Showing papers by "Manuel Ramos-Cabrer published in 2006"

AVATAR: an improved solution for personalized TV based on semantic inference

Abstract: The search engines in Internet and the recommender systems in the digital TV domain, pursue to light the burden of users with access to massive amounts of information, by offering only data (and TV programs) of interest for them. In this paper, we emphasize the advantages of using the so-called semantic Web technologies in the development of an intelligent TV assistant, named AVATAR. Its main advantage is a great improvement with respect to previous TV recommenders, obtained by combining two personalization strategies with a novel common nexus related to semantic inference capabilities. By the inference, AVATAR discovers appealing and complex semantic associations between the user preferences and the finally recommended TV shows. It is worth noting that this inference process overcomes a drawback identified in the existing tools, which suggest programs too similar to those the user watched in the past. In this regard, our inference strategy provides the viewers with suggestions clearly enhanced, diversified and permanently updated to their personal preferences.

A Six-valued Logic to Reason about Uncertainty and Inconsistency in Requirements Specifications

Abstract: The development of requirements specifications is characterized by the uncertain and changeable knowledge available about the systems to be built. This paper presents a many-valued logic that enables effective reasoning about uncertainty and inconsistency in requirements specifications, motivating the election of six truth values and the definition of a new implication connective. The adequacy of this logic to support a formal development methodology is assessed through a comparison with Belnap's four-valued logic in combination with the classical implications.

ATLAS: a framework to provide multiuser and distributed t-learning services over MHP

Abstract: The increasing need of the developed countries to carry out effective distance learning strategies has led to a great development of Internet-based learning technologies (e-learning). Despite its evident advantages, the expansion of e-learning has been limited by the difficulty in reaching important social sectors, and also by the absence of mechanisms to fight the feeling of isolation of the users, which often leads them to abandoning the distance learning activities. This paper tackles these problems by introducing ATLAS, a framework for the development and deployment of multiuser t-learning services (i.e. learning services over Interactive Digital TV). This framework is built around three major features: an architecture for the services that exploits the multimedia capabilities of the television, a communications infrastructure that promotes the establishment of virtual learning communities, and a development tool that allows services to be created with minimum programming knowledge. ATLAS has been designed by considering several features that make Interactive Digital TV quite different from the PC, advising against the direct translation of the models developed for the Internet. In particular, ATLAS adheres to the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) standard, which is gaining worldwide acceptance as one of the technical solutions that will shape the future of Interactive Digital TV. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Bringing the agile philosophy to formal specification settings

Abstract: Software development can be seen as a process of knowledge acquisition, in which human beings progressively learn about the intended behavior of the desired systems. Thereby, development is subject to considerable amounts of uncertainty and variability, that make it impossible to proceed in a purely incremental fashion — at some points, the need always arises to reconsider part of the accumulated knowledge. With this problem in mind, agile development methodologies have been gaining popularity in recent years as a means to enhance productivity, and there have been attempts to supplement them with formal techniques for better reliability. However, the existing approaches to agile formal methods have practically limited themselves to adopting recommended practices of agile development, with no particular contribution from the employed formalisms. Compared to that, this paper advocates the use of formalisms intended for evolutionary development, with a two-fold objective: first, to exploit the knowledge acquired up to any given stage as a means to cope with frequent and numerous changes; and, second, to introduce support for the creative development tasks through an interactive procedure that helps taking steps forward.

Guidelines for the incremental identification of aspects in requirements specifications

Abstract: The desired principle of separation of concerns in software development can be jeopardized by the so-called crosscutting concerns, which tend to be scattered over (and tangled with) the functionality of the modular units of a system. The correct identification of such concerns (and their encapsulation into separate artifacts) is thereby considered a way to improve software understanding and evolution. Pursuing a proper management of concerns from the requirements engineering stage can greatly benefit the entire software life-cycle. In this paper, we propose conceptual guidelines on how to perform the identification of crosscutting concerns in the process of building requirements specifications. We argue that the identification must be carried out in an incremental way, to encapsulate apart the crosscutting concerns even if they have not emerged completely yet.