The theory and application of agents and multiagent systems is now experiencing a new surge in interest in the international commercial sector. As a result, a cacophony of modeling notations is beginning to emerge. This presentation discusses the issues involved in extending the OMG’s UML 2.0 as a possible starting point. This approach is under debate from both the object and agent groups. Some believe that agents are just objects with a few more feature, and some believe that agents share absolutely nothing in common with objects. This talk presents examples from work already underway and discusses the work that still needs to be addressed.

Advances in computing and communication over wired and wireless networks have resulted in many pervasive distributed computing environments. The Internet, intranets, local area networks, ad hoc wireless networks, and sensor networks are some examples. These environments often come with different distributed sources of data and computation. Mining in such environments naturally calls for proper utilization of these distributed resources. However, most off-the-shelf data mining systems are designed to work as a monolithic centralized application which usually do not scale up in large distributed applications. The field of Distributed Data Mining (DDM) offers an alternate choice. It pays careful attention to the distributed resources of data, computing, communication, and human factors in order to use them in an optimal fashion. This presentation will first offer a brief overview of the current state-of-the-art DDM Technology. It will then point toward a synergy between multi-agent systems and DDM which may lead to very large scale data intensive problem solving capabilities. It will particularly discuss a few applications in the sensor network and security domains where such a merger particularly appears to be promising.

An overview of the Strategic Objective on Grid Technologies under the IST (Information Society Technologies) priority of the 6th European RTD Framework Programme (2002-2006) will be provided. The evolution and progress since the 5th Framework Programme will be explained and shown. The presentation will include a description of the portfolio of 12 projects - with a total EU funding of 52 million € - that have been very recently launched. Latest strategic planning activities with regard to Grid Technologies - particularly in the context of the European Research Area - will be covered in relative details. The forthcoming work programme for years 2005-2006 - still in draft form - will be briefly sketched. Future perspectives for the 7th Framework Programme (2006-2010) will be outlined on a high level. A question and answer time will follow the presentation.

Given the need to realize ubiquitous/pervasive computing, we must be able to control information agents so that they can coexist with humans in the real world. To realize large-scale socially embedded multiagent systems, we propose a new system design methodology towards society-centered design. We have already developed the scenario description language Q, which describes interaction protocols that link agents to society. Using the virtual space called FreeWalk, wherein agents behave under given Q scenarios, we explain each step of society-centered design. The process consists of participatory simulation, where agents and human-controlled avatars coexist in virtual space to jointly perform simulations, and augmented experiment, where an experiment is performed in real space by human subjects, scenario controlled agents, and human extras. As an application of society-centered design, we are working on mega navigation, where millions of humans and socially embedded agents collaborate for developing services for traffic control, crisis management and large-scale event navigation.

In 1978 Harry Sneed set up the first commercial software test laboratory in Budapest charging DM 75,- per test case and DM 100,- for each error found. The laboratory was used to test the Integrated Transport Steuerung system of the German railroad and the BS2000 operating system of Siemens. Today, some 26 years later, managers are looking for a means to justify the cost of testing. While working as a test consultant for a Viennese software house from 1998 until 2003, Harry Sneed conceived a set of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of the test operations there. These metrics were intended to measure the performance of the test department, but they are equally valid for measuring test operations anywhere. In fact, with these metrics it should be possible to convert software testing from an art as perceived by Glenford Meyers in 1975 to a science as defined by Lord Kelvin in 1875. The metrics were obtained using the Goal/Question/Metric Method of Basili and Rombach and were refined through three years of practical application. In effect, they are a continuation of the test measurement work Sneed began as a young test entrepreneur in 1978. They are supported by a set of tools designed for both static and dynamic analysis as well as for evaluating the results of both. Working as a test team leader at the Wirtschaftskammer in Vienna, Sneed applied these metrics to successfully predict the test effort required to test a complex web application. From this presentation the attendants will be exposed to the experience of 30 years of software testing.

The ‘traditional’ Web Service triple SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, while widely praised as the next Silver Bullet, has been heavily criticized at the same time as being just the most recent replacement technology for remote procedure calls. The main criticism lies in the syntactic nature that SOAP, WSDL and UDDI retain compared to previous solutions: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business-to-Business (B2B) Integration are possible on a syntactic level only; however, the biggest problem – the Semantic Integration – still cannot be solved by traditional Web Services at all, whatsoever. The goal of Semantic Web Services is to change exactly that. Fundamentals of Semantic Web Services are discussed as well as advanced topics that are necessary for Business Integration in the real sense.

In this (very) extended abstract I will make explicit the general ideological
perspective and theoretical claims of the talk (like in a manifesto). As
for the exemplification of these claims within the AI domain - in particular
within the Agent and Multi-Agent Systems area - I will provide the overall
blueprint but I will develop here only some part and give only some examples. I will illustrate how a synthetic paradigm can be built through the notion of different levels of reality description and of scientific theory, and through their interconnections thanks to bridge-theories, cross-layered theories, and layered ontologies. I will provide several examples of bridge-theories and layered ontologies with special attention to agents and multi-agent systems. In particular I will sketch the problem of emotions in agents with reference to agent/mind reembodiment (the theory of needs and the relation between ‘believing’ and ‘feeling’); I will examine the theory of the mental counterparts of social objects illustrating the mental facet of norms and of commitment; the grounding of social power in the personal power; the cognitive bases of organisations; the layered notions of conflict, cooperation, communication, goal, agent, delegation, as applied to different levels of agenthood.
I will examine the problem of emergence among intelligent agents by exploring the problem of unplanned cooperation and social functions. I will conclude with the importance of the new “social” computational paradigm in this perspective, and the emergent character of computation in Agent Based Computing.

Although Semantic Web Services have recently received a great deal of attention, the use of semantics to describe distributed cooperating components is not new. Multi-Agent Systems have long addressed the problems of coordinating heterogeneous, autonomous components so that they can collaborate and achieve joint goals. Several MAS use semantic descriptions to achieve a shared understanding of communications (both the purpose of the communication, and the contents of the communication); however these solutions typically enable only a modest number of disparate MAS to collaborate. With current advances in the Semantic Web, and Semantic Web Services, it may be possible to relax these constraints.
The DARPA Agent Markup Language for Services (DAML-S) was proposed as a solution to discovering and automating the composition of services. Two years on (and a name change to OWL-S), it has gained widespread interest; yet is viewed as a Web Services proposal augmented through semantics, rather than a markup language for Agents. This paper presents an agent-oriented perspective of OWL-S, including an alternative set of usage metaphors. The emerging problems for agent-based adoption are discussed, as well as potential solutions that address this divergence.

Nachdem Mitte der 90er Jahre die Nachteile objektorientierter Ansätze hinsichtlich der Qualität, insbesondere der Wiederverwendbarkeit der resultierenden Software deutlich wurden, ist heutzutage die komponenten- basierte Softwareentwicklung in aller Munde. Trotzdem blieb der Test komponentenbasierter Software - ebenso wie Anfang der 90er Jahre schon der Test objektorientierter Software - lange Zeit unbeachtet.

Dieser Beitrag erläutert die Unterschiede zwischen objektorientierter und komponentenbasierter Software und beschreibt die verschiedenen Tester-Rollen sowie mögliche Formen des spezifikationsbasierten Tests von Komponenten.
Insbesondere wird die beim Test komponentenbasierter Software immer wieder auftretende Frage beleuchtet, wie die mit "Verträgen" bzw. "Contracts" spezifizierten Schnittstellen von Komponenten getestet werden können. Anmerkungen zu entsprechenden Testwerkzeugen runden den Beitrag ab.

DaimlerChrysler’s Integrated Application Platform (IAP) is a standardized software platform used within the company for custom applications. Using the IAP J2EE platform as an example, this talk shows how application development on top of IAP platform is done. Further, the software components contained within the IAP J2EE platform are described. Also, the advantages of using it in application projects are discussed.

Enterprise portals help knowledge workers to aggregate, access and navigate through data from databases, document repositories, web sites, and web applications. Examples for enterprise portals are the DCX Supplier Portal and the DCX Employee Portal. Therefore, DaimlerChrysler’s Integrated Application Platform (IAP) provides portal server functionality to support the creation of portals.
In this presentation, the IAP portal platform is illustrated. It is shown how application development on top of this platform is done. The portal platform is based on industry-accepted standards. This presentation will also cover implementation issues within a corporate environment.

Enterprise applications and portals require an effective and scalable security infrastructure. Therefore, DaimlerChrysler’s Integrated Application Platform (IAP) contains directory and security platforms that provide support for user management, authentication, and authorization services.
In this presentation, the IAP directory and security platforms are illustrated. It is shown how these platforms are integrated with application and portal platforms. The directory and security platforms are based on industry-accepted standards. This presentation will also cover implementation issues within a corporate environment.

To build an “Integrated-Application-Platform” was and is still a challenge. This presentation describes the challenges and lessons learned out of building IAP’s.

- Enterprise Applications have to be designed and build like „products“, with a global integrated scope of business and IT.
- IAP-Product governance and product architecture will define the needed procedures and structures of the Enterprise Systems
- The Development and Test-Environment for IAP has to simulate the whole possible environment combinations running in production.
- Ongoing requirements definition has to be established with the customers.
- A support and service organization has to be build up
- The IT-Management has to be convinced with business cases and marketing
- An Integrated Application Platform as a product, enables an “Product driven IT-Governance Model”
- ….

In summary, to develop an IAP, means to establish a product organization. With an IAP, companies can implement a product driven IT-Governance model.

Web-based user interfaces have become a must-have for applications during recent years. Often enough, however, it turned out that with the focus purely on HTML, a lot of former wisdom on how to build well-structured user interfaces got lost in the process - leaving both developers and end-users in distress. This talk will introduce concepts around building well usable user interfaces based on UI patterns and the Model-View-Controller paradigm. You will also learn how a J2EE-based model-driven approach combined with the use of generative techniques can help to minimize the effort of building and maintaining Web applications.

Beyond DOM manipulation and XSLT Transformations, XML operations provide a third method of complex operations on XML Documents and structures. The method can be used to implement templates, inheritance, aggregation or comparison (diff) of XML data.
An implementation in Java and examples are presented.

In this article we describe how Agile Software Engineering can be introduced to an in-house development structure of a firm. We describe how agile process elements and model driven architecture approaches can be combined in order to achieve a light weight, flexible and incremental software engineering process. We also show the resulting organizational structure of a development department and have a closer look to the management actions that have to be taken to introduce agility to the internal team and the stakeholders all over the company.

Ontologies have gained acceptance within the research community as the way to make applications interoperable and drive the next intelligent generation of the World Wide Web known as the Semantic Web that many consider as a future enabler of future advance forms of collaborative e-business. It is just this consideration what has motivated the OBELIX (superscript: **) This work has been partially supported by the European Commission, as project No. IST-2001-33144 OBELIX (Ontology-Based Electronic Integration of compleX products and value chains) whose consortium is composed by LABEIN, VUA, ONTOPRISE, SINTEF, PTSS, TRØNDERENERGI, SENA. consortium to do research on multi-component product configuration, since collaborative design scenarios over the (Semantic) Web will become a future reality, but have not been researched in depth yet.

The possibility to uniformly access the WWW using a standard web browser has fostered the development of nomadic desktop computing, allowing nomadic users to run their applications from nearly any location providing access to the Internet. In this paper, we propose an approach to nomadic desktop computing based on the idea of dynamically deploying and executing personalized applications on the desktop system currently used by a nomadic user. We present a cross-platform application environment that automatically adapts itself to the requirements and configuration of a nomadic desktop application and enables the seamless execution and migration of applications across heterogeneous desktop computer systems. The implementation of our approach is outlined and its use in ongoing research projects is demonstrated.

Thing-oriented programming (TP) is an emerging programming model which overcomes some of the limitations of current practice in software development in general and of object-oriented programming (OOP) in particular. Ercatons provide an implementation of the model. TP does not describe a new programming language. The so-called "ercato virtual machine" or "ercato engine" implements the ideas discussed and has been used to validate the concepts described here.

Thing-oriented programming is centered around the concept of a "Thing". A thing in an executing software system is bound to behave like an object does in our real world. Software objects do not. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) or extreme programming methods (XP) provide no exception. This fact is traced back to be the root why current software development often fails to meet our expectations. TP should then be able to provide the means to make software development achieve what other engineering disciplines have achieved a long time ago: that projects are deterministic (completed in time and effort scales sub-linearly with size).

Software product lines (PLs) present a solid approach in large scale reuse.
Due to the PLs' inherit complexity, many PL methods use the notion of "features" to support requirements analysis and domain modelling (e.g. FODA, FORM, FeatuRSEB). Nevertheless, the link between features and architecture remains weak in all methodologies, with a large impact on the traceability of high-level concerns in respect to lower-lever architectural structures. This paper provides an analysis on the state of the art of feature-oriented PL methodologies from the point of view of the linkage between feature models and architecture. Based on the identifed shortcomings it introduces an approach to allow a strong mapping between features and architecture. The approach makes use of extensions in the feature modelling techniques and adopts plug-in archi-
tectures as a means of mapping feature structures and at the same time satisfying the demanded PL variability and flexibility.

In the research domain agent-based systems are widely used for mobile and
distributed information systems. Their underlying paradigm provides excellent
mechanisms to isolate tasks in independent modules that can be re-used and
combined in multiple ways. In order to facilitate the communication between
such agents a common domain-knowledge needs to be collected and stored in
an ontology. This paper introduces an XML-based ontology representation for
mobile multi-agent systems. A uniform XSLT-based mechanism that allows for
transforming agent communication into a format readable by human users is
presented. We show how the resulting combination of domain representation
and presentation allows highly flexible agent systems where users interface
agents can feed information from any service agent to the user or vice versa and
how this approach can be easily extended to take user- or context-adaptive
presentation strategies into account. Additionally, we describe how these
mechanisms are integrated into a prototypical mobile multi-modal tourist information system and we present some evaluation results.

Software product lines have a demonstrated potential for cost-effective development of software families. Product lines have to support and coordinate variabilities between the different members of the product family. However, it is also known that the management of these variabilities and the concurrent evolution of product line architecture and single products are still challenging tasks. This organizational overhead often prevents small and medium enterprizes with limited software development staff from adopting product lines. This paper introduces three classes of product line variability and discusses their impacts to product line architectures. In particular, we discuss the management of these variabilities, by introducing a pattern based product line architecture and an associated pattern language for statistical analysis software. For illustration we use as an example a product line for statistical analysis software, although the variability classes and the pattern language approach presented in this paper are not bound to this application domain.

Digital pathology and telepathology allow an extended usage of electronic images for diagnostics, support or educational purposes in anatomical or clinical pathology. Current approaches have not found wide acceptance in routine pathology, mainly due to limitations of image retrieval. We propose a semantic retrieval system for text- and image-based data for the pathology domain. The system combines text and image information and offers advanced content-based retrieval services for diagnosis, differential diagnosis and teaching tasks. At the core of the system is a Semantic Web gathering both ontological domain knowledge, and rules describing key tasks and processes in pathology. We present the use cases and main features of the system and describe the main components of its architecture, focusing on the knowledge component, which contains a library of medical and generic ontologies and a rule set.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a visual language for modeling complex systems in an object oriented manner. Although various structural and behavioral aspects of the system under development can be modeled, a description mechanism for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) still lacks.

Since UML 2.0 offers profiling mechanisms for extending the existing modeling language by the user, new diagram types which reside on the existing language's metamodel can be added in a lightweight manner.

Therefore we propose a UML profile for expressing GUI layout information which allows for modeling the static representation of graphical user interfaces. In contrast to earlier approaches, the profile can be used to create an abstract representation of a GUI based on a notation commonly used by graphics designers. All layout information is added using the recently published UML 2.0 diagram interchange specification.

Feature modeling, a conceptual domain modeling technique used mainly in domain engineering, proved as useful for representing configurability of concepts by dealing explicitly with commonality and variability. This paper introduces feature modeling for multi-paradigm design as an integrative approach and evaluates other approaches to feature modeling. These approaches differ mainly in the notation of feature diagrams, but there are also differences regarding the basic notions. The commonalities and variabilities of the domain of feature modeling are concisely expressed using feature modeling itself in the form of a feature modeling metamodel which may serve both for further reasoning on feature modeling and as a basis for developing feature modeling tools.

The benefits of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) with respect to software design are getting more and more accepted, and measurements have shown that AOP does not necessarily introduce severe performance penalties. A benchmark suite for measuring the performance of AspectJ software is being developed. However, general benchmarks are missing for the emerging field of dynamic AOP, even though major J2EE application server vendors begin to employ dynamic aspects in their systems. Instead, work on dynamic AOP frequently comprises varying measurements. To be eventually able to classify such systems along their performance qualities, it is important to develop a benchmark suite for dynamic AOP. In this paper, we present a first building block for such a benchmark suite in the form of micro-measurements. We also present and discuss results gained by running the measurements in several dynamic AOP systems. A discussion of requirements for dynamic AOP benchmarks finishes the paper.

We present a novel scheme for portable CPU accounting and control in Java,
which is based on program transformation techniques and can be used with
every standard Java Virtual Machine. In our approach applications, libraries,
and the Java Development Kit are modified in order to expose details regarding
the execution of threads. Each thread accounts for the number of executed bytecode
instructions and periodically the threads of an application component aggregate
the information of their respective CPU consumption within a shared account and
invoke scheduling functions that are able to prevent applications from exceeding their
allowed CPU quota.

Values and objects are two different logical concepts. Objects can be created and changed, values, in contrast, exist per se and are immutable. Current object-oriented languages support mainly objects and classes of objects. Classes cannot be used to simulate value types in a satisfactory way.
The paper proposes a language element that supports arbitrary value types and that can be embedded in an object-oriented language. It describes the corresponding keywords, syntax, and consistency checks. Thereby, it gives an impression of the "look and feel" of value types from an application programmer's perspective.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have recently emerged as a new
promising paradigm for supporting distributed computing. Web services, as
well as integration-packages relying on message oriented middleware, are
special substitutes for this kind of architecture. However, even if a lot of
work has been focused on how to build such systems less work has been
invested in how testing and monitoring such systems could be done. It is
obvious that cyclic testing in the development phase of such architecture
can help to identify vulnerabilities early in the design phase and leads to
a stable deployment of the system. Testing in distributed systems is very
challenging and automated test tools can help to reduce the development
costs enormously. In the next years big investment will be done in
integrating systems, as a lot of companies have the need to integrate their
systems to establish more flexible workflows. In this paper we will propose
an approach how automatic testing for SOAs can be done. We will introduce a
meta language in XML, which allows to define test cases for services. A
service can be a Web service, as well as an adaptor for a messaging-system,
such as Tibco. We define a generic meta language, but predict that maybe
some cases are not covered, as our research for automatic testing of SOAs is
still in progress. This paper focuses on a real life prototype
implementation called SITT (Service Integration Test Tool).SITT is designed
in a way that it can also be used as a monitoring system for SOAs. It has
the possibility to test and monitor if certain workflows, between multiple
service endpoints, really behave as described with the XML meta language. We
will also explain a feature called online and batch testing. Online testing
means that tests are going on in real time, in contrast batch testing has
the possibility to test service endpoints not connected to SITT, which will
be often the case when integrating system with external departments or
companies. This paper shows how SITT is designed and we will present its
features by introducing a real-world application scenario from the domain of
Telecommunications providers, namely “Mobile Number Portability”. This paper
focuses on SITT as a test tool, how SITT can be used as a monitoring system
is not part of this paper.

This paper proposes a standardized framework for the specification of components, which focuses on providing the information necessary to facilitate component development, discovery, and composition. To be applicable in all these fields, the Unified Specification of Components (UnSCom) framework ties together a mix of di®erent specification aspects and unifies the specification of components using a single, coherent approach. The framework is based on the notion of design by contract which it extends to component-based software engineering by introducing service and composition contracts. It supports the specification of composition contracts, which describe the required and provided interfaces of components on various contract levels. These contract levels are thematically grouped into colored pages: white pages contain general and commercial information, yellow pages comprise component classifications, blue pages describe the required and provided functionality, green pages comprise the architectural design of the required and provided interfaces, and grey pages describe the required and provided quality.

Web services have a substantial impact on today’s distributed software systems, especially on the way they are designed and composed. Specialization of different services is leading to a multitude of applications ultimately providing complex solutions. The interaction and modeling aspects of Web services is increasingly becoming important. Based on the needs for Web services conversations, process modeling, and composition, a variety of languages and technologies for Web services composition have evolved. This case study is focused on a systematic evaluation of the support for workflow patterns and their BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) implementation in Collaxa, a leading BPEL process modeling and enactment engine for Web services processes.

In Service-Oriented Application Development, applications are composed by selecting and integrating third-party web services. To avoid hardwiring concrete services in client applications we introduced in previous work the Web Services Management Layer (WSML) and suggested a redirection mechanism based on Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). Even though this mechanism enables hot swapping between semantically equivalent services based on their availability, this is not enough to create applications that are driven by business requirements. In this paper we introduce a more advanced selection mechanism that allows dynamic switching between services based on business driven requirements that can change over time. Choosing a service may be done based on cost, presence on approved partners list, as well as binding support, quality of service classifications, historical performance and proximity. We introduce a modular monitoring mechanism that is able to observe these criteria and trigger a more advanced service selection procedure. We show how the AOP language JAsCo with its dynamically pluggable aspects is well suited to achieve this.

Web services have become a universal technology for integration of distributed and heterogeneous applications over the Internet. Many recent proposals such as the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) and the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) focus on combining existing web services into more sophisticated web services. However, these standards exhibit some limitations regarding modularity and flexibility. In this paper, we advocate an aspect-oriented approach to web service composition and present AO4BPEL, an aspect-oriented extension to BPEL4WS. With aspects, we capture web service composition in a modular way and the composition becomes more open for dynamic change.

Web Services have added a new level of functionality on top of current Web, enabling the use and combination of distributed functional components within and across company boundaries. The addition of semantic information to describe Web Services, in order to enable the automatic location, combination and use of distributed functionalities, is nowadays one of the most relevant research topics due to its potential to achieve dynamic, scalable and cost-effective Enterprise Application