Posted by Dr Serena Coetzee on 21 May 2010, 09:24

In May two post-doctoral research fellows from Germany arrived to support our department's research activities in Software Engineering as members of the SSFM research group. Agnes Koschmider and Alexander Paar recently received their PhD degrees - with distinctions! - from the Faculty of Informatics of the University (TH) of Karlsruhe, which is one of Germany's leading universities in the field of engineering and technology. During their stay in South Africa, Agnes and Alex will be supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF), which is gratefully acknowledged. Agnes and Alex are looking forward to an active year at our department.

In her post-doctoral project in Pretoria, Agnes wants to deal with web mashups, especially ways of classifying and assessing the quality of such mashups. These are software applications which are built and processed on-line. Mashups combine available resources (e.g., data, presentation, functionality). For example, the Google Maps API and the Yahoo Geocoding API can be combined to visualize (location) information on a map. In contrast to computer programs mashups are not programmed line by line but are created graphically. The starting point for the analysis of mashups are graphically combined components. This special case of application development might lead to more qualitative metrics than for conventional computer programs.

Alex, on the other hand, wants to do his post-doctoral project in Pretoria on the topic of programming languages and their type systems. In his research project, a minimal object-oriented programming language (ZHILANG) will be designed and implemented to provide for the cooperative usage of a number of different type systems (e.g., XSD and OWL), as well as for language inherent support for UML and OCL modelling primitives. Case studies and experiments will be based on the cooperative usage of external type systems such as XSD and OWL with the ZHILANG programming language, as well as on the implementation of UML modelling primitives by means of ZHILANG language features.