Journal's Facebook pageEditorial
As the year draws to a close, reflecting on the past several years and the road our journal has taken brings into focus a very positive outlook for the future. The academic interest in ComSIS has steadily increased, an observation supported by the large number of higher-quality articles being submitted, widening coverage of the journal by leading abstracting and indexing databases, and the rising number of citations to articles published in ComSIS. Based on the last observation, we are optimistic that ComSIS will receive a solid two-year impact factor for 2010 from Thomson Reuters, placing the journal firmly into the Science Citation Index.
This issue of ComSIS contains one invited paper, nine regular papers, and three papers selected from ICIT 2009, 4th International Conference on Information Technology, held during June 3–5 in Amman, Jordan. We would like to use this opportunity to thank the organizers of ICIT, especially the General Chair of the conference, professor Yahya Abdelfatah A., Al-Zaytoonah University, Jordan, Dean of the Faculty of Science and IT, and Program Chair of the conference, professor Ali Al-Dahoud, Al-Zaytoonah University, for assisting in the contribution of high-quality articles to this issue of ComSIS.
The invited paper in this issue, “Advanced Indexing Technique for Temporal Data” by Bela Stantic, Rodney Topor, Justin Terry, and Abdul Sattar, is an extended version of the paper presented at the ADBIS 2010 conference (14th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, September 20–24, 2010, Novi Sad, Serbia). The paper describes a detailed investigation of the “Triangular Decomposition Tree” (TD-Tree): a new approach to indexing temporal data that facilitates open-ended intervals, with the core idea of managing temporal intervals by virtual index structures that rely on geometric interpretations of intervals, and using a space partitioning method that produces an unbalanced binary tree. The authors demonstrate that the single-query algorithm is suitable for different query types, and that the TD-Tree exhibits good space and time complexity compared to the current state-of-the art.
The first of the regular papers, “COLIBROS: Educational Operating System” by Predrag Rakić, Ţarko Ţivanov, and Miroslav Hajduković, gives an overview of a small, object-oriented, library operating system whose primary purpose is to facilitate teaching a basic operating system undergraduate course. Despite its simplicity, COLIBROS supports high level concurrency and synchronization primitives. The system is also equipped with a hardware emulation layer that emulates keyboard, monitor, disk, and interrupt mechanism. COLIBROS joins the concepts of classical and object oriented operating systems with multithreading concepts of high-level programming languages through simple and clean interface, helping undergraduate students establish first contact with the problems of concurrency, parallelism and operating systems.
The next regular paper by Miroslav Líška and Pavol Návrat, entitled “An Approach to Project Planning Employing Software and Systems Engineering Meta-Model Represented by an Ontology,” explores the interaction between the model driven architecture (MDA) approach to system development and the semantic Web. The article presents an approach aimed at facilitating the use of software and systems engineering meta-model (SPEM) for improvements in the applicability of MDA standards in the technical space of the Semantic Web that are rooted in knowledge engineering approaches.
In “Facilitating Information System Development with Panoramic View on Data”, Dejan Lavbič, Iztok Lajovic, and Marjan Krisper present Panorama – an associative thinking paradigm for the implementation of a software solution. The foundation of Panorama is an object recognition process, based on context and focus information visualization techniques. The approach focuses on using and updating data vocabulary by users without extensive programming skills.
The article “Metrics for Evaluation of Metaprogram Complexity” by Robertas Damaševičius and Vytautas Štuikys analyzes software complexity management and measurement techniques, and proposes five complexity metrics (Relative Kolmogorov Complexity, Metalanguage Richness, Cyclomatic Complexity, Normalized Difficulty, Cognitive Difficulty) for measuring complexity of metaprograms at information, metalanguage, graph, algorithm, and cognitive dimensions.
Rahim A. Abbaspour and Farhad Samadzadegan, in “An Evolutionary Solution for Multimodal Shortest Path Problem in Metropolises” tackle the problem of finding shortest paths between two locations in large urban areas. The proposed approach presents an adapted evolutionary algorithm, which uses chromosomes with variable lengths and particularly defined evolutionary stages. Empirical evaluation on data representing the city of Tehran, which takes into account three different modes of transportation, demonstrates the validity of the approach.
“Trojan Horses in Mobile Devices” by Daniel Fuentes, Juan A. Álvarez, Juan A. Ortega, Luis Gonzalez-Abril, and Francisco Velasco, examines the behavior of malicious software that attempts to steal information from a mobile device while the user is unaware. The article describes the communication links “Trojan horses” use, the damage that an infection can inflict on a PDA device, and proposes different solution to tackle the problem.
Tsung-Hung Lin, Cheng-Chi Lee, Chwei-Shyong Tsai, and Shin-Dong Guo, in “A Tabular Steganography Scheme for Graphical Password Authentication” propose a novel graphical password authentication protocol that tackles the conflicting requirements of passwords to be secure and easy to remember. The proposed graphical password system can help the user easily memorize their password without loss of security of authentication. The user’s chosen input is hidden into an image using steganography technology, while the authentication server needs only to store a secret key for decryption instead of a large password database.
“A Multi-attribute Auction Model by Dominance-based Rough Sets Approach” by Rong Zhang, Bin Liu, and Sifeng Liu introduces a novel multi-attribute online auction model founded on the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA). The model resembles a natural reasoning learning method, is able to directly derive the preference relations between the attributes of alternatives, and can reuse the agent’s preferences to increase bidding efficiency.
The article “Design of Median-type Filters with an Impulse Noise Detector Using Decision Tree and Particle Swarm Optimization for Image Restoration” by Bae-Muu Chang, Hung-Hsu Tsai, Xuan-Ping Lin, and Pao-Ta Yu, proposes a method for the recovery of the corrupted gray-level images that first uses an impulse noise detector to determine whether a pixel is corrupted, and then applies the filtering component which consists of three different filters. Noise detection is treated as a classification problem, approached using decision trees coupled with particle swarm optimization (PSO) for optimizing the thresholds to find out the approximate optimized decision tree and the suboptimal solutions for a set of parameters.
The following three articles represent selected and revised versions of papers published in the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT), June 3–5, 2009, Amman, Jordan.
Amjad Rattrout, Rasha Assaf, Ali Al-Dahoud, in “Personalising the Dynamic Information Resources in a Self Organized Web System Using CAS and MAS” present a model that uses new Web usage information to explore the effects of usage on semantic values, and how such information can help achieve a robust well personalized and organized Web. The article simulates the usage space environment in the multi-agent system (MAS) and complex adaptive system (CAS) paradigms.
In “A Hybrid Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm for Solving Multi-Objective Flexible Job Shop Problems” Jun-qing Li, Quan-ke Pan, and Sheng-xian Xie propose a novel hybrid variable neighborhood search algorithm combined with the genetic algorithm (VNS+GA) for solving the multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problems (FJSPs) to minimize the makespan, the total workload of all machines, and the workload of the busiest machine, demonstrating the success of the approach on well-known benchmarks.
Finally, “Automation of the Moving Objects Movement Prediction Process Independent of the Application Area” by Ivana Niţetić and Krešimir Fertalj contribute to research on moving objects by presenting a conceptual model for movement prediction independent of application area and data model. The authors propose a generic model that addresses the disadvantages of related approaches, and evaluate their method on three case studies.
On behalf of the Editorial Board and the ComSIS Consortium, we would like to thank the article authors for submitting their high-quality contributions, and also the reviewers for the considerable efforts invested into the preparation of this issue of Computer Science and Information Systems.
Editor-in-Chief
Mirjana Ivanović
Managing Editor
Miloš Radovanović
