Institute Name: Foundation for Research & Technology-Hellas(F.O.R.T.H), Institute of Computer ScienceDescription: In its short ten-year history, ICS-FORTH has established itself as an internationally known and highly competitive institute of computer science, with a modern infrastructure and a broad range of R & D activities. ICS employees a full-time scientific and technical staff of 52(most holding postgraduate degrees) and offers 160 undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships. Furthermore, it employees more than 20 faculty members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete and other universities in Greece and abroad. ICS has been very active in European competitive R&D programs including ESPRIT, RACE,AIM and TIDE, as well as the Mediteranean Integrated Program for Informatics, the NATO Science for Stability Proramme, STRIDE, STAR, etc.. Currently it has 20 R&D programs and external funding accounts for approximately 65% of its budget. ICS-FORTH represents Greece in the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.
Research activities concentrating on requirements engineering and software reuse have been carried out primarily within the Group for Information Systems and Software Technology (coordinator: Prof. Panos Constantopoulos).
The group has been concerned with the design and implementation of a software infomation base(SIB), documenting and relating all the the stages of the software development life cycle(Esprit projects: ITHACA, ITHACA-IT, ASSET). Central issues in the design of the SIB are the extensibility of the description schema for software artifacts, the support of different programming languages and methods for software analysis and design and the ability to integrate it with external applications and tools. The SIB was demonstrated as a prototype system in ITHACA, evolved into versions supporting the static analysis of programs and the management of classes in object-oriented programming languages in ITHACA-IT and extended according to a client server architecture in ASSET.
It has been also concerned with the compositional reuse of software requirements components(Esprit BRA project Nature). Along this line of research, it has developed a computational model of detecting analogical similarities between requirement specifications & descriptions of software development processes, employed for retrieving and integrating the former or guiding the enactment of the latter. This model elaborates analogies by measuring distances between conceptual structures(devised according to a semantic net notation, extended with meta modeling constructs) without demanding user-supplied distance measures or measures indicating the importance of different elements of these structures.
Researchers associated with the project:
Prof. Panos Constantopoulos Dr. Martin Doerr
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Prof. Panos Constantopoulos
Nationality: Hellenic
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Panos Constantopoulos holds a Diploma in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering(National Technical University of Athens, 1978), a MSc in Electrical Engineering(Carnegie-Mellon University, 1979) and a Doctor of Science in Operations Research(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983). Dr. Constopoulos is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete and a research scientist at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation of Research and Technology - Hellas. Currently, he is the head of the Information Systems and Software Technology Group, and Associate Director of the Institute. Prof. Constantopoulos has also been the principal investigator for the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, in several national and international projects, including the ESPRIT projects ITHACA (Integrated Toolkit for Highly Advanced Computer Applications, 1989-93) and its continuation, ITHACA-IT (1993-94), ASSET and ESPRIT BRA project NATURE(1992-95). Himself and his team have investigated the use of knowledge-based techniques for representing reusable software and information about the entire software lifecycle, issues of information acquisition and selection, computational models of semantic similarity and view integration, with particular reference to software requirements analysis and using process and domain knowledge. A major part of the work concerns building the Semantic Index System (SIS), which underlies such software development tools as the ITHACA Software Information Base (reuse-oriented repository), a static analyser and an object-oriented class management system, all of which have also been developed.
He has also been a visiting associate professor at the Universite de Paris Sud and the University of Toronto(1994) and a visiting scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre(1989). His principal areas of interest include Information systems, conceptual modelling, decision support systems and software engineering.
Prof. Constantopoulos is an associate editor of the ORSA Journal on Computing and member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Management Sciences and the Operations Research Society of America.
He has also been chairman and programme committee member in a number of international conferences.
Selected Publications:
Constantopoulos P. and Pataki E.(1992): "A Browser for Software Reuse", Proc. 4th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering - CAiSE 92, Manchester
G. Spanoudakis and P. Constantopoulos.(1993): "Similarity for Analogical Software Reuse: A Conceptual Modelling Approach", Proc. 5th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering - CAiSE 93, Paris
P. Constantopoulos, M. Doerr and Y. Vassiliou.(1993): "Repositories for Software Reuse: The Software Information Base", Proc. IFIP WG 8.1 Conference on Information System Development Process, Como
G. Spanoudakis, P. Constapoulos. (1994): "Analogical Similarity of Objects: A Computational Model", Proc of the 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
P. Constantopoulos, M. Jarke, J. Mylopoulos and Y. Vassiliou.(1995): "The Software Information Base: A Server for Reuse", to appear in the VLDB Journal. .LP P. Constantopoulos and M. Doerr.(1995): " Component Classification in the Software Information Base", in O. Nierstrasz and D. Tsichritzis (eds.), Object-Oriented Software Composition, Prentice-Hall, 1995.
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Prof. Panos Constantopoulos,
Address:Institute of Computer Science, F.O.R.T.H, Vassilika Vouton, PO Box 1385, Heraklion, GR-71110, Crete, GREECE
Telephone number: +30 81 391600
Telefax number: +30 81 391601
EMail: panos@ics.forth.gr
List of Members