Sharing of behavior is one of the most important features in the Object-Oriented paradigm. The two classical organisations of sharing are classes and prototypes, raising two different models and two families of object oriented languages. It has been largely discussed…

The Semantic Web attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified…

Ensuring the correctness of a given software component has become a crucial aspect in Software Engineering and the Model Checking technique provides a fully automated way to achieve this goal. In particular, the usage of Model Checking in formal languages…

Electronic Government applications aim to deliver efficient, seamless, customer-focused services to the public using various distribution channels. One of challenges in building such applications is the requirement to rely upon preexisting, often heterogeneous government applications. In order to enable communication…

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…

Applying design patterns is considered a helpful technique for designing software systems.
Patterns description, however, results not sufficiently precise providing a weak understanding and making it difficult to be certain when a pattern is being used correctly. We have formally…

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…