Editorial

ComSIS has entered the sixth year of its publishing. So far, we have published 78 papers in eight regular issues and three special issues. This issue of ComSIS contains one invited and eight regular research papers. As a rule, some of them are mostly theoretical, while the others present results from various application domains.

The invited paper comes from the distinguished authors Klaus Bothe from Humboldt University, Zoran Budimac from University of Novi Sad, Rebeca Cortazar from University of Deusto, Mirjana Ivanović from University of Novi Sad, and Hussein Zedan from De Montfort University. The authors advocate that there is a strong need for new approaches and new curricula in European education area in the field of software engineering, which has traditionally been underdeveloped in some areas. In the paper, they present a curriculum oriented towards undergraduate students of informatics and engineering. The proposed approach takes into account integration trends in European educational area and requirements of the labour market. The authors discuss the body of knowledge that should be provided by a modern curriculum in software engineering at a master level. The presented ideas are based on the experience gained in the TEMPUS project “Joint MSc Curriculum in Software Engineering”.

In the recent years, many efforts in computer science and software engineering have been invested in model driven software development approaches with a deployment of formal methods. Nenad Krdžavac, Dragan Gašević, and Vladan Devedžić in their paper "Model Driven Engineering of a Tableau Algorithm for Description Logics" show how model driven engineering techniques can be applied to developing a description logic (DL) reasoner. They propose a method based on the tableau algorithm that tries to compute the basic reasoning service of DLs (i.e., satisfiability), which is used as a basis for other reasoning services, namely subsumption, consistency, and instance checking. To implement the algorithm, they utilized MOF based metamodels.

The next paper targets an application domain of financial decision-making, as one of the most current issues of modern financial management. Gordana Radojević and Milija Suknović in the paper "Scoring models: towards the more realistic approach" compare two financial decision support systems – the classical one, and the system based on fuzzy logic, with an expectation to improve the existing methodology of financial decision-making process, particularly for the applications in the real banking environment.

An influence of the application of information and communication technologies on the organizational systems is always an open, interdisciplinary research area. The next three papers are from that area. Ioannis Koskosas in his paper "Communicating Information Systems Goals: A Case in Internet Banking Security" notifies that a large part of information system (IS) security approaches is technical in nature with less consideration on people and organizational issues. On the contrary, the research presented in his paper adopted a broader perspective and presents an understanding of IS security in terms of a social and organizational perspective. Based on a theoretical framework the research supported the rationale that “security risks may arise due to a failure to obtain some or all of the goals that are relevant to the integrity, confidentiality and authenticity of information through the Internet banking channel”. The author concludes that the triangulation methods used including interviews, documents, archival records, observation and physical artefacts, provided useful insights into IS security in the context of Internet banking and allowed the study of risk communication and goal setting within their real life context.

Mladen Čudanov, Ondrej Jaško, and Miloš Jevtić in their paper "Influence of Information and Communication Technologies on Decentralization of Organizational Structure" present an empirical research, in which decentralization of the organizational structure was compared to the level of composite index of adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT). The authors conclude that ICT adoption is more frequently present in decentralized companies, empirically described by dominant liberal style of management, although in some cases ICT adoption can also lead to the centralization, depending on other organization factors.

In their paper "Software Process Improvement in SMEs: A Comparative View", Deepti Mishra and Alok Mishra advocate that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have realized that it is crucial for their business to improve their processes and working methods but there is a lack of knowledge and resources to do it. A successful implementation of software process improvement (SPI) methodologies is generally not possible within the context of SMEs because they are not capable of bearing the cost of implementing these software process improvement programs, and often operate on limited resources and with strict time constraints. In their paper, the authors analyze six SPI methodologies for SMEs so as to move towards maturity of SPI in SMEs and help in the development of SPI automation tools in future.

Valentina Janev, Jovan Duduković, Jelena Jovanović, and Sanja Vraneš in their paper "Web4WeB e-Collaboration tools" introduce and compare two innovative tools, the Alfresco system and the Semantic MediaWiki portal, aimed at enhancing the collaborative work of the researchers and professionals from the West Balkan countries in the Semantic Web field. They discuss the customization of these tools and their utilization in the Web Technologies for West Balkan countries (Web4WeB) project.

By the rule, wireless computer networks, as one of the hottest research topics in recent years, are often present in ComSIS regular issues. Andreas Miaoudakis, Dimitrios Stratakis, Emmanouel Antonidakis, Vassilios Zaharopoulos, and Radovan Stojanović in their paper "Co-existence Performance Evaluation of Wireless Computer Networks in a Typical Office Environment" present a performance evaluation of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) in an office co-existence environment. The evaluation is based on real measurements in a typical office environment. Several coexistence scenarios have been examined regarding both WLAN to WLAN and WLAN to WPAN interference. Measurements were performed to obtain quality metrics such as throughput, RTT delay, P2P delay and jitter for TCP and UDP network traffic.

Medical image processing is also an emergent and promising application domain. Dinu Dragan and Dragan Ivetić in their paper "Architectures of DICOM based PACS for JPEG2000 Medical Image Streaming" notify that delivering of medical image content to mobile/embedded devices with low storage and processing capabilities and low resolution displays is a challenging, but important task for achieving ubiquitous computing in modern hospital environments. The common approaches in industry and technical literature employ JPEG2000 compression and image streaming. The authors developed DICOM2000 syntax providing JPEG2000 streaming over DICOM networks. They compare communication architectures of DICOM2000 based Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) with the common architectures of DICOM based PACS and conclude that DICOM2000 based PACS shifts medical computing environment toward the ubiquitous computing.

On behalf of the ComSIS Consortium, let me use this opportunity to give my great thanks to the reviewers and all of the authors for their high-quality work, great efforts, and remarkable enthusiasm.

Editor-in-Chief
Ivan Luković