Holger M. Kienle

Open data is an emerging paradigm to share large and diverse datasets -- primarily from governmental agencies, but also from other organizations -- with the goal to enable the exploitation of the data for societal, academic, and commercial gains. There are now already many datasets available with diverse characteristics in terms of size, encoding and structure. These datasets are often created and maintained in an ad-hoc manner. Thus, open data poses many challenges and there is a need for effective tools and techniques to manage and maintain it. In this paper we argue that software maintenance and reverse engineering have an opportunity to contribute to open data and to shape its future development. From the perspective of reverse engineering research, open data is a new artifact that serves as input for reverse engineering techniques and processes. Specific challenges of open data are document scraping, image processing, and structure/schema recognition. From the perspective of maintenance research, maintenance has to accommodate changes of open data sources by third-party providers, traceability of data transformation pipelines, and quality assurance of data and transformations. We believe that the increasing importance of open data and the research challenges that it brings with it may possibly lead to the emergence of new research streams for reverse engineering as well as for maintenance.

This paper addresses policy challenges of complex virtual environments such as virtual worlds, social network sites, and massive multiplayer online games. The complexity of these environments--apparent by the rich user interactions and sophisticated user-generated content that they offer--poses unique challenges for policy management and compliance. These challenges are also impacting the life cycle of the software system that implements the virtual environment. The goal of this paper is to identify and sketch important legal and policy challenges of virtual environments and how they affect stakeholders (i.e., operators, users, and lawmakers). Given the increasing significance of virtual environments, we expect that tackling these challenges will become increasingly important in the future.

In this paper we argue that policies are an increasing concern for organizations that are operating a web site. Examples of policies that are relevant in the domain of the web address issues such as privacy of personal data, accessibility for the disabled, user conduct, e-commerce, and intellectual property. Web site policies--and the overarching concept of web site governance--are cross-cutting concerns that have to be addressed and implemented at different levels (e.g., policy documents, legal statements, business processes, contracts, auditing, and software systems). For web sites, policies are also reflected in the legal statements that the web site posts, and in the behavior and features that the web site offers to its users. Both policies and software tend to evolve independently, but at the same time they both have to be kept in sync. This is a practical challenge for operators of web sites that is poorly addressed right now and is, we believe, a promising avenue for future research. In this paper, we discuss various challenges that policy poses for web sites with an emphasis on privacy and data protection and identify open issues for future research.

This paper describes our implementation of a fact extractor for J2EE Web applications. Fact extractors are part of each reverse engineering toolset; their output is used by reverse engineering analyzers and visualizers. Our fact extractor has been implemented on top of IBM's Websphere Application Developer (WSAD). The extractor's schema has been defined with the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) using a graphical modeling approach. The extractor extensively reuses functionality provided by WSAD, EMF, and Eclipse, and is an example of component-based development. In this paper, we show how we used this development approach to accomplish the construction of our fact extractor, which, as a result, could be realized with significantly less code and in shorter time compared to a homegrown extractor implemented from scratch. We have assessed our extractor and the produced facts with a table- based and a graph-based visualizer. Both visualizers are integrated with Eclipse.

In this paper we report on our results for the VISSOFT tool demo challenge. In order to understand the architecture of Azureus, a BitTorrent client written in Java, we use the Rigi reverse engineering tool to visualize and explore dependency relations at the class and package level.

Our objective is to identify requirements (i.e., quality attributes and functional requirements) for software visualization tools. We especially focus on requirements for research tools that target the domains of visualization for software maintenance, reengineering, and reverse engineering. The requirements are identified with a comprehensive literature survey based on relevant publications in journals, conference proceedings, and theses. The literature survey has identified seven quality attributes (i.e., rendering scalability, information scalability, interoperability, customizability, interactivity, usability, and adoptability) and seven functional requirements (i.e., views, abstraction, search, filters, code proximity, automatic layouts, and undo/history). The identified requirements are useful for researchers in the software visualization field to build and evaluate tools, and to reason about the domain of software visualization.