A goal of the Geosciences Network (GEON) is to MotivationThe NSF-funded Geosciences Network (GEON) project is a collaborative effort among researchers from a broad cross section of computer science and earth science disciplines [1]. GEON is comprised of computation clusters that include compute nodes and data nodes that store high quality geological information and software services and that enable data access, analysis, modeling, and visualization. GEON is an example of a "virtual scientific community" that uses cyber-infrastructure (CI) to support and enhance the scientific process.Different groups from the GEON community are developing ontologies that support search [2], information integration [3], and service discovery [4]. An ontology [5] is an explicit specification of the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in a specific domain and the relationships that hold among them.In addition to development of ontologies, many research teams are using workflow techniques to specify the computation of complex scientific activities [6,7,8]. In this paper, we describe a new approach to ontology design called Workflow-Driven Ontologies (WDO). WDOs are distinguished from domain-based ontologies that capture basic knowledge about a domain. Use cases typically drive the specification of domain-based ontologies [9]. In the WDO approach, abstract workflow specifications drive the elicitation and specification of classes and their relationships. For example, domain experts, i.e., earth scientists, begin the knowledge acquisition process by identifying a product and from the product identify methods that can generate the product. Further, domain experts can identify data that are required as input for the identified methods. Knowledge acquisition methodologies based on WDOs are flexible since earth scientists can refine WDOs by refining a WDO-derived workflows and vice-versa. We claim that abstract WDO-derived workflow specifications are indeed the use cases for WDOs.Prior to presenting the details of WDOs, this paper first motivates the utility of WDOs by presenting a case study in Section 2. The case study illustrates how a contour map can be generated from composition of services from the gravity domain. Section 3 explains how workflows are derived from WDOs using the WDO class hierarchy and core relationships. Section 4 presents related work including a discussion on how WDOs compare to other ontologies. Section 5 summarizes the main contributions and open issues related to the development of the WDO approach. Gravity Case StudyThis section describes the Gravity ontology [10] and the use of the ontology to specify workflows. To remain consistent with the terminology used by the OWL Web Ontology Language community, we use the term "class" to denote types of objects captured by the ontology.

This chapter describes a two-semester software engineering course that is taught in a computer science program at the University of Texas at El Paso. The course is distinguished from other courses in that it is based on the Affinity Research Group (ARG) philosophy that focuses on the deliberate development of students’ team, professional and technical skills within a cooperative environment. To address the challenge of having to teach professional and team skills as well as software engineering principles, approaches, techniques, and tools in a capstone course, the authors have defined an approach that uses a continuum of instruction, practice, and application with constructive feedback loops. The authors hope that the readers will benefit from the description of the approach and how ARG components are incorporated into the course.

Dr. Villa received her doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction from New Mexico State University; she received a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and a Master of Arts in Education from UTEP. She has led and co-led numerous grants from corporate foundations and state and federal agencies, and has numerous publications in refereed journals and edited books. Her research interests include communities of practice, gender, transformative learning, and identity.

The difficulty of writing, reading, and understanding formal specifications remains one of the main obstacles in adopting formal verification techniques such as model checking, theorem and runtime verification. In order to train a future workforce that can develop and test high-assurance systems, it is essential to introduce undergraduate students in computer science and software engineering to the concepts in formal methods. This paper presents an experiment that we used to validate the effectiveness of a new approach that can be used in an undergraduate course to teach formal approaches and languages. The paper presents study that was conducted at two institutions to compare the new approach with the traditional one in teaching formal specifications. The new approach uses a model checker and a specification tool to teach Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), a specification language that is widely used in a variety of verification tools.

Software verification is one of the most important activities in the software development cycle, and testing remains the most common approach to verification used in industry. The goal of blackbox testing (functional testing) is to verify the system's adherence to specifications. The notion of patterns and scopes developed by Dwyer et al. provides a cohesive and rich set of examples to teach black-box testing strategies. A pattern describes a recurring software property, and a scope specifies the interval of program execution where a pattern must hold. A property specified using a pattern and scope combination has characteristics that must be satisfied if it is to hold. Based on these characteristics, there is a large set of behaviors that can be examined using black-box testing techniques. In a complementary fashion, the behaviors specified by patterns and scopes provide clear and simple examples that can enhance the understanding of these testing techniques. In this paper, we describe an approach and present general lessons and exercises that demonstrate how patterns and scopes can be used to teach boundary value analysis and equivalence class testing, which are two of the most commonly used black-box testing techniques. As a side effect of this approach, students are exposed to, and become familiar with, formally specifying system behavior.