the system was the overall complexity of the information presented at the main interface that often confused and misled the users. In order to address this problem, it is suggested that features related to the most frequent family medicine operations should be placed on the main screen, whereas remaining features should be organized under auxiliary pages with clear navigation aids.

Each software project requires a specialized management to handle software development activities throughout the project life cycle successfully and efficiently. Software governance structures provide easy and efficient ways to handle software development activities. Software configuration management is an important software development activity, and while selecting the right strategy in configuration management, its conformity to the software governance should be considered as well. Software configuration management patterns are aligned with the software governance structures to increase the success in development and management of the projects. Companies running large and inter-dependent projects, should adapt their governance structures to the changing characteristics and dependencies of projects. In this thesis, we propose a method to dynamically manage software configuration management, as a result of the changing specifications in the software governance representation.

In this thesis, we study the shape analysis problem and propose new methods for shape description, similarity and recognition. Firstly, we introduce a new shape descriptor in a two-step method. In the first step, the 2-D shape information is mapped into a set of 1-D functions. The mapping is based on the beams, which are originated from a boundary point, connecting that point with the rest of the points on the boundary. At each point, the angle between a pair of beams is taken as a random variable to define the statistics of the topological structure of the boundary. The third order statistics of all the beam angles is used to construct 1-D Beam Angle Statistics (BAS) functions. In the second step, we apply a set of feature extraction methods on BAS functions in order to describe it in a more compact form. BAS functions eliminate the context-dependency of the representation to the data set. BAS function is invariant to translation, rotation and scale. It is insensitive to distortions. No predefined resolution or threshold is required to define the BAS functions. Secondly, we adopt three different similarity distance methods defined on the BAS feature space, namely, Optimal Correspondence of String Subsequences, Dynamic Warping and Cyclic Sequence Matching algorithms. Main goal in these algorithms is to minimize the distance between two BAS features by allowing deformations. Thirdly, we propose a new Hidden Markov Model (HMM)topology for boundary based shape recognition. The proposed topology called Circular HMM is both ergodic and temporal. Therefore, the states can be revisited in finite time intervals while keeping the sequential information in the string, which represents the shape. It is insensitive to size changes. Since it has no starting and terminating state, it is insensitive to the starting point of the shape boundary. Experiments are done on the dataset of MPEG 7 Core Experiments Shape-1. It is observed that BAS descriptor outperforms all the methods in the literature. The Circular HMM gives higher recognition rates than the classical topologies in shape analysis applications.

Software size estimation/measurement has been the objective of a lot of research in the software engineering community due to the need of reliable size estimates. FSM Methods have become widely used in software project management to measure the functional size of software since its first publication, late 1970s. Although all FSM methods measure the functional size by quantifying the FURs, each method defined its own measurement process and metric. Therefore, a piece of software has several functional sizes when measured by different methods. In order to be able to compare functional sizes of software products measured by different methods, we need to convert them to each other. In this thesis study, the similarities and differences between four FSM methods, IFPUG FPA, Mark II FPA, COSMIC FFP and ARCHI DIM FSM are investigated and the common core concepts are presented. Accordingly a unification model of the measurement process of all four methods is proposed. The main objective of this model is to measure the functional size of a software system by applying all four methods simultaneously, using a single source of data. In order to have an infrastructure to validate the unification model by conducting empirical studies, a software tool is designed and implemented based on the unification model. Two empirical studies are conducted by utilizing the data of a real project to evaluate both the unification model proposed and the developed tool and the measurement results are discussed.