Advances in agent and non-agent software engineering methodologies on the web and software systems

Citation

Shakshuki, E. (2007), "Advances in agent and non-agent software engineering methodologies on the web and software systems", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 3 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijwis.2007.36203daa.001

Advances in agent and non-agent software engineering methodologies on the web and software systems

The Fourth International Software Engineering Track was held on 7-9 April 2007 with the Fourth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. During this track, many interesting topics on software engineering methodologies using agent and non-agent for information systems were discussed among the presenters and the audience.

Authors of the selected papers were invited to submit extended versions of their papers. Based on a two rounds of rigorous reviews, seven papers were accepted for inclusion in this special issue. These papers include contributions from both academic as well as industry research community from around the world.

Owing to the huge explosion of the internet and the number of web pages available, it became important to measure the size of the web. The first paper by Benoit and Trudel is an attempt to measure the exact size of the world wide web, using the number of publicly accessible web servers on port 80. Using this measure, they have a fixed upper bound for the number of web servers: the number of IP addresses. In their approach, servers behind firewalls and running on different ports are not generally publicly accessible. The proposed approach is implemented and their census took 2.5 months to complete and surveyed almost 3.8 billion IP addresses in that time, finding just over 18.5 million web servers.

Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act enforces all web development contractors for the Federal government must conform to the standards of W3C to make electronic and information technology accessible including Federal pages on the internet to all individuals, including those with disabilities. In the next paper, Eyadat and Fisher investigated into the issues of Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines for web accessibility so as to incorporate web accessibility in information systems curriculum. The authors tested the top pages of the websites of California State University's 23 campuses using WebXACT and found the majority of the web pages were not in compliance with the standards of Section 508.

Bentahar et al. proposed new security framework from the perspective of trust for open systems. It is of paramount importance to the entities of the open systems (web services, virtual organizations, etc.) to decide about trusting or not each other before starting transactions. Thus, the authors designed the entities of the system as software autonomous agents and equipped with advanced communication and reasoning capabilities. These agents interact with one another by communicating using public dialogue game-based protocols and strategies on how to use these protocols. These strategies are private to individual agents, and are defined in terms of dialogue games with conditions. Agents use their reasoning capabilities to evaluate these conditions and deploy their strategies. Agents compute the trust they have in other agents, represented as a subjective quantitative value, using direct and indirect interaction histories with these other agents and the notion of social networks. The proposed approach is implemented as a prototype and is demonstrated on examples.

Web searching is a very challenging problem. Jansen et al. investigated the issue of query formulation during web searching. The authors of this paper have identified the patterns of interaction between searchers and search engine during web searching. These patterns are based on three strong identified query reformulation transition patterns: between specialization and generalization; between video and audio; and between content change and system assistance. In this approach, it was also showed that web and images content were the most popular media collections. The proposed approach is examined on 2,465,145 interactions from 534,507 users of Dogpile.com.

Paes and Hirata investigated current software development processes and their support for the development of secure systems. The authors introduced an extension to the well-known software engineering process rational unified process (RUP) that provides a disciplined approach to support and assigning tasks and responsibilities for development of secure systems. The proposed extension considers security as a knowledge area (discipline) and defines workflow, activities and roles according to the architecture of process engineering unified method architecture. A software development is used to assess qualitatively the extended RUP.

Taksa et al. proposed an approach to classifying web logs by personal properties of users. This approach is based on the incorporation of domain knowledge. The classification problem is augmented with background knowledge for a text-classification task, which is defined as a set of text documents that is related to the task, but that does not consist simply of unlabeled examples. The authors examined the difficulties of classifying queries in web logs and introduced a method that combines limited manual labelling, computational linguistics and information retrieval to classify a large collection of web search queries. A short set of manually chosen terms that are known a priori to be of interest to a particular class is used to cull a small number of actual queries from a commercial search engine log. These queries are then submitted to a commercial search engine and the returned search results are used to find more class related terms. The authors were able to classify many queries in a large query log by iteratively applying this approach and improving performance of the ranking algorithm.

En-Nouaary presented a formal testing of real-time systems to provide readers with guidance for generating test cases from timed automata. The issue of testing software products is an important activity that aims to ensure the quality of the implementation. It is considered the most commonly used method for demonstrating that an implementation (usually referred to as implementation under test) accomplishes its intended purpose. The author addresses testing real-time systems modeled as timed input output automata, a variant of timed automaton in which clocks are real-valued variables, increase synchronously at the same speed and measure the amount of time elapsed since last initialization or reset. The approach is demonstrated on some examples.

Finally, we express our deepest gratitude to the programme committee members, the reviewers, and the editors of the International Journal of Web Information Systems for their help and support.

Elhadi ShakshukiGuest Editor