Papers by Bonnie MacKellar
Coordination among developers has long been recognized as critical in software projects. One of t... more Coordination among developers has long been recognized as critical in software projects. One of the reasons for running large project software engineering courses is to teach students how to coordinate while working in a group; yet we have little understanding of how the students might fail or ways to assist them in learning this skill. Socio-technical congruence is a way to measure coordination based on the fit between communications among developers and the dependencies of the project. In this work-in-progress paper, we use a measure of socio-technical congruence to analyze the coordination in a student software engineering team. We found that congruence did not improve over time as has been shown for professional software teams. We then describe a proposed tool that uses sociotechnical congruence measures to support and give advice to students who are learning how to effectively coordinate activities on a group project.
Effective communication among members of a software development team is considered to be a critic... more Effective communication among members of a software development team is considered to be a critical factor in the success of software projects. Social network analysis is a promising way to analyze communication patterns that has been used in a number of studies of professional software development teams. In this paper, we present preliminary data on communication events collected in a software engineering course and analyze it on a number of measures including basic social network measures. Successful groups are compared to an unsuccessful group on these measures. This is a work in progress report of a project to use social network analysis as a means of studying communication patterns among software engineering students, in order to improve teaching strategies. 2012 25th IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training 978-0-7695-4693-3/12 $26.00
This project addresses how to link scattered health-related data from different Web communities, ... more This project addresses how to link scattered health-related data from different Web communities, and provide integrated knowledge of health information. Specifically, we integrate data from social media-based patient communities, curated sites with expert content, and the research community. Our approach is based on medical concept extraction using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), Resource Description Framework (RDF) semantic modeling to represent diverse social health and medical experiences, and summarization of integrated health data. A prototype implementation annotates medical terms occurring in blogs with summarized health experience data, medical expert data and medical research data that enables users, such as patients, doctors or other health care providers to have integrated and linked view of health-related knowledge. Currently, the system integrates information from PatientsLikeMe, WebMD, and PubMed, and can be used to annotate a wide variety of text based blogs. This system uses ontology-based information extraction and semantic modeling of social health data to integrate informally specified information, which is typical of content written by patients.
Patients facing a serious disease often want to be able to search for relevant clinical trials fo... more Patients facing a serious disease often want to be able to search for relevant clinical trials for new or more effective alternative treatments. The NIH makes all of its trials available on a website, in fact, for this purpose. Its search facility, however, is difficult to use and requires the patient to sift through lengthy text descriptions for relevant information. Our overall aim is to build a system that allows for a more patient-focused clinical trial search facility. In this paper, we present a semantic integration approach using RDF triples to develop an integrated clinical trial knowledge representation, by linking different Linked Open Data such as clinical trials provided by NIH as well as the drug side effects dataset SIDER. The integration model uses UMLS to link concepts from different sources with consistent semantics and ontological knowledge. Patient-oriented functions that our prototype system provides include semantic search and query with reasoning ability, and semantic-link browsing where an exploration of one concept leads to other concepts easily via links which can provide visual search for the end users.
… International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in …, Jan 1, 1992
The VLDB Journal, Jan 1, 1995
We describe the conceptual model of SORAC, a data modeling system developed at the University of ... more We describe the conceptual model of SORAC, a data modeling system developed at the University of Rhode Island. SORAC supports both semantic objects and relationships, and provides a tool for modeling databases needed for complex design domains. SORAC's set of built-in semantic relationships permits the schema designer to specify enforcement rules that maintain constraints on the object and relationship types. SORAC then automatically generates C+ + code to maintain the specified enforcement rules, producing a schema that is compatible with Ontos. This facilitates the task of the schema designer, who no longer has to ensure that all methods on object classes correctly maintain necessary constraints. In addition, explicit specification of enforcement rules permits automated analysis of enforcement propagations. We compare the interpretations of relationships within the semantic and object-oriented models as an introduction to the mixed model that SORAC supports. Next, the set of built-in SORAC relationship types is presented in terms of the enforcement rules permitted on each relationship type. We then use the modeling requirements of an architectural design support system, called ArchObjects, to demonstrate the capabilities of SORAC. The implementation of the current SORAC prototype is also briefly discussed. 158 monitoring, and analysis of these projects. Methodologies developed for other domains often do not scale well to the complexities inherent in large design environments. Here we describe the use of semantic modeling to design object-oriented databases needed to support design systems. To illustrate the techniques, we show how the prototype Semantic Objects, Relationships,, and Constraints (SORAC) system at the University of Rhode Island can be used to specify and automatically generate an object-oriented database for the support of the ArchObjects architectural design system .
Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Jan 1, 2001
We illustrate here how software engineers developing engineering design systems can introduce pat... more We illustrate here how software engineers developing engineering design systems can introduce patterns into the conceptual modeling techniques that were developed in the database community and integrate them with techniques that are emerging in the object-oriented analysis and engineering design community. The goal is to raise the level of abstraction used to communicate software speci®cations and to build applications. This will speed the development and improve the quality of engineering design tools. We show by an example how this can be accomplished through an example software pattern from the software engineering discipline (the observer pattern) . We show how patterns can be automatically supported using the general techniques that were developed in the Semantic Objects, Relationships, and Constraints (SORAC) project for the development of tools, for the speci®cation of databases and for building design systems. q
Data Engineering, 1988. …, Jan 1, 1988
Abstract This paper discusses the integration of analogi-cal reasoning into a knowledge base syst... more Abstract This paper discusses the integration of analogi-cal reasoning into a knowledge base system. Such a system would retrieve stored examples on the basis of similarity to a current problem. A data model that permits a case oriented representation is devel-oped. The ...
Proceedings of the 7th IFIP, Jan 1, 1997
Database systems for computer-aided design (CAD) are characterised by structural complexity and n... more Database systems for computer-aided design (CAD) are characterised by structural complexity and nonstandard relationship types. Integrity constraints typically describe the semantics of these relationships. Enforcing such constraints in the face of user-initiated changes to the database is necessary to ensure that the database is consistent and the corresponding design is valid. Typically, update rules are specified to maintain integrity constraints. In this paper, we concentrate on the automatic generation of update rules from integrity constraints. Our methodology generates two types of update rules, which are guaranteed to result in a consistent database state. The database designer is provided with the flexibility of alternative semantics as a result of the two update rule types. Tests for integrity violations and repair actions are both generated during a single analysis. The underlying formalism expresses constraints, updates, and rules within the same language; thus the same proof theory applies to all components. This simplifies the overall analysis and enables concise correctness proofs.
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Jan 1, 2011
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Papers by Bonnie MacKellar