In this thesis, a low-cost system, called Mobile Ambulance, is designed and implemented that provides patient&rsquo / s medical data collection and transmission from a moving ambulance. The aim of the system is to decrease the waiting time for critical care patients to be seen at the emergency department (ED) at the same time to equip the emergency physician with the essential medical data before the patient arrives the ED. Mobile Ambulance is a multi-tiered distributed application composed of three components: ambulance component to capture patient&rsquo / s essential medical data (EMD) and to transmit it to the ED (transmission is wireless via General Packet Radio Service, GPRS), synchronization component (synch for short) to persist incoming data into the back-end database and to warn the emergency physician, and service component to analyze the patient&rsquo / s EMD.

This thesis reviews the software acquisition models and management tools used for managing, tracking and planning the acquisition projects all around the world. Then the requirements of Turkish Land Forces Command (TLFC) for a project management tool are considered. Features of a project management tool that is suitable for TLFC are determined through the ideas of TLFC personnel of IS department. After evaluation of selected tools through the requirements of TLFC the best one is presented. Then an interface module is developed through the requirements of the current acquisition process of TLFC for effective usage of the tool. Finally the study is evaluated.

Today, Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing and Web Services play an important role in networking and computing. P2P computing, that aims addressing all the resources in a network and sharing them, is an old paradigm that gains importance nowadays with the advent of popular file sharing and instant messaging applications. On the other hand, a Web service is a software system that has an interface allowing applications to interact with other applications through Internet or intranet. Providing methods for publishing and discovering Web services from which mobile devices can facilitate in a P2P environment enables exploitation of P2P and Web service technologies efficiently by mobile devices. This also extends the range of devices that facilitate P2P and Web services technologies from servers and desktop computers to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. In this thesis, an architecture that enables publishing and discovering Web services for mobile clients that are inter-connected in a P2P environment is introduced. Key issues in this architecture are allowing mobile devices to join in a P2P network group, publishing Web services and discovering these services in P2P network. Invoking Web services that are published and discovered is another key issue in this architecture. The architecture introduced exploits P2P and Web services standards using various tools for mobile devices. For the purpose of organizing a P2P environment, JXTA protocols and services are used. WSDL is used for describing Web services. JXTA advertisements help in publication and discovery of Web services / and BPEL enables composition, deployment and execution of Web services. The architecture introduced within the scope of this thesis combines all these standards with tools that enable use of these standards on mobile devices. The work done in this thesis is realized as a part of Artemis, a project funded by European Commission for providing interoperability of medical information systems.

Metric collection process and Project Management activities cannot be performed in an integrated fashion on most of the software projects. In software engineering world, there are Project Management Tools that has embedded project metrics and there are various Metric Collection Tools that collect specific metrics for satisfying requirements of different software life cycle phase activities (Configuration Management, Requirements Management, Application Development tools etc.). These tools however are not communicating with each other with any interface or any common database. This thesis focuses on the development of a tool to define, export, collect and use metrics for software project planning, tracking and oversight processes. To satisfy these objectives, POMMES with functionalities of Generic Metric Definition, Collection, Analysis, and Import, Update and Export of Project Metrics from 3rd Party Project Management Tools is developed and implemented in a software organization during this thesis work.

The video databases and retrieval of data from these databases have become popular in various business areas of work with the improvements in technology. As a kind of video database, video archive systems need user-friendly interfaces to retrieve video frames. In this thesis, an NLP based user interface to a video database system is developed using a content-based spatio-temporal video data model. The data model is focused on the semantic content which includes objects, activities, and spatial properties of objects. Spatio-temporal relationships between video objects and also trajectories of moving objects can be queried with this data model. In this video database system, NL interface enables flexible querying. The queries, which are given as English sentences, are parsed using Link Parser. Not only exact matches but similar objects and activities are also returned from the database with the help of the conceptual ontology module to return all related frames to the user. This module is implemented using a distance-based method of semantic similarity search on the semantic domain-independent ontology, WordNet. The semantic representations of the given queries are extracted from their syntactic structures using information extraction techniques. The extracted semantic representations are used to call the related parts of the underlying spatio-temporal video data model to calculate the results of the queries.

This thesis focuses on index and retrieval mechanism of an ontology based medical domain search engine. First, indexing techniques and retrieval methods are reviewed. Then, a special indexing and retrieval mechanism are introduced. This thesis also specifies the functional requirements of these mechanisms. Finally, an evaluation is given by indicating the positive and negative aspects of mechanisms.

While software subcontracting is a common business transaction in the information technology field, metrics specifically aimed at effectiveness of software subcontracting arrangements are not commonly available. This thesis makes a review of the literature and derives such metrics from fields of software quality, COTS acquisition and IS success. A case study is performed on software subcontracting projects of a Turkish defense contractor, and the project metrics are compared according to their success. The results suggest that metrics regarding the requirements are good indicators for subcontracting success and that larger projects may enjoy more success compared to smaller ones.

Component Oriented Software Engineering (COSE) seems to be the future of software engineering. Currently, COSEML is the only modeling language that completely supports the COSE approach. Abstract decomposition of the system and their representing components are shown in a hierarchy diagram to support the COSE process model. In COSEML, only static modeling is supported through this single diagram. However, software is about behavior and static modeling is not sufficient to describe the system. The aim of this thesis is providing the benefits of dynamic modeling to COSEML by adopting collaboration diagrams. For this purpose, first, specification of modified collaboration diagrams is made for COSEML. Then software is developed for supporting collaboration diagrams in COSECASE. Also, an e-store application is modeled with COSEML using the collaboration diagrams. With this work, modeling the dynamic behavior of the system in both abstract and component levels is made possible. Furthermore, use case realization is enabled in the COSE modeling. More important, modeling the sequential interactions among components is made possible. Consequently, a suitable environment is provided for automated testing and application generation from the model.

Agile Software Development has gained popularity with their people centric view and their common practices for developing software in today&rsquo / s volatile business world where change on requirements is unavoidable. However / the efficiency of the project depends on the communication and the collaboration of the team, which are supported by the co-location of the team. But in some cases colocation of the team cannot be realized, thus agile processes should also support distributed teams. This point was observed by Kircher, Jain, Corsaro, and Levine [31] and they suggested Distributed eXtreme Programming (DXP) after they prepared a study using offthe- shelf software products in order to replace the effect of face-toface communication on the efficiency of the application of agile processes with the aid gathered from tool support. In this study some available tool support for distributed agile software development is investigated and a tool is developed and presented in order to support software configuration management as well as increasing collaboration and communication of the team. The tool is then evaluated from a user&rsquo / s perspective and it is compared with some available software configuration management tools.

This thesis attempts to show the contribution of Geographic Information System to urban planning process in Turkey. GIS can enhance the planning system by providing an access to accurate, reliable and update geographical information, producing alternatives according to the scenario and ensuring participation in the evaluation of the alternatives. This is the high level contribution of GIS for the enhancement of planning. The contribution can occur / if certain conditions are sustained such as establishment of geographical data provision system among public institutions. Obviously, these are connected with available technical and social infrastructure. Although, there is not a digital infrastructure system among the public institutions, several general directorates have started to provide some geographical information in their works. These efforts should be increased in quality and quantity. From the planning point of view, we argue that these are not even at satisfying level to work with the GIS in the plan-making processes. To prove our argument, the use of GIS and technology in the Bank of Provinces and private planning offices are inquired. The results of the thesis study show that the Bank of Provinces is in the transition period for the use of GIS. Private planning offices are in the initial stage and some of them seem unable to adopt themselves if the plan-making process becomes digital, because of the extra costs for them. Therefore, geographical data provision policies among public planning institutions will determine the future development of GIS in the planning process.