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+===================================================+
+======= Quality Techniques Newsletter =======+
+======= January 2005 =======+
+===================================================+
QUALITY TECHNIQUES NEWSLETTER (QTN) is E-mailed monthly to
subscribers worldwide to support the Software Research, Inc. (SR),
eValid, and TestWorks user communities and to other interested
parties to provide information of general use to the worldwide
internet and software quality and testing community.
Permission to copy and/or re-distribute is granted, and secondary
circulation is encouraged, provided that the entire QTN
document/file is kept intact and this complete copyright notice
appears in all copies. Information on how to subscribe or
unsubscribe is at the end of this issue. (c) Copyright 2004 by
Software Research, Inc.
========================================================================
Contents of This Issue
o Trustworthy Software Systems, by Larry Bernstein
o eValid Version 5 (V5) Feature Summary
o Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality, SBQA 2005
o Dependable Model-Based Separation, Composition and Validation
Concerns, by Paulo Alencar (McMaster University Lecture)
o Formal Approaches to Testing of Software, FATES 2005
o Situated Formalisms: Combining Softwre Function and Context,
by John C. Knight (UC/Irvine Lecture)
o International Conference on e-Society, June 2005
o Fifth Internal Conference on Quality Software, Melbourne,
Australia 2005
o Web Service Semantics: Toward Dynamic Business Integration,
2005
o QTN Article Submittal, Subscription Information
========================================================================
Trustworthy Software Systems
by
Larry Bernstein,
Fellow IEEE and ACM
Industry Research Professor
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, NJ 07030
Software system development is too often focused solely on schedule
and cost. Sometimes performance and functional technical
requirements become an issue. Rarely is trustworthiness considered.
Not only must software designers consider how the software will
perform they must account for consequences of failures.
Trustworthiness encompasses this concern.
Too often software professionals do not think about the risks to
others. And when they do, they are frequently overruled by their
bosses or product managers. Laws are needed that require every
product to have a named Software Architect and Software Project
Manager. The same person may perform both roles. The roles are:
Software Architect:
1. Affirms that the software product solves the customer's
problem
2. Affirms that the software product is suitably reliable, easy-
to-use, extendible, not harmful and robust. That it is
trustworthy.
3. Affirms that the requirements are valid.
Software Project Manager:
1. Affirms that the software was successfully tested against the
requirements.
2. Affirms and identifies the good software engineering processes
were used in the software development and integration.
3. Affirms that the project is within budget, on-time and
performs satisfactorily.
This issue is so important that it is a foundation theme taught in
all courses in the Quantitative Software Engineering program at
Stevens Institute of Technology and in the Graduate School on
Trustworthy Software Systems (TrustSoft) at the University of
Oldenburg, Germany. Software Forensics is studied by Les Hatton is
now the Professor of Forensic Software Engineering at the University
of Kingston in London. Colin Tully has done seminal work analyzing
software system failures; study his report on the London Ambulance
Dispatch System fiasco. Prof. Sha of the University of Illinois has
written eloquently on how simple software leads to reliable
software.
The dependency on software systems intensifies the consequences of
software failures. The successful use of software systems demands
their trustworthiness. The need for trust is gaining industry
awareness. Several software vendor consortia plan to develop so-
called "Trusted Computing" platforms. These current initiatives
primarily focus on security, while trust is a much broader concept.
PhD fellowships are being offered for the study of trustworthy
software, see http://trustsoft.uni-oldenburg.de.
The software industry seems exempt from the need to practice due
diligence and from liability suits. The underlying problems with
software trustworthiness is not technical, it is the legal and
business structure of the software market. This tacit exemption
slows the adoption of trustworthy technology. The state-of-the
practice lags the state-of-the-art by a wide margin. There are few
financial consequences to companies that produce poor software; but
survival is at stake for companies that are slow to market. The
software industry operates in a "customer beware" market structure.
Corporate fraud has stimulated the call for corrective action. The
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is driving a renewed interest in
trustworthy software. Survey results show that over fifty percent
of major, Fortune 1000 companies are still using spreadsheets or
other manual methods to manage and control commissions and other
types of variable pay. These methods are error-prone and time
consuming, and raise concerns under SOX. Enterprise incentive
management software must enable the financial control cleanup
required by Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404.
Trustworthiness is a holistic property, encompassing security,
safety and reliability. It is not sufficient to address only one or
two of these diverse dimensions, nor is it sufficient to simply
assemble components that are themselves trustworthy. Integrating
the components and understanding how the trustworthiness dimensions
interact is a challenge. Because of the increasing complexity and
scope of software, its trustworthiness will become a dominant issue.
Software fault tolerance is at the heart of the building trustworthy
software. Microsoft claims to have undertaken a Trustworthy
Computing initiative. Bill Gates sent a memo to his entire
workforce demanding, "... company wide emphasis on developing high-
quality code that is available, reliable and secure- even if it
comes at the expense of adding new features." [Information Week,
Jan. 21 2002, issue 873, p.28.]
Trustworthy software is stable software. It is sufficiently fault-
tolerant that it does not crash at minor flaws and will shut down in
an orderly way in the face of major trauma. Trustworthy software
does what it is supposed to do and can repeat that action time after
time, always producing the same kind of output from the same kind of
input. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
defines trustworthiness as "software that can and must be trusted to
work dependably in some critical function, and failure to do so may
have catastrophic results, such as serious injury, lost of life or
property, business failure or breach of security." Some examples
include software used in safety systems of nuclear power plants,
transportation systems, medical devices, electronic banking,
automatic manufacturing, and military systems.
Modern society depends on large-scale software systems of
astonishing complexity. Because the consequences of failure in such
systems are so high, it is vital that they exhibit trustworthy
behavior. Much effort has been expended in methods for reliability,
safety, and security analysis, as well as in methods to design,
implement, test, and evaluate these systems. Yet the "best
practice" results of this work are often not used in system
development. A program is needed to integrate these methods within
a trustworthiness framework, and to understand how best to ensure
that they are applied in critical system development. In addition,
it is important to focus attention on critical systems and to
understand the societal and economic implications of potential
failures. There must be consequences to those who continue to
deliver failure prone software.
Much software engineering focuses only on features and schedule,
especially schedule. My view is that a shift is needed. The
software engineer must make judgments or tradeoffs among the
functions the software provides, the time it will take to produce
the software, the cost of producing the software, how easy it is to
use and how reliable it is. A reliability based focus is needed.
The fundamental software reliability equation is:
Reliability = e exp(- k * l * t)
where,
k is a normalizing constant,
l = Complexity/effectiveness times staffing,
and
t is the time the software executes from its launch
This equation can be used to make engineering tradeoffs. It is
reasonable, if unorthodox, to model the software engineering process
based on this model. The longer the software executes the more
likely it is to execute a latent fault that soon becomes a failures.
Failures are hangs and crashes of a system. l incorporates the
factors a software project manager controls through the development
process. By providing better software tools, such as higher level
languages, to the software designer the reliability of the final
product is better. By reusing reliable components and properly
integrating them the software project manager reduces the complexity
of the system again making it more reliable and by adding staff well
beyond the minimum staff predicted by staffing models more effort
can be placed on such activities as diabolic testing and system
audits to make the system more trustworthy. Specific technologies
can bound software execution that makes software less vulnerable to
latent faults.
The lack of trustworthy software systems has killed and injured too
many people. Software-caused aircraft crashes, airline groundings,
telephone network outages and internet failures, among others, have
killed people and caused severe economic consequences. It is
difficult to estimate the considerable extent of loses experienced
by individuals and companies that depend on these systems. The
issue of system trustworthiness, the subject of this talk, is not
well known or understood by the public, the nation's leadership or
by many software practioners.
========================================================================
eValid Version 5 (V5) Feature Summary
Summary: eValid Version 5 (V5) includes many changes
and additions relative to the prior eValid release. In
V5 the product suite has been expanded to include a
variety of new commands, new features for access and
processing of the current page, bidirectional interfaces
to JavaScript, additional metrics, and a range of other
analytic support features.
Record/Play Features
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The basic architecture of eValid, nearly automatic recording
amplified by a rich collection of extrinsic (edit only) commands.
Processing of parent-child relationships, modal dialogs, and other
kinds of user interaction are compact and efficient. The
InBrowser(tm) approach continues to lead the technology for website
testing because of the natural advantage eValid has as an actual
browser. Enhancements and additions include:
o PageMap Display (Recording Advisor). The powerful PageMap
feature shows what's where an helps in setting up advanced test
scripts. It shows the structure of the current page or frame or
iframe and identifies elements for reference or script editing
convenience. Two way feedback to/form the page and the pagemap.
Recording advisor signals type of recording mode to use.
o Revised Dashboard. The eValid dashboard now has additional
displays, better control, and more details.
o Mouse-Event Recording. There is now complete support for all
JavaScript mouse events. This support includes a number of new
commands and options. It is now possible to record excursion
actions with mouseover events with complete fidelity. Complete
iframes Support. The new release includes complete support for
iframes and also includes a new frame naming and/or numbering
system.
o Data Synthesis Feature. Operating from a user-supplied file of
$NAME=value pairs, eValid now can rerun a single script multiple
times with different value sutstitutions in each run.
o JavaScript Interface. A built-in 2-direction interface -- to
and from the eValid script file to the internal JavaScript
interpreter -- offers a powerful new option to give commands to
the JavaScript interpreter from a playback script and to issue
commands from within the eValid browser via a special JavaScript
method.
o Interactive Mode Enhancements. This eValid release includes new
C/C++ and Java interface versions, and provides exposure of the
current page, frame, iframe source files for secondary analysis
through and from the DOM (Document Object Model).
o New Data Saving Commands. These commands allow a user to save
the current contents of the original HTML page, the complete
HTML page, or the visible text of the page, to a local file for
detailed processing.
o Other New Script Commands. A variety of new editable playback
commands to permit manipulation of browser behavior during
playback, control of cursor and screen, manipulation of files,
and setting playback-time parameters.
LoadTest Features
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The architecture of eValid's server loading capability uses multiple
coordinated playbacks of scripts from multiple instances of eValid.
This is a superior solution in terms of accuracy and general
flexibility. Enhancements and additions include: Test
Synchronization. There are several new LoadTest methods for
synchronizing tests among multiple machine playbacks. These methods
include the WaitMod... commands.
o Report Consolidation. There are new procedures for integrating
Load Test reports from multiple machines into a single,
consolidated multi-machine report.
o Browser Re-Spawn Capability. In long eValid LoadTest runs that
involve long playbacks the footprint of each eValid instance can
grow substantially. There is now an option to automatically
re-spawn [restart] eValid after a specified number of playbacks.
Using this option has the effect of minimizing the total RAM
requirements for a given total number of simulated users.
o New Playback Delay Commands. There is a new Delay msec command
that holds the playback in a frozen state for a specified time.
The wait time multiplier does not affect the Delay command.
Site Analysis
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The built-in site analysis engine (the eValid "spider") is the basis
for powerful methods of detailed quality assurance of websites.
Enhancements and additions include: Enhanced 3D-SiteMap. Changes
and extensions to the 3D-SiteMap include more display choices,
more-flexible choice of displays, more powerful access to page
details.
o Simplified Reporting. New site analysis results menus permit
choosing site analysis reports easily, quickly.
o Simplified Report Format. The formats for site analysis reports
have been improved through use of a special structure that lets
the site analysis reports be fully expandable and contractable.
o Report Selection Face Lift. Here is the newly formatted Multi
Report Selection Page that makes it easy to see all of the
reports after they are done.
o Complete Scan Data Table. This new report tracks a complete
scan. The complete scan data table is available in HTML and in
spreadsheet or SQL-ready CSV format.
Monitoring.
New support for eValid in monitoring mode includes these additions
and improvements: Enhanced Modal/Popup Control. Recording and
playback of modal dialogs and popups has been enhanced, and there
are new methods in place that can be used to suppress unwanted
popups during playback.
o Expanded Command Line Options. New command line (batch mode)
switches have been added to provide batch mode control of log
files, preferences, profiles, and other important options.
o New Error Codes. New error codes have been added to eValid and
to eV.Manager to simplify batch mode operation.
o New Timer Controls. New timer controls including Pause and
Resume allow more accurate timing of events. Also, optional
messages are now allowd on the ResetTimer and Elapsed Time
commands.
o Improved Standard Test Report (STR). The information in the
standard test report has been revised and reordered for greater
convenience. There is a new batch-mode only option to record
STR records in CSV format for direct use by SQL.
o Script Validity Checking. New commands have been added to
permit a script to confirm version number and operational dates
(date ranges). These commands help prevent scripts that are out
of date from being applied inadvertantly.
Additional Changes
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Major rework and reorganization of the ~300-page on-line User Manual
has improved access and readability.
o Simplified Version Numbering. Beginning with V5 eValid build
numbers will be used to show the current revision number. Build
sequence numbers will continue from V4 for which the final
released build is #115.
o New QuickStart Manual. The quickstart manual -- the material
intended for first time eValid users -- has been revised and
simplified.
o New Quick Step Solution Descriptions. There are now several
"quick step" solution descriptions for some of the most-common
testing situations. These descriptions help user to learn
eValid operation in an orderly and didactically efficient way.
o Script Catalog Introduced. Sample scripts, including the
training material that is implemented as AUTOPLAY scripts, are
now available in a script catalog.
o Completely Revised Settings Descriptions. The material
describing all of the eValid settings and preferences has been
completely revised.
o Worked Examples. There are many revised and simplified,
completely worked examples of eValid usages.
o Screenshots. All images and screenshots in the documentation
and other material have been redone in a uniform modern style.
Licensing and Other Matters
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Other changes to eVlaid include:
o Product Licensing Changes of several kinds have been made to the
licensing structure available with eValid.
o Regular Product Licenses. Prices for basic licenses have been
adjusted to reflect certain product changes. Some new special-
price feature bundles are available.
o Enterprise Floating Licenses. HostName based multiple-user
enterprise licenses (EPRISEnn) are now available.
o "Pay Per Play" Licensing. A new "pay-per-play" commercial
pricing option is now available for limited-capacity record/play
applications or for commercial monitoring applications.
o AUTOPLAY Script Creation. This option provides an AUTOPLAY
version of a script for a moderate fee based on script length.
eValid AUTOPLAY scripts play back on any eValid browser anywhere
and at any time without further licensing required.
o Required OS/Browser Alert V5 of eValid relies on certain
properties of the IE DLLs that are only available in IE Ver.
5.50 or IE Ver. 6.0+. Similarly, certain features of the
technology require use of Windows operating system features that
are only present in Windows NT 4.0 SP6a, Windows 2000/SP4, or
Windows XP. At launch eValid provides an advisory notice in
case the minimum required operating capabilities are not
present.
o Revised Pricing. To simplify licensing and provide the greatest
flexibility in selecting eValid features, we have made revisions
to the V5 Suggested Retail Price List. V5 is available to
customers with a current maintenance subscription.
o Supported Platforms. eValid V5 is build on .NET 2003 (or later)
and supports .NET operation. eValid V5 is aimed for use on
Windows NT/2000/XP platforms. For NT at least SP6 is required.
eValid does not formally support Windows 95, 98 or ME. In some
cases scripts that work perfectly well on the supported
platforms may have problems if you are running Windows 98 or ME
(even when including the latest SP's) and will very likely have
severe problems or complete failure, if you are running Windows
95.
o Required Software. Even though eValid is a free-standing
browser, its operation is based on and is standardized to
interoperate correctly with a co-installed Internet Explorer.
We highly recommend you have IE 5.50, IE 6.0 or later on your
machine (Download Internet Explorer).
Complete Information:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Get complete information about eValid using this simple form:
http://www.soft.com/eValid/Information/question.request.html
========================================================================
Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality - SBQS 2005
www.pucrs.br/eventos/sbqs
About SBQS: The objective of the Brazilian Symposium on Software
Quality is to provide a forum for researchers, professionals,
teachers, students and software industry to present their work and
exchange experiences on questions related to Software Quality. SBQS
is a conference promoted by the Special Interest Group on Software
Engineering of the Brazilian Computer Society and the Brazilian
Initiative on Software Quality and Productivity. SBQS2005 will be
held in the campus of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio
Grande do Sul at Porto Alegre-RS, Brazil, from June 06 to 10 2005.
Topics of interest:
* Product and Process Quality
* Quality Certification
* Software Quality Teaching
* Definition of Quality Programs
* Methods and Tools for Quality Control
* Software Metrics
* Web Software Quality
* Object-Oriented Software Quality
* Total Quality
* Quality Assessment Techniques
* Software Verification and Validation
* Software Testing
General Co-Chairs:
Jorge Luis Nicolas Audy, PUCRS, Brasil
Josli Antonio Antonioni, Softsul, Brasil
Lucia Giraffa, PUCRS, Brasil
Kival Chaves Weber, PBQP Software, Brasil
Program Chair:
Jorge Luis Nicolas Audy, PUCRS, Brasil
========================================================================
Dependable Model-Based Separation, Composition,
and Validation Concerns
Dr. Paulo Alencar
University of Waterloo
ABSTRACT: Modern software systems are routinely complex and
distributed, yet critical systems such as the ones found on the Web
and the Internet are expected to be highly reliable and always
available. These software systems involve complex component
topologies, behavior, and interactions. However, although a system
may behave properly on test cases, undetected failures such as those
attributed to consistency and integration problems, may be revealed
ultimately only as
accidents that often cause undesirable system crashes after
deployment, and these failures can be both dangerous and expensive.
Correcting these software errors late in the design and
implementation is a complex procedure that usually impacts all
facets of the system and results in large unforeseen costs. In
addition, system concerns such as presentation, concurrency,
security, and timing, are often dispersed across a myriad of complex
implementation structures, which significantly raises the complexity
of the systems behavior and interactions. Without a solid
foundation, it is difficult to develop and apply rigorous modular
and incremental analysis methods to assure the validity of
anticipated (i.e., design time) and non-anticipated (i.e., evolution
time) concerns and their composition.
One of the fundamental goals of software engineering is to enable a
reliable, predictable and modular construction of sofware systems by
assembling software components. In this talk I will present results
related to one of my lines of research in the area of highly-
dependable computing, which focuses on systematic model-based
separation, composition, and validation of concerns. In this
context, the following questions can be posed: raise the level of
abstraction in which concerns are represented, composed and analyzed
instead of dealing with source code, as is done currently? How can
we build software systems that allow considerable anticipated and
unanticipated concern composition in the software without
compromising constraints related to issues such as integration,
consistency and timing? methods, tools and applications will be
presented for anticipated concerns related to views, problem frames,
and design patterns, as well as for unanticipated concerns related
to object-oriented frameworks and aspects. I will also describe the
impact as well as ongoing and future work related to this research.
========================================================================
FORMAL APPROACHES TO TESTING OF SOFTWARE
(FATES 2005)
In affiliation with the
17th International Conference on
COMPUTER AIDED VERIFICATION
(CAV 2005)
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 11, 2005
Objective and Scope
Software testing is one of the most cost-intensive tasks in the
modern software production process. The application of formal
approaches to the testing process has gained steady attention in
recent years. Effective and efficient test cases may be generated
automatically from formal system models and specifications or be
developed based on a formal analysis of the system. Formal
approaches to testing of software use techniques from areas like
theorem proving, model checking, constraint resolution, program
analysis, abstract interpretation, Markov chains, and various
others. These techniques are combined with traditional approaches
to testing.
The aim of the FATES workshop series is to be a forum for
researchers, developers, and testers to discuss the state of the art
in theory, application, tools and industrialization of formal
approaches to testing. The topics of interest include:
* Different techniques in testing: combined verification and
testing approaches, analysis techniques that support testing,
black-box testing, integration testing, etc.
* Different aspects of testing: test derivation, test selection,
test implementation and execution, test result analysis, test
stop criteria, etc.
* Different testing techniques in OO, extreme programming, aspect
oriented programming, etc.
* Different types of testing: functional, interoperability,
performance, security, robustness, etc.
* Different formal models: automata, logical, process algebra,
algebraic data types, grammars, Markov-chains, etc.
* Different modeling languages: UML, SDL, MSC, LOTOS, Z, VDM,
TTCN-3, Timed Automata, synchronous languages, etc.
* Different application areas: communication systems, control
systems, embedded software, Web-based systems, sensor networks,
etc.
* Different algorithms related to testing for model and program
analysis: automatic partitioning, coverage analysis, test
derivation (online and offline), test data selection, etc.
* Different testing tools based on formal methods and application
experiences.
With formal approaches to testing becoming more mature, the focus of
the workshop is not only on research approaches, but especially on
the application and industrialization of formal testing
methodologies. Thus FATES 2005 invites in addition to research
papers, experience reports and work-in-progress papers submission
which describe applications and industrialization of testing
methodologies, with a clear outline of the theoretical background
and the benefits and drawbacks of the application.
Program Committee Co-Chairs
Wolfgang Grieskamp, Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
e-mail: wrwg@microsoft.com, phone: +1 425 707 5740 home page:
http://research.microsoft.com/users/wrwg
Carsten Weise, Ericsson GmbH, Research and Development, Aachen, Germany
e-mail: carsten.weise@ericsson.com, phone: +49 2407 575 638 home page:
http://www.cweise.de/research/
========================================================================
University of California, Irvine
Institute for Software Research
http://www.isr.uci.edu/
ISR Distinguished Speaker Series 2004-2005
"Situated Formalisms: Combining Software Function and Context"
by
PROF. JOHN C. KNIGHT
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/dist-speakers04-05/knight.html
ABSTRACT: In systems requiring ultra-high dependability, the
majority of software defects that are found during testing or after
deployment are the result of requirements errors. Of those
requirements errors, a significant number occur because of
misunderstandings about the system context. Essential details of the
application domain are either unknown or misunderstood by developers
because of poor communication of application domain knowledge.
Current software development practices focus on the formal aspects
of software. While formalisms are the only structures required to
communicate with a machine, contextual information is required for
developers to communicate with one another and establish software
validity.
The pervasive medium for this communication, natural language, is
understood to be problematic for high-precision communication
because of its characteristic ambiguity and informality. However,
natural language possesses its own body of research results and is
amenable to rigorous inspection. We have analyzed the domain
knowledge communication problem as it arises in software engineering
from the perspective of current cognitive linguistic theory, and
this analysis has yielded a model that helps to explain sources of
ambiguity and other problems with the use of natural language. Using
this model we have developed a new artifact that combines software
function and essential context information in a rigorous entity that
we refer to as a situated formalism.
In this presentation, I briefly summarize the linguistic model and
insights derived from it, e.g., that the considered use of natural
language performs a function unachievable by formal means. I will
explain how these insights are exploited to motivate the structure
of the situated formalism and discuss a preliminary practical
representation. Finally, I will present some details of our
applications of the concepts discussed.
========================================================================
IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE e-SOCIETY 2005
June 27-30, 2005 - Qawra, MALTA
http://www.iadis.org/es2005
Co-organised by University of Malta
* Conference Background and Goals
The IADIS e-Society 2005 conference aims to address the main issues
of concern within the Information Society. This conference covers
both the technical as well as the non-technical aspects of the
Information Society. Broad areas of interest are eGovernment /
eGovernance, eBusiness / eCommerce, eLearning, eHealth, Information
Systems, and Information Management. These broad areas are divided
into more detailed areas (see below). However innovative contributes
that don't fit into these areas will also be considered since they
might be of benefit to conference attendees.
* Conference theme
e-Society 2005: How is the use of ICT in all its forms changing
practices and behaviours in the digital age?
* Topics related to e-Society are of interest. These include best
practice, case studies, strategies and tendencies in the following
areas:
eGovernment / eGovernance May include issues relating to:
* Accessibility
* Democracy and the Citizen
* Digital Economies
* Digital Regions
* eAdministration
* eGovernment Management
* eProcurement
* Global Trends
* National and International Economies
* Social Inclusion
eBusiness / eCommerce
* Business Ontologies and Models
* Digital Goods and Services
* eBusiness Models
* eCommerce Application Fields
* eCommerce Economics
* eCommerce Services
* Electronic Service Delivery
* eMarketing
* Languages for Describing Goods and Services
* Online Auctions and Technologies
* Virtual Organisations and Teleworking
eLearning
* Collaborative Learning
* Curriculum Content Design & Development
* Delivery Systems and Environments
* Educational Systems Design
* eLearning Organisational Issues
* Evaluation and Assessment
* Virtual Learning Environments and Issues
* Web-based Learning Communities
eHealth
* Data Security Issues
* eHealth Policy and Practice
* eHealthcare Strategies and Provision
* Legal Issues
* Medical Research Ethics
* Patient Privacy and Confidentiality
Information Systems
* Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
* Intelligent Agents
* Intelligent Systems
* IS Security Issues
* Mobile Applications
* Multimedia Applications
* Payment Systems
* Protocols and Standards
* Software Requirements and IS Architectures
* Storage Issues
* Strategies and Tendencies
* System Architectures
* Telework Technologies
* Ubiquitous Computing
* Virtual Reality
* Wireless Communications
Information Management
* Computer-Mediated Communication
* Content Development
* Cyber law and Intellectual Property
* Data Mining
* ePublishing and Digital Libraries
* Human Computer Interaction
* Information Search and Retrieval
* Knowledge Management
* Policy Issues
* Privacy Issues
* Social and Organizational Aspects
* Virtual Communities
* XML and Other Extensible Languages
Conference Co-Chairs Pedro Isatas, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese
Open University), Portugal Piet Kommers, University of Twente, The
Netherlands
Program Chair Maggie McPherson, University of Sheffield, United
Kingdom
========================================================================
QSIC 2OO5
FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON QUALITY SOFTWARE
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, SEPTEMBER 19 -21, 2005
http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/conferences/qsic2005
Software is playing an increasingly important role in our day-to-day
life. Unfortunately, software systems often fail to deliver
according to promises. It is well known that there are still
unresolved errors in many of the software systems that we are using
every day.
The aim of the QSIC series of conferences is to provide a forum to
bring together researchers and practitioners working on improving
the quality of software, to present new results and exchange ideas
in this challenging area. It originated as the Asia-Pacific
Conference on Quality Software (APAQS). The four preceding
conferences were held in 2000 (Hong Kong), 2001 (Hong Kong), 2003
(Dallas, USA), and 2004 (Braunschweig, Germany), respectively, and
received overwhelming responses from academia as well as industry.
Each conference publishes a proceedings with IEEE Computer Society
Press and a post- conference special issue with a recognized
internationally journal. More historical information can be found at
http://www.cs.hku.hk/~tse/qx05history.html.
QSIC 2005 will be held in Melbourne, Australia. It will adhere to
the style of previous conferences. In addition, it will be expanded
to include workshops.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics of submissions include, but are not limited to:
- Software testing: automation, conformance, strategies, tools,
standards, economics, performance and robustness, processes and
standards
- Software quality: management and assurance, measurement and
benchmarking, review, inspection and walkthrough, reliability,
safety and security
- Methods and tools: design tools, testing tools, information systems
engineering, quality tools
- Evaluation of software products and components: static and dynamic
analysis, validation and verification
- Information and knowledge management: economics of software
quality, knowledge engineering
- Formal methods: program analysis, model checking, model
construction, formal process models
- Adaptive software: architecture, quality of service, theoretical
foundation
- Emerging technology: software for ubiquitous computing, service
computing, mobile computing
- Applications: component-based systems, digital libraries,
distributed systems, e-commerce, embedded systems, enterprise
applications, information systems, multimedia, Web-based systems,
safety critical systems
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Program Co-Chairs:
Kai-Yuan Cai, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
China
Email: kycai@buaa.edu.cn
Atsushi Ohnishi, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Email: ohnishi@cs.ritsumei.ac.jp
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WEB SERVICE SEMANTICS:
TOWARDS DYNAMIC BUSINESS INTEGRATION
http://www.ai.sri.com/WSS2005
14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2005)
http://www2005.org/
Chiba, Japan
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
DESCRIPTION
The description of Web services in a machine-understandable fashion
is expected to have a great impact in the areas of e-Commerce and
Enterprise Application Integration, as it can enable dynamic and
scalable cooperation between independently developed systems and
organisations. These potential benefits have led to the
establishment of an important class of research activities, both in
industry and academia, aimed at the practical deployment of
declarative, semantically rich service and process descriptions and
their use across the Web service lifecycle.
This research, which draws on a variety of fields such as knowledge
representation, automated software engineering, process modeling,
workflow, and software agents, is happening under several headings,
including Semantic Web services (SWS), Grid services and Semantic
Grid services, and (some aspects of) Service-Oriented Computing.
For ease of reference, in this call we refer to this general area of
work as Semantic Web services (SWS). We note that here, "Semantic
Web" does not denote any particular set of standards, although much
work in this area does build on products of the Semantic Web
activity at W3C. In addition, many SWS efforts are aligned with
rapidly developing commercial Web service standards such as WSDL and
UDDI.
Many major challenges need to be addressed in this field. This
workshop aims to provide a forum in which to focus on selected core
technical challenges for deployment of SWS, and reach a better
understanding of the relationships between commercial Web service
standards, current SWS research efforts, and the ultimate
requirements for full-scale deployment of these technologies.
Another major focus will be on the relationship of work on SWS to
the needs of business systems, and in particular the needs having to
do with publishing policies associated with Web services, such as
those discussed at the recent W3C Workshop on Constraints and
Capabilities for Web Services (see http://www.w3.org/2004/06/ws-cc-
cfp.html). Submissions related to semantics for Grid services are
welcome. We particularly seek submissions that demonstrate
innovative applications of SWS technologies to the challenges
involved in automating online business transactions.
Relevant topics include:
o Supporting SWS Deployment
o Architectures for SWS Deployment
o Semantics in Grid Services
o Tools and Infrastructure
o Applications of SWS to E-business and E-government
o Supporting Enterprise Application Integration with SWS
o Policies for Semantic Web Services
o Advertising, Discovery, Matchmaking
o SWS Conversational Protocols and Choreography
o Ontologies and Languages for Service Description
o Ontologies and Languages for Process Modeling
o Foundations of Reasoning about Services and/or Processes
o Contracts and Commitments
o Composition of Semantic Web Services
o Execution and Lifecycle Management of Semantic Web Services
o Monitoring and Recovery Strategies for Semantic Web Services
o Relationship of Semantic Web Services with Workflow Technologies
o Security and Privacy for Semantic Web Services
o Relationships between SWS, Grid Service, and Commercial WS
Technologies
Organizing Committee
Christoph Bussler Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland
Richard Goodwin IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
Rubin Lara Tecnologma, Informacisn y Finanzas (TIF), Spain
David Martin SRI International, USA
Takahira Yamaguchi Keio University, Japan
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