Nowadays, an increasing number of companies are using process improvement models as a mean to improve the quality of their processes and therefore the quality of their products and services. Although various improvement frameworks exist that provide organizations with aids…

This book provides an excellent foundation for the principles of database and data management. It explains some of the more difficult concepts fairly well. The book is meant for an introductory course in database management which is usually required as…

When stakeholders are geographically distributed communication presents new challenges for software engineering community. In order to improve communication between stakeholders, we have previously proposed to apply learning style models to characterise the way people interact. In this work we enhance…

Software tools processing partially common set of data should share an understanding of what these data mean. Since ontologies have been used to express formally a shared understanding of information, we argue that they can be used to improve integration…

During recent years, new software engineering paradigms like component-based software engineering and COTS-based development have emerged. Both paradigms are concerned with reuse and customisation of existing components. The use of COTS software has become more and more important in state-of-the-art…

The term “Federated Databases” refers to the data integration of distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous databases. However, a federation can also include information systems, not only databases. When integrating data, several issues must be addressed. Here, we focus on the problem…

Product-line architectures, i.e. a software architecture and component set shared by a family of products, represents a promising approach to achieving reuse of software. Several companies are initiating or have recently adopted a product-line architecture. However, little experience is available…

Using COTS software promises faster time-to-market, which can yield substantial advantages over competitors with regards to earlier placement of a new product on a market. At the same time, component-based software introduces risks, such as unknown quality properties of the…

During the last years a lot of projects and lines of research have emerged from different proposals trying to find the best way to reach data integration. Two powerful techniques have appeared separately – ontology and contextual information – in…

The star model, broadly used in data warehouse modeling, is a logical model, so its representation is strongly dependent on the database technology used for its implementation, usually relational. The method recommended for designing a dimensional system would be the…