ComSIS has entered the third year of its publishing.
In the two past years, we have put a lot of effort
and enthusiasm to move ComSIS towards a
high-standard, high-quality journal in such a broad
area of computing. So far, we have published 34
papers in four regular issues, and one special issue
focusing on e-Learning. Now, we may say that we have
preserved continuity, and that the beginners'
problems are mostly behind us.
According to ComSIS policy and the agreement of all
the other members of the Consortium, ComSIS office
has been moved for the next two years to the Faculty
of Technical Sciences at the University of Novi Sad,
and I am honored and privileged to take the position
of Editor-in-Chief. Due to generous support from the
former Editors-in-Chief, Professor Branislav
Lazarevic, and Professor Vladan Devedžic, this
transition was smooth.
Since the beginning of this year, the ComSIS
management team includes Vladan Devedžic
(Vice-Editor-in-Chief), Miro Govedarica (Managing
Editor), and Dinu Dragan, Srdan Popov, and Slavica
Aleksic (Editorial Assistants). I believe that their
remarkable experience will help ComSIS to fulfill
its mission. Having in mind that a lot has to be
done in near future, I hope that we will continue
with special issues and further improvements of the
journal quality, as well as provide world-wide
bibliography indexing. It will be a great pleasure
for us if the readers, reviewers, and authors
recognize our intention and efforts, and further
support us in this mission.
This issue of ComSIS contains one invited, and five
regular research papers. The invited paper comes
from Stellan Ohlsson from the University of
Illinois, Chicago, and Antonija Mitrovic from the
University of Canterbury, New Zeland, the
distinguished authors that have devoted a lot of
their time and effort to one of the hot areas in
artificial intelligence: knowledge representation
and learning systems. The authors emphasize that
formal representation of knowledge is the
constituting idea of AI. The ambition to explore the
technological potential of such representations
makes AI a bridge between technology and the
symbolic traditions in philosophy, psychology and
other cognitive sciences. The authors discuss state
constraints, a type of knowledge unit originally
invented to explain how people can detect and
correct their own errors. They also consider the
differences between constraints and other
representational formats, the advantages of
constraint-based models and the types of domains in
which they are likely to be useful.
Data Mining is also an attractive discipline in
computing that is in a close relationship to AI.
Zengyou He, Xiaofei Xu, and Shenchun Deng, in their
paper "Improving Categorical Data Clustering
Algorithm by Weighting Uncommon Attribute Value
Matches", consider the technique of clustering that
has been extensively studied and used in many
domains. They present an improved Squeezer algorithm
for categorical data clustering by giving greater
weight to uncommon attribute value matches in
similarity computations.
Formalizing the process of user interface design has
been a challenge in software engineering for many
years. In their paper "Adapting the Unified Software
Development Process for User Interface Development",
Zeljko Obrenovic and Dusan Starcevic propose an
approach to make use of HCI knowledge easier for
ordinary software engineers who are usually not
familiar with the most recent HCI research results.
They consider how existing software developing
processes, such as Rational Unified Process, can be
adapted in order to allow disciplined and more
efficient development of user interfaces.
Metaprogramming introduces a layer of abstraction
above the domain language programs. It is especially
useful for developing program generators for
domains, where a great deal of commonalties exists.
Robertas Damaševicius in his paper "On the
Quantitative Estimation of Abstraction Level
Increase in Metaprograms" estimates the increase of
abstraction by evaluating the information content at
the lower (domain) and higher (meta) layers of
abstraction. The estimation method is based on the
Kolmogorov complexity and uses a common compression
algorithm.
There is a wide variety of different software
development environments on the market that
integrate language-based structure editors as their
components. Despite that, the ways to enhance the
quality of software development, and the
productivity of developers, is still an extremely
interesting research area. Zorica Suvajdžin, and
Miroslav Hajdukovic, in their paper "A Structure
Editor for the Program Composing Assistant",
introduce The Program Composing Assistant, an
interactive generic development environment that
provides a structure editor with graphical user
interface as a main feature. It is based on an
intuitive approach, and aims to integrate important
practical aspects of structure editing.
Zoran Živkovic, and Milorad Stanojevic, the authors
of the paper "Simulation Analysis of Protected B2B
e-Commerce Processes", indicate that further
development of Internet-based business applications
is jeopardized by increased security risks, threats,
and attacks. Efficient security policy measures are
needed to minimize these risks. They propose
cryptographic security measures as an efficient
solution to this problem. The paper presents a
simulation analysis of certain trust models (complex
PKI architectures) with regard to the security
support of B2B applications on the Internet. It also
underlines the significance of the up-to-date
cryptographic mechanisms: digital signature and
digital certificate to deliver the main security
services based on PKI.
Finally, on behalf of the ComSIS Consortium, I would
like to take this opportunity to thank the reviewers
and all the authors for their high-quality work,
great efforts, and remarkable enthusiasm.
Editor-in-Chief
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