Aligning requirements and testing through metamodeling and patterns: design and evaluation.

Poorly executed requirements engineering activities profoundly affect the deliverables' quality and project's budget and schedule. High-quality requirements reuse through requirement patterns has been widely discussed to mitigate these adverse outcomes. Requirement patterns aggregate similar applications' behaviors and services into well-defined templates that can be reused in later specifications. The abstraction capabilities of metamodeling have shown promising results concerning the improvement of the requirement specifications' quality and professionals' productivity. However, there is a lack of research on requirement patterns beyond requirements engineering, even using metamodels as the underlying structure. Besides, most companies often struggle with the cost, rework, and delay effects resulting from a weak alignment between requirements and testing. In this paper, we present a novel metamodeling approach, called  Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM), which aligns requirements and testing through requirement patterns and test patterns. Influenced by well-established agile practices, SoPaMM describes functional requirement patterns and acceptance test patterns as user stories integrated with executable behaviors. Another novelty is the evaluation of SoPaMM's quality properties against a metamodel quality evaluation framework. We detail the evaluation planning, discuss evaluation results, and present our study's threats to validity. Our experience with the design and evaluation of SoPaMM is summarized as lessons learned.

Filtragem semântica de contexto aplicada em monitoramento de sinais vitais / Semantic filtering of context information on vital signs monitoring

Este artigo propõe um mecanismo de filtragem baseado na semântica de contexto ontológico, que apóia a disseminação de contexto segundo uma comunicação publish-subscribe. A filtragem semântica é descrita como um serviço oferecido pelo sistema gerenciador de contexto Hermes; cenários de monitoramento de sinais vitais com dados reais foram definidos com auxílio de uma equipe de Enfermagem de um hospital universitário e usados para validação e avaliação de desempenho do serviço de filtragem orquestrado com outros serviços do sistema Hermes. Os resultados comprovam a eficácia da solução tanto do ponto de vista funcional quanto em relação ao tempo de resposta para a emissão de alarmes inferidos em função de anormalidades em sinais vitais. Conclui-se que a filtragem semântica, como apoio à inferência e à disseminação de contexto, é uma novidade na literatura, aliada à alta expressividade na especificação de filtros para atender diversas demandas de aplicações assim antes.

This paper presents a filtering mechanism based on the semantics of context modeled by ontologies and a publish-subscribe-based context distribution. The semantic filtering is described as a service provided by the Hermes context management system; scenarios of vital signs monitoring with real-world data were created by a Nursing staff from a university hospital and also used for the validation and a performance evaluation of the filtering mechanism orchestrated with other Hermes services. The simulation results demonstrate the adequacy of the filtering service in terms of functional validation and response time to the production of inferred alarms based on abnormalities of vital signs measurements. We conclude that the semantic filtering support for context inference and dissemination is the main contribution, besides the high expressiveness of filters specification to attend heterogeneous demands of subscribing applications.

QASF 2. 0 - Sistema de perguntas e respostas em doenças crônicas / QASF 2. 0 - Question-answering system on chronic diseases / QASF 2. 0 - Sistema de pregunta y respuesta en enfermedades crónicas

As doenças crônicas são um grave problema mundial de saúde pública. Elas são responsáveis por morbidez,mortalidade, incapacidade e baixa qualidade de vida. No Brasil, 72% das mortes são causadas por doenças crônicas, e no mundo esse valor é de 60%. Sabe-se que a atual produção científica mundial é vasta e as informações contidas nos artigos científicos podem ser úteis para o profissional da saúde. Porém, ler artigos científicos é uma tarefa que exige tempo e disposição. O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a segunda versão do sistema de perguntas e respostas QASF para auxiliar os profissionais da saúde e outros usuários na busca rápida por informações, especificamente, em doenças crônicas. O processo de desenvolvimento do sistema baseou-se na construção de módulos de processamento de pergunta,de documentos e de resposta. Com o QASF, espera-se facilitar o acesso a informações.

Chronic diseases is a global public health problem. They are responsible for morbidity, mortality, disability andpoor quality of life. Chronic diseases cause 60% of deaths worldwide and 72% of deaths in Brazil. It is known that the current world scientific production is vast and the information contained in scientific papers can be useful for health professionals. However, the reading of scientific articles is a demanding and time-consuming task. This paper presents a question answering system to help health professionals quickly search for information about chronic diseases. The core of the question answering system includes the development of modules for processing questions, documents and answers. It is expected to support users that demand for quick information about chronic diseases. Precision rates between 50% and 60% were obtained.