No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

A Database Management System (DBMS) is system software for managing a large amount of data in secondary memory. The standard DBMS used today in both industry and the military is the Relational DBMS (RDBMS). The RDBMS is based upon the relational paradigm, whereas modern software development technologies that interact with the RDBMS are based upon the object-oriented paradigm. This difference in paradigms presents a conceptual mismatch which greatly reduces programmer and developer productivity. Additionally, wireless handheld devices have become ubiquitous both in the military and in the community at large. These handheld devices provide a convenient means of information access. To date, the military has failed to capitalize on the use of handheld devices as a convenient means of information access with respect to the large amounts of information stored in its databases. This thesis investigates various database application architectures and proposes an architecture that will not only overcome the conceptual mismatch between the relational and object-oriented paradigms, but also allows handheld device access to the database. A proof-of-concept prototype database application that provides handheld device access to a military personnel database is built to show the viability of the proposed architecture.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The automation of software development has long been a goal of software engineering to increase efficiency of the development effort and improve the software product. This efficiency (high productivity with less software faults) results from best practices in building, managing and tes ting software projects via the use of these automated tools and processes. However, each software development tool has its own characteristics, semantics, objects, and concepts. While there have been significant results achieved by use of automated software development tools (coming mainly from the widespread increase of customers' adoption of these tools), there remains many challenging obstacles: lack of communication between the different software development tools, poor shared understanding; use of di fferent syntax and concepts between tools, limits in interoperability between tools, absence of a unifying conceptual models and ideas between tools, and redundant work and cross purposes between tools. The approach undertaken in this thesis to overcome th ese obstacles was to construct a "pilot" ontology that is extensible. We applied the Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis approach to capture the commonalities between two software development tools (Rational Software Corporation's RequisitePro, a main -stream, complex, commercial tool), and a software prototyping tool (the Software Engineering Automation tool (SEATools), a research model with tool support for developing executable software prototypes) and developed an ontology for the software development tool s using the ProtgÌ Ì -2000 System. The ontology expressed in UML, promotes interoperability and enhanced communication. / Lieutenant, Tunisian Navy

This thesis deals with the management and analysis of source code, which is represented in XML. Using the elementary methods of the XML repository, the XML source code representation is accessed, changed, updated, and saved. We reason about the source code, refactor source code and we visualize dependency graphs for call analysis. The visualized dependencies between files, modules, or packages are used to structure the source code in order to get a system, which is easily to comprehend, to modify and to complete. Sophisticated methods have been developed to slice the source code in order to obtain a working package of a large system, containing only a specific functionality. The basic methods, on which the visualizations and analyses are built on can be changed like changing a plug-in. The visualization methods can be reused in order to handle arbitrary source code representations, e.g., JAML, PHPML, PROLOGML. Dependencies of other context can be visualized, too, e.g., ER diagrams, or website references. The tool SCAV supports source code visualization and analyzing methods. / Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit der Verwaltung und Analyse von Quellcode, der in XML repräsentiert ist. Es werden Abhängigkeitsgraphen visualisiert um ein Projekt leichter verstehen zu können. Es kann auch ein Slice einer bestimmten Methode aus dem Projekt erstellt werden. Die Programmierung ist in Modulen gemacht, so dass die Funktionalität leicht erweitert werden kann.

This thesis presents the evolution of the Western Cultures Database. The project starts with a database design using a Semantic modeling, and continues with the implementation following two techniques: a Relational and a Semantic approach. The project continues with them in parallel, reaching a point where the Relational is left aside because of the advantages of the Semantic (Sem-ODB) approach. The Semantic implementation produces as a result the Western Culture Semantic Database Application - web interface (the main contribution of this thesis). The database is created and populated using Sem ODB and the web interface is built using WebRG (report generator), HTML, JavaScript and JavaChart (applets for graphical representation). The resulting semantic application permits the storage and retrieval of data, the display of reports and the graphical representation of the data through a Web interface. All of these to support research assertions about the impact of historical figures in Western Cultures.

No description available.

With the rise of services like Steam and Xbox Live, multiplayer support has become essential to the success of many commercial video games. Explicit, server-client synchronisation models are bandwidth intensive and error prone to implement, while implicit, peer-to-peer synchronisation models are brittle, inflexible, and vulnerable to cheating. We present a generalised server-client network synchronisation model targeted at complex games, such as real time strategy games, that previously have only been feasible via peer-to-peer techniques. We use prediction, learning, and entropy coding techniques to learn a bandwidth-efficient incremental game state representation while guaranteeing both correctness of synchronised data and robustness in the face of unreliable network behavior. The resulting algorithms are efficient enough to synchronise the state of real time strategy games such as Blizzard’s Starcraft (which can involve hundreds of in-game characters) using less than three kilobytes per second of bandwidth.

One of the most essential parts of any software requirements analysis effort is the exploration of alternative ways by which stakeholder problems can be solved. Systematic modeling and analysis of requirements variability allows better decision making during the early requirements phase and substantiates design choices pertaining to the configurability aspect of the system-to-be. This thesis proposes the use of goal models for capturing and reasoning about requirements variability. The goal models we adopt consist of AND/OR decompositions of stakeholder goals and express alternative ways by which stakeholders may wish to achieve them. By capturing goal variability using such models, we propose a shift of focus from variability of the software design, to variability of the problem that the design is intended to solve. This way, we ensure that every important variation of the problem is identified and analyzed before variations of the solution are specified. The thesis exploits opportunities that arise from this new viewpoint. Firstly, a variability-intensive goal decomposition process is proposed. The process is based on associating each high-level goal to a set of variability concerns that must be addressed through decomposition. We introduce a universal categorization of such concerns and also show how domain-specific variability concerns can be identified by annotating domain corpora. Concern-driven decomposition offers a structured way of thinking about problem variability, while systematizing its identification process. Further, an expressive LTL-based preference language is introduced to support leverage of large spaces of goal alternatives. The language allows the expression of preferences over behavioral and qualitative properties of solutions and a reasoning tool allows the identification of alternatives that satisfy these preferences. This way, individual stakeholders can get the solution that exactly fits their needs in a particular situation, through simply specifying desired high-level characteristics of these solutions. Finally, a framework for connecting alternatives at the goal level to alternative configurations of common desktop applications is presented. The framework shows how a vast number of configurations of a software application can be evaluated and ranked with respect to a small number of quality goals that are more intuitive to and comprehensible by end users.