Keynotes

Invited talk jointly with GPCE by Prof. Oege de Moor, University of Oxford

Photo of Oege de Moor is an expert on software quality management. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. His aim is to make software development a mature engineering discipline, where meeting targets is the norm, not the exception.

In pursuit of that aim, he has founded Semmle Ltd, which produces ODASA. ODASA assists in the management of large and complex software projects by putting objective facts (about software quality and development activity) at your fingertips. It guides you to those areas of the code where maintenance and testing work will have the greatest economic impact.

ODASA analyses all relevant software quality indicators (source code, and output of testing tools, issue tracking systems, license compliance checkers, profiling tools, …) to give a total picture of software quality. These measures are analysed as trends over time, and presented on an intuitive graphical dashboard. ODASA integrates smoothly with whatever tool chain you already have in place.

Inside ODASA is a state-of-the-art analytics engine, encompassing the latest insights in software analysis and prediction.

Analysing Contributions

How do you improve the behavior of a software team? There will always be team members who are great at quickly producing a new prototype, and others who do a great job of carefully implementing a rock-solid library around a set of new data structures. By analyzing every single contribution of every individual over a long period of time, we can start to understand such differences in coding style. Individuals get suggestions on how to improve their own style, and team leaders can build on everyone’s strength to maximize productivity.

Semmle’s business intelligence product enables this type of detailed analysis of version history, source code, issue tickets, test results and so forth. I will discuss how the technical challenges were overcome, and also the organizational implications.

Invited talk by Prof. Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria

Margaret-Anne Storey is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria, a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto and a Canada Research Chair in Human Computer Interaction for Software Engineering. She is one of the principal investigators for CSER (Centre for Software Engineering Research in Canada) and a principal investigator for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, US. Her research goal is to understand how technology can help people explore, understand and share complex information and knowledge. She applies and evaluates techniques from knowledge engineering, social software and visual interface design to applications such as collaborative software development, program comprehension, biomedical ontology development, and learning in web-based environments.

Recent projects include investigating the role of social media in collaborative software engineering, improving information visualization techniques and developing social software to facilitate the next version of the International Classification of Diseases with the World Health Organization.

Addressing Cognitive and Social Challenges in Designing and Using Ontologies in the Biomedical Domain

Ontologies can provide a conceptualization of a domain leading to a common vocabulary for communities of researchers and important standards to facilitate computation, software interoperability and data reuse. Most successful ontologies, especially those that have been developed by diverse communities over long periods of time, are typically large and complex. To address this complexity, ontology authoring and browsing tools must provide cognitive support to improve comprehension of the many concepts and relationships in ontologies. Also, ontology tools must support collaboration as the heart of ontology design and use is centered on community consensus.

In this talk, I will describe how standardized ontologies are developed and used in the biomedical and clinical domains to aid in scientific and medical discoveries. Specifically, I will present how the US National Center for Biomedical Ontology has designed the BioPortal ontology library (and associated technologies) to promote the use of standardized ontologies and tools. I will review how BioPortal and other ontology tools use established and novel visualization and collaboration approaches to improve ontology authoring and data curation activities. I will also discuss an ambitious project by the World Health Organization that leverages the use of social media to broaden participation in the development of the next version of the International Classification of Diseases. To conclude, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities that arise from using ontologies to bridge communities that manage and curate important information resources.