Climate Change

Just found out the blog maintained by Steve Easterbrook on matters related to climate change. Professor Easterbrook has been studying how requirements engineering may help dealing with the huge problem of climate change, in special by providing modeling capabilities at a level of abstraction distinct from the models usually built by climate scientists.

Anyway, I am adding his blog to the Links bar.

Software Transparency

Check the Software Transparency portal at PUC-Rio. Click here, or follow the link on the Links sidebar.

Requirements Engineering´s Roots

I am honored to be among the first researchers to be involved in the Requirements Engineering area. We were involved in the first RE conference as well as on the starting of IFIP W.G. 2.9.

I have recovered, and made available, a literature survey on Requirements. This survey, "A Survey on Requirements Analysis", preceded my Ph.D. thesis. The document contributed to the amalgamation of the different sources that shaped the area. I was one of the first to stress the problem of using the phrase “analysis” to denote the semantics of building requirements. The survey was popular at some point of time, as to be listed on Amazon.

The text is a collection of around 200 bibliography entries, which are summarized and briefly commented.

During the preparation for a talk I gave at Professor John Mylopoulos´s Festschrift I needed to recollect his importance to Requirements Engineering, and as such I went to reread the report. From there it was clear the importance of Mylopoulos to the area, specially because of the book “On Conceptual Modeling, Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Programming Languages”. Coming back to the Survey I came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to make it available.

Systems Analysis versus Requirements Engineering

I have been teaching and preaching that the
phrase "systems analysis" is not a proper term for the task of
building requirements. In reality it causes a lot of
misunderstandings for young professionals.

In fact, the phrase "systems analysis" was used since, in the past,
reverse engineering an "existing system" or "old system" was the
popular way to gain insight about the Universe of Discourse.

Check some of the arguments in a brief summary of a panel
at WER 04.

Tag Oriented Search

Way back I wrote “Delicious may be a great undertaking by people in building a shared ontology. Let’s see.”

I just have read an article on Computer Magazine that explores this possibility. The article uses a meta-tagging strategy implemented by a tool called “Mr. Taggy”.

It is worth checking it up.

United States CTO

I just learned from the La Times that the new CTO was finally
appointed. As the CIO, he also comes from Virginia. His name
is Aneesh Chopra (see also a note about him 4 years ago).

This is what President Obama is expecting from this nomination:

"Aneesh and Jeffrey will work closely with our
Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, who
is responsible for setting technology policy across the
government, and using technology to improve
security, ensure transparency, and lower costs.
The goal is to give all Americans a voice in
their government and ensure that they know exactly
how we’re spending their money – and can hold us
accountable for the results. "

I marked the phrase "ensure transparency" above.

The same LA Times news reports on the new position in
federal government, the Chief Performance Officer.

Read more about the new CTO from Tim O'Reilly´s blog, which
includes a video where Chopra talks about Open Government, data
mining, data standards, legacy, broadband, health systems and
so on.

It seems that his strong point is the vision that government
should be in the upfront usage of new technology and not behind it,
as it seems it is in the United States, as well as in other countries.

Bringing the possibilities of IT to government is his main drive.

Interesting as well is his view on approaching R&D as support for
attracting new industries, a policy applied in Virginia for the case
of the Rolls Royce jet engine plant.