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 development of languages allowing a proper handling of time is important in many areas of computer science because the capability to deal with the notions of change and time are essential to solve their problems.
In the development of…

Requirements capture user needs about a system [KG99]. They stand for those functional and nonfunctional attributes the system must posses to be considered correct. Requirements also dictate how the system should respond to user interaction. Therefore, they play a very…

We proposed her a technique, which can be employed within the methodology know as process reengineering. This technique was applied in a government environment, which included an Information System and Geographical Information System, developed with financial support from The World…

This study investigates an approach of knowledge discovery and data mining in insufficient databases. An application of Computational Taxonomy analysis demonstrates that the approach is effective in such a data mining process. The approach is characterized by the use ot…

In this position paper, the main steps to measure and evaluate quantitatively the quality of sites are shown. Besides, some specific models, criteria and procedures to apply in these activities are discussed by quoting case studies already performed (e.g., in…

The main purpose of this book is to present the contents of an introductory course in databases. In this regard, one can find a number of material validity and recognized different scopes. This work is developed under the guidelines that…

In spite of years of research and development, formal structured estimation of time and effort required to develop a Management Information System (MIS) is still an open problem. Usual estimation techniques applied by now are supported by the not so…

Ontologies serve as a mean to establish a conceptually concise basis for communicating knowledge for many purposes. Within the information integration area, ontologies are useful to solve heterogeneity problems. They provide a set of knowledge terms, including the vocabulary, the…

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…