(FWF - Austria)
(2004-2006): Meta Local e-government, EU-funded project
(2004 - 2006) Intelligent News Distribution Network for multinational business news exchange and dissemination, EU-funded project
Automata and query languages for semistructured data
On the occasion of the Mozart Year 2006 we implemented a Typo3-based content management system for Wiener Festwochen that offers flexible presentation and administration of events (including online-ticketing) and information related to the New Crowned Hope Festival. High usability, dynamic access-control and full multi-language support, as well as an open interface for further extensions were the main-challenges of this project, as well as an easy integration of existing data.
The primary benefit of the event-based paradigm is that it supports the loose coupling of components that compose an application and therefore scales to large numbers of heterogeneous components. The use of this architectural style has been successfully demonstrated in the development of large-scale and complex systems. The practice of application development based on this paradigm is, however, ad hoc and informal. The aim of this research project is to develop a novel approach for the construction of event-based applications. The result of this research project will include a methodology for the specification, stepwise development, verification, and validation of event-based applications, together with a case toolset to support the methodology.
Distributed software systems are a dominant factor for sustainable economic growth of the European Union, serving as a basis for innovative applications. DeDiSys aims at a concept for optimizing dependability in distributed component-based software systems and comprises an architecture, rules for technology integration, open platform services, well-defined metrics and evaluation methods, and necessary prototype implementations. By promoting the idea of open systems, we do not aim at a new middleware, but rather at the integration with existing component infrastructures and commercial off the shelf products. Furthermore, DeDiSys is not a method for testing and verification, but rather a highly innovative method to deal with failures of nodes and links.
CAFÉ (From Concept to Application in System-Family Engineering) is an EUREKA project within the ITEA framework where several well known European companies and universities research the problem area of software product families (i.e., system families). The primary goal is to structure software systems into product families that allows sharing design effort within the product family, reduces development costs and increases the rate of product introduction. CAFÉ aims to spread the use of the system family approach by adapting neighbouring systems to become part of the family, by maturing existing platforms, and by investing when a product family approach is beneficial. The development of a product family regards the total software development process including business, architecture, organisation and process concerns.
Experts estimate that every entity found on the web (XML data, software) will be coalesced to active components (shippable places). Active components will replace documents, desktops, browsers, 3-tier architectures and complete applications: everything will be an active component. Since active components are structured, the information society needs a uniform composition technology with the following requirements: Users, both end-users and software engineers, should compose active components powerfully and easily. The composition should be able to integrate standard components (such as CORBA). The composition technology should enable to buy components in web-based supermarkets and compose them with powerful composition operators. EASYCOMP's goal is to develop the foundation of such a composition technology and to demonstrate it in a web-based composition machine.
An emerging direction of current manufacturing is leading to a growing need for geographically distributed product development: products are built up of components developed by units located in different cities or countries. MOTION addresses the area of largely distributed production environments with the objective of developing and validating a multi-service business architecture for supporting Team Work and distributed working methods, both for cooperative product design and for business management. To this end, the project will: define a novel, distributed communication services infrastructure; identify and develop a core set of services based on such infrastructure; use such core set of services to build up two specific business applications. The architecture will allow end-users to implement new methods of working and achieve business process improvements in terms of improved product design, improved productivity and reduced time to market.
The objective of SPARTA is the creation, development, provision, composition and management of innovative and intelligent security modules across heterogeneous platforms and networks. The intelligent agent modules are focused on maintaining the level of IT elements security high, while at the same time providing a decision support information to the security managers. The second objective is to define a methodology to elaborate efficient security policy in order to support such advanced functionality as intelligent agent based tools.
Professional users of information demand added-value services like personalisation, evaluation, categorisation and combination of multimedia information on the Internet. Currently, there is no business model for this type of information commerce. The objective of OPELIX is to develop such a business model by providing tools to create personalised information offerings taking into account copyright protection of information, certification of the data, timely delivery of the data, and with payment schemes that apply to this type of business. The project uses two pilot case studies of enhanced information commerce businesses. The business models and toolsets will be disseminated widely to interested SMEs and the business offer language will be proposed to de-facto standardisation bodies. Our goal is to stimulate the creation of information commerce businesses on the Internet that will mediate between multiple content owners and professional users
In project Wiener Festwochen we have implemented a WWW service for the Vienna International Festival (a large information system) which supports the credit card based purchase of tickets using a secure communication channel (SSL). We evaluate our Web service engineering system HTML++/MyXML for the architecting, managing and maintening of this complex and dynamic Web service.
The goal of the Minstrel project is to develop a flexible, portable, scalable, and secure Java-based push system. Push systems reverse the typical communication pattern of Internet information systems: information is actively disseminated to users
The Gypsy project is a flexible and dynamically extensible environment where programs, called Mobile Agents, with persistent identity can move around a network on their own volition and can communicate with their environment.
The MAYA network is constituted by higher education institutions from Europe and Latin America with strong background in software engineering. The projects in the ALFA program are intended to allow the exchange of postgraduate students among the participating institutions. This project shall contribute to strengthen existing cooperation links and establish new ones among members of the MAYA network. Our group is the coordinator of this network
The main objectives of PROMOTER-2 are to exploit this emerging European research community, its strong links with industrial partners, to collectively deepen remaining open issues, to coordinate research activities, and to support dissemination of results. Our main effort is the software process evolution and the integration of software architecture into the software process.
RENOIR, the Requirements Engineering Network of International Cooperating Research Groups provides a framework for research coordination, research training, industrial liaison, and technology transfer in the area of requirements engineering. RENOIR brings together all the key European research teams from industry, academia, and research centers.
The project Object-Oriented Reverse Engineering (CORET), funded by the Austrian Research Foundation (FWF) aims at transforming legacy data processing software systems to a modern, object-oriented architecture. It focuses on guiding such a transformation process by different kinds of patterns on different levels of abstraction thereby integrating human expertise to overcome typical limits of automated reverse engineering methods. The feasibility and the effectiveness of the approach will be evaluated by building a prototype toolset
The Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems (ARES) project enables software developers to explicitly describe, assess, and manage architectures of embedded software families. To reach this goal we select, extend or develop a framework of methods, processes and prototype tools for incorporating architectural reasoning along the life-cycle of embedded software families. Results of this project will help to design reliable systems with embedded software, that satisfy important quality requirements, evolve gracefully and may be built in-time and on-budget. Partners are Nokia, Philips, ABB, Imperial College, and Technical University of Madrid.
In project ASIA (Austrian Spanish Integrated Action), we investigate network technologies for the support of communication and data sharing among research groups which are geographically separated. The purpose of the project is to investigate networking technologies and applications such as the World-Wide Web (WWW), Java, and push systems to enable remote collaboration and easy dissemination of information.
Mobile agents, programs that move within a system performing a set of tasks, are an active field of research. The focus of current research, however, is on the development of execution platforms and applications for mobile agents and not on methodologies for building agents. Since the creation of mobile agents can be a tedious and error prone task, the ADK projects ivestigates how to create mobile agents from a set of components. Building systems from software components has already proven useful in the context of large software systems, increasing the productivity of the development process and the reliability of the resulting system by reusing proven components.
Usenet is globally replicated bulletin board service on the Internet. Due to the growth of Usenet, many organizations can no longer afford to run a full news server that stores all the availabe news articles. In this project, we implemented a cache server for Usenet News that caches articles on demand instead of replicating the full spool as done by a news server. This cuts network bandwidth requirements and reduces the I/O load on the machine running NewsCache and on the feeding news server. For a complete description, please visit our NewsCache site
Organizations are increasingly faced with the task of rapidly developing web sites and modifying the content and layout of existing web sites. MyXML is an XML/XSL based template engine which facilitates the rapid development of flexible, database-backed web sites. MyXML enables the web-site developer to strictly separate the content, layout and business logic of a web site. These three aspects of a web site are often under the control of, and need to be modified by different departments in an organization. Their separation supports the smooth evolution of complex web sites. MyXML supports other frequently needed web functionality, including database access, CGI and support for different programming languages. The tool can also be used for the generation of XML content from relational databases. The design of MyXML was influenced by our web engineering experiences in building the web site of the Vienna International Festival (VIF).