The papers collected in this book were invited by the editors as tutorial courses or keynote speeches for the Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. The book offers wide coverage of the main topics involved with the specifications, prototyping, development and maintenance of software systems and knowledge-based systems. The main issues in the area of software engineering and knowledge engineering are addressed and for each analyzed topic the corresponding research state is reported.

This text begins with the modelling of evolutionary constraints on morphological diversity in ecology and then extends to development and evolution. The book uses tractable, traditional models and maths, as well as linked traditional ecological equations with production and consumption. It also contains powerful models and has applied them, for example, in chemical ecology.

Offering a number of exercises of diverse complexity, this text discusses fundamental concepts and terminology on object-oriented software development, with emphasis on design and maintenance rather than programming. It also presents methodologies and proposes a software life-cycle model which focuses on reusability during software development and maintenance.

The term "software visualization" refers to the graphical display of characteristics and behaviour of all aspects of computer software. This volume presents and compares different experiences of software visualization both from fundamental and applied viewpoints. The book is divided into four parts, covering important aspects of software visualization. Part 1 covers a survey of some existing software visualization environments, how to make a software visualization system language independent, and automatic animation techniques. Part 2 presents the advances in graph drawing, which support...

The latest in the series on software engineering and knowledge engineering is based on the acquisition of software engineering knowledge.

Parallel processing is a very important technique for improving the performance of various software development and maintenance activities. The purpose of this book is to introduce important techniques for parallel executation of high-level specifications of software systems. These techniques are very useful for the construction, analysis, and transformation of reliable large-scale and complex software systems.

Empirical verification of knowledge is one of the foundations for developing any discipline. As far as software construction is concerned, the empirically verified knowledge is not only sparse but also not very widely disseminated among developers and researchers. This book aims to spread the idea of the importance of empirical knowledge in software development from a highly practical viewpoint. It has two goals: (1) Define the body of empirically validated knowledge in software development so as to advise practitioners on what methods or techniques have been empirically analysed and what the...

This is a textbook for a course in object-oriented software engineering at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as for software engineers. It contains more than 120 exercises of diverse complexity.

Machine learning deals with the issue of how to build computer programs that improve their performance at some tasks through experience. Machine learning algorithms have proven to be of great practical value in a variety of application domains. Not surprisingly, the field of software engineering turns out to be a fertile ground where many software development and maintenance tasks could be formulated as learning problems and approached in terms of learning algorithms. This book deals with the subject of machine learning applications in software engineering. It provides an overview of machine...

Focuses on the topic of improving software quality using adaptive control approaches. This book combines research topics such as requirements engineering, software development processes, pervasive and autonomic computing, service-oriented architectures, on-line adaptation of software behavior, testing, and QoS control into a coherent whole.