The problem of managing the consistency of heterogeneous, distributed software engineering documents is central to the development of large and complex systems. We show how this problem can be addressed using xlinkit, a lightweight framework for consistency checking that leverages standard Internet technologies. xlinkit provides flexibility, strong diagnostics, and support for distribution and document heterogeneity. We use xlinkit in a comprehensive case study that demonstrates how design, implementation and deployment information of an Enterprise JavaBeans system can be checked for consistency, and rechecked incrementally when changes are made.

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Fluid Documents use animated typographical changes to provide a novel and appealing user experience for hypertext browsing and for viewing document annotations in context. This paper describes an effort to broaden the utility of Fluid Documents by using the open hypermedia Arakne Environment to layer fluid annotations and links on top of arbitrary HTML pages on the World Wide Web. Changes to both Fluid Documents and Arakne are required.

In this paper we show how personalization techniques from the area of adaptive hypermedia can be achieved in the semantic web. Our approach

Traceability relationships help stakeholders understand the many associations and dependencies that exist between software artifacts created during a software development project. Individual relationships between specific artifacts can be useful in understanding portions of the system. However, these explicit relationships are greatly outnumbered by the implicit relationships that exist between artifacts. This situation adds to the complexity of software development. Stakeholders need a way to understand all the relationships that exist in a software development project. We describe TraceM, a framework for automating the management of traceability relationships. A key contribution of TraceM is its ability to transform implicit relationships into explicit relationships by processing chains of traceability relationships. Thus, our framework has the potential to provide software developers with insight into the state of their software development projects. 1.

The Fluid Documents project has developed various research prototypes that show that powerful annotation techniques based on animated typographical changes can help readers utilize annotations more effectively. Our recently-developed Fluid Open Hypermedia prototype supports the authoring and browsing of fluid annotations on third-party Web pages. This prototype is an extension of the Arakne Environment, an open hypermedia application that can augment Web pages with externally stored hypermedia structures. This paper describes how various Web standards, including DOM, CSS, XLink, XPointer, and RDF, can be used and extended to support fluid annotations. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]:

The World Wide Web has since its beginning provided linking to and from text documents encoded in HTML. The Web has evolved and most Web browsers now support a rich set of media types either by default or by the use of specialised content handlers, known as plug-ins. The limitations of the Web linking model are well known and they also extend into the realm of the other media types currently supported by Web browsers. This paper introduces the Mimicry system that allows authors and readers to link to and from temporal media (video and audio) on the Web. The system is integrated with the Arakne Environment, an open hypermedia integration aimed at Web augmentation.

An approach for the semi-automated recovery of traceability links between software documentation and source code is presented. The methodology is based on the application of information retrieval techniques to extract and analyze the semantic information from the source code and associated documentation. A semi-automatic process is defined based on the proposed methodology. The paper advocates the use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) as the supporting information retrieval technique. Two case studies using existing software are presented comparing this approach with others. The case studies show positive results for the proposed approach, especially considering the flexibility of the methods used.

A-posteriori integration of heterogeneous engineering tools supplied by different vendors constitutes a challenging task. In particular, this statement applies to incremental development processes where small changes have to be propagated --- potentially bidirectionally --- through a set of inter-dependent design documents which have to be kept consistent with each other. Responding to these challenges, we have developed an approach to tool integration which puts strong emphasis on software architecture and model-driven development. Starting from an abstract description of a software architecture, the architecture is gradually refined down to an implementation level. To integrate heterogeneous engineering tools, wrappers are constructed for abstracting from technical details and for providing homogenized data access. On top of these wrappers, incremental integration tools provide for inter-document consistency. These tools are based on graph models of the respective document classes and graph transformation rules for maintaining inter-document consistency. Altogether, the collection of support tools and the respective infrastructure considerably leverage the problem of composing a tightly integrated development environment from a set of heterogeneous engineering tools.

The paper summarizes the authors ’ current research on supporting model-to-model traceability. The authors present a graph theoretic definition of what they mean by models and traceability links. This definition is realized by the use of XML technologies to represent the models and traceability links. Practical means to represent different types of system models (e.g., source code and design) using XML are discussed. Traceability links are also implemented using XML technologies in an efficient and scalable manner. The evolution of the system, along with the traceability links, is supported by a fine-grained versioning technique. This allows for versioning and differencing of specific elements of the models versus just lines or whole files.