Journal's Facebook pageEditorial
The first issue of Computer Science and Information Systems (ComSIS) journal is in front of you. I hope that it could be seen as a promising start, and that ComSIS will soon win a name for being competitive journal in the field of computing.
To move towards this goal from the very beginning, the Editorial board has invited four papers for the first issue. Hopefully, there will be huge competition of high-quality regular papers for future issues, but we will keep on inviting papers that review or originally treat hot topics in the field.
This is truly a broad-coverage issue. Its topics range from reconsidering fundamental model of software engineering, to learning technology standardization and applications, to interesting problems in distributed multimedia systems, to problems of massive datasets processing, to MDAbased ontology infrastructure and to proposing a method of XML-based application generation.
Strangely enough, the first paper in the first issue of ComSIS, related to software engineering, proclaims “the end of software engineering”. Alistair Cockburn gives a very interesting and refreshing view on fundamental problems of the software engineering model and describes “a new model for software development: A series of resource-limited, goal-directed cooperative games of invention and communication”.
Eric Duval offers an overview of learning technology standards. Moreover, to resolve confusion and misunderstanding in standardization, the paper provides a very useful survey of the process and results of standardization.
Also in this issue, G. Simic describes architecture, design, and implementation of a multi-courses tutoring system. Multitutor is a Web-based, ontologically founded framework that enables teachers to develop tutoring systems and students to learn the topics from the courses, assess their knowledge, and get the recommendations what to learn for a better score.
In distributed multimedia systems, adaptation - the capability to respond to changes in the environment - is becoming increasingly important. R. Tusch et al. argue that an integration of the defensive, reactive media adaptation and offensive, proactive, system-level adaptation will provide better quality of endto- end service in a distributed multimedia system. They describe an adaptive multimedia server (ADMS) supporting offensive adaptation and an intelligent video proxy (QBIX) that implements defensive adaptation. A. Calvagna presents a design of multimedia content-delivery service architecture. The service provides a mechanism to distribute multimedia streams to end-users with the Virtual Home Environment (VHE), enabling them to access and personalize the services they subscribed to.
V.Boginski et al. discuss the problems of processing massive datasets (datasets with excessive size), many of which cannot fit into the computer’s internal memory. The enormous size of the dataset overcomes even the power of efficient external-memory algorithms. The authors argue that using an appropriate dataset mathematical model; in particular a network or graph representation, can significantly simplify dataset analysis.
Dragan Duric presents an Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) that enables using Model Driven Architecture (MDA) standards in ontological engineering. The proposed ODM is a good starting point for defining an OWLbased UML profile that will enable using the well-known UML notation in ontological engineering more extensively. Interestingly, his paper comes at the time when ODM as a topic attracts much attention in the Object Management Group (OMG) consortium.
XML becomes an important model in designing flexible information systems. M.Govedarica et al. propose an XML-based methodology of information system design. Using a CASE tool, named IIS*Case, one can map user requirements into initial XML specifications. Design process proceeds through a sequence of XSL transformations of the initial XML specification, until a platform-independent formal specification of an information system is generated. To enable early feedback from users, the methodology uses further XSL transformations that produce an executable prototype of the information system in Java programming environment.
Regular columns, reviews of newly published books, and presentations of PhD and master theses in computing completed at universities in Serbia will start in the next issue.
The Editorial Board wants to express gratitude to Digit, the company that supported publication of this issue. We would like to thank Marijana Despotovic creative construction of ComSIS Web site and Velimir Stavljanin for inspired cover design.
Editor-in-Chief
Branislav Lazarević
