[Paper] Towards Meta-Model Interoperability of Models through Intelligent Transformation

I have just received the confirmation of a paper submitted to the International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI'09), organized into the 10th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (IWANN'09). This meeting will be held at the University of Salamanca in June 10-12th, 2009.

Special thanks to Vicente García Díaz, Oscar Sanjuán Martínez, Héctor Fernández Fernández and Gloria García Fernández for their support.

Abstract

Models and transformations between models are provided as the core of Model-Driven Engineering, offering reusability of knowledge and processes. In order to establish the basis of future advances in this emerging paradigm, this paper is focused on the principles of meta-models and transformation models. Moreover, the concept of meta-model is becoming an essential artifact for MDE based solutions, thus we have centered our background review in the state of art related with meta-model specifications and model transformation technologies. Our research is aimed at getting a higher degree of interoperability among available meta-model specifications by raising the transformation models to the upper meta-layers. Some conclusions extracted suggest that this is yet an early solution which demands greater efforts in terms of research, development and specification, with many interesting open subjects like design of generic editors for model-agnostic visual modeling, integration of models instances from different meta-models, improvements of the semantic knowledge offered by actual modeling languages or even the evaluation of the applicability of graph transformation techniques towards formal transformation models.

Full Paper

All papers accepted will be published in an special volume of IWANN in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS Springer Verlag). IWANN is included in the ranking of the best conferences established by the Computer Science Conference Ranking based on the "Estimated Impact of Conference (EIC)", concretely in position 55 among 620 considered (in the Artificial Intelligence field). Therefore the papers will be indexed by CiteSeer.IST, and by the organization Computing Research and Education Association (CORE).

A special issue in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligent Real-Time Automation (Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence), from Elsevier, will include a selection of between 10 to 15 papers published in DCAI 2009 (JCR 2007 - 0.762).

[Poster] Login Pattern Proposal

This draft paper is written as part of a master course in Information Arquitecture, including an A3 poster and a presentaion.

Abstract

Login pattern deals with the need of users to sign in, so data stored by them in previous interactions can be used repeatedly in subsequent processes. This fact involves the use of a basic form where the user is prompted for his credentials. We have evaluated the state of art login pattern with a simplified version of the GOMS genetic evolution-based model in order to compare it with our proposal. We focused our efforts on reducing this kind of interaction to its minimal, reorganizing the user inputs in fewer GUI components, so that novice users will require less time to complete the task.

Poster

[PDF] Login Pattern Proposal Poster

Slides

[PDF] Login Pattern Proposal Slides

Full paper

[PDF] Login Pattern Proposal Paper

Endless JavaScript with Dojo

It was one year ago when my interest in AJAX and Dojo was awoken; while looking for some approach to draw geometrical objects within a web browser to evaluate the viability of a collaborative browser-based client for diagram design. However, I have been interested in JavaScript since many more years. It has been always an exciting language for my eyes, despite of its criticized existence.

Today I have received an email from mind42, announcing the end of the beta period. And due to my untiring curiosity I have been looking for more details. My first impresion is: "Wow, what an amazing tool for my mental divergences! and collaborative! and developed with dojo!"

This video shows some of its features:

Looking deeper, I have found this interesting video from Stefan Schuster where he discusses the possibilities of JavaScript development with Dojo:

You can also download the slides of the talk from Stefan Schuster website, or these other introduction slides about Dojo 0.9.

All this stuff have been very inspiring for me, and I am wondering about an abstract idea. It deals with the copcept of a self-defined web environment, where users could extend GUI components with the powerfull features provided by Dojo, like OO development (dojo.declare), namespaces (dojo.require), event handling (dojo.connect) and more on.

This extensions could be designed with the diagram capabilities of the environment itself or with a web-based text editor, monitoring preferred usage for futher research of their usability.

Moreover, it would be feasible to develop a Dojo IDE with the features claimed in Stefan Schuster's talk by means of this environment. Both diagram and text approaches.