Building robust data pipelines often requires spe-cialized engineering skills, creating barriers for domain experts with limited coding expertise. We introduce Prompt2DAG, a modular prompting methodology that transforms natural language descriptions into executable Apache Airflow workflows by decomposing generation into three sequential stages: structured analysis, configuration generation, and code implementation. This approach aligns with established software engineering principles of separation of concerns and progressive refinement. Our evalu-ation across five different LLMs demonstrates that Prompt2DAG significantly outperforms conventional end-to-end generation, im-proving code quality (+78.4 %) and structural integrity (+43.2 %) of generated pipelines. Using a data enrichment case study, we show how this approach enables the development of high-quality workflows through natural language, effectively democratizing data pipeline development.

The ubiquitous availability of datasets has spurred the utilization of Artificial Intelligence methods and models to extract valuable insights, unearth hidden patterns, and predict future trends. However, the current process of data collection and linking heavily relies on expert knowledge and domain-specific understanding, which engenders substantial costs in terms of both time and financial resources. Therefore, streamlining the data acquisition, harmonization, and enrichment procedures to deliver high-fidelity datasets readily usable for analytics is paramount. This paper explores the capabilities of SemTUI, a comprehensive framework designed to support the enrichment of tabular data by leveraging semantics and user interaction. Utilizing SemTUI, an iterative and interactive approach is proposed to enhance the flexibility, usability and efficiency of geospatial data enrichment. The approach is evaluated through a pilot case study focused on urban planning, with a particular emphasis on geocoding. Using a real-world scenario involving the analysis of kindergarten accessibility within walking distance, the study demonstrates the proficiency of SemTUI in generating precise and semantically enriched location data. The incorporation of human feedback in the enrichment process successfully enhances the quality of the resulting dataset, highlighting SemTUI’s potential for broader applications in geospatial analysis and its usability for users with limited expertise in manipulating geospatial data.

Data enrichment facilitates the creation of rich, expressive, and high-quality datasets, enabling valuable analytics and enhanced decision-making. The accurate geolocation of residential addresses and travel routes is crucial for determining the most appropriate locations of critical social infrastructure, such as educational and medical centres. This paper introduces an interactive semantic enrichment approach that enhances urban data by integrating high-quality geospatial information. The approach is supported by a modular and extensible data enrichment framework, which leverages existing geolocation services, enabling seamless data integration. Human-in-the-loop revision is employed to enhance the quality of geocoding results. A real-world pilot study conducted in Sofia, Bulgaria, was used to validate this approach, demonstrating its promising potential in addressing pressing issues in parametric urban planning.

We present Touch&Screen, a wide set of interaction techniques for the remote control of widgets (menu, lists, videos, maps etc.) for large screens through smartphones. After presenting the design of these widgets and the related control interfaces of the smartphone, we evaluated the interaction through two user studies. The first study (48 users) aimed to evaluate the user experience (naturalness, usability, etc.) and spontaneity of use. The second user study (12 users) aimed to evaluate our interaction techniques comparatively with direct touch and a commercial smartphone application designed to control cursors on distant screens. The evaluation results show that Touch&Screen is faster and more natural than existing solutions to control distant screens.

The increasing number of services available on the Web requires sophisticated mechanisms for the matchmaking, selection and composition of services based on business criteria. Such mechanisms require descriptions that address business terms, but existing approaches for the modeling of service properties are inadequate for expressing business conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel Service Description Language for Contract specification (SeDL-C). The proposal is based on a detailed analysis of business terms to identify the set of requirements a model and a language should fulfill. Formal syntax and semantics for SeDL-C are given.

Currently, rich and diverse data types have been increasingly provided using the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) model, a form of cloud computing services. However, data offered by DaaS are constrained by several data concerns that, if not automatically being reasoned properly, will lead to a wrong way of using them. In this paper, we support the assumption that data concerns should be explicitly modeled and specified in data contracts to support concern-aware data selection and utilization. Instead of relying on a specific definition of data contracts, we analyze contemporary data contracts and we present an abstract model for data contracts. Based on the abstract model, we propose several techniques for evaluating data contracts that can be integrated into data service selection and composition frameworks. We also illustrate our approach with some real world scenarios.

Web service evaluation is a phase of the Web service selection in which discovered Web services are evaluated with respect to user request, which means that the non functional properties (NFPs) offered by Web services are compared with the non functional properties requested by users. The fact that users and providers can express their NFPs in very flexible ways makes the management of NFPs a very complex task. In this paper we propose a computing-oriented description of NFPs and a novel approach to NFP-based service evaluation based on Hierarchical Constraint Logic Programming. This proposal extends our previous work on Policy Centered Meta-model (PCM).

In this paper we propose a meta-model for nonfunctional property descriptions targeted to support the selection of Web Services. The approach is based on the explicit distinction between NFP offered by providers and requested by users, on the concept of policy that aggregates NFP descriptions into single entities with an applicability condition, and finally on a set of constraint operators, which is particularly relevant for NFP requests. The semantic meta-model embracing the above perspective is defined by a BNF syntax whose semantics is formalized by an ontology. The ontology has been formalized in OWL-DL and WSML to provide for logical syntax. The logic upon which the meta-model supports NFP-based selection is discussed in the paper.

The discovery of a semantic web service (SWS) is the act of locating a machine-processable description of a SWS-related resource that may have been previously unknown and that meets certain functional criteria. The increasing availability of services that offer similar functionalities requires the discovery process to be enhanced with a selection phase that considers non-functional properties (NFPs) of services. This paper proposes a model to describe these properties and a novel approach to service selection. Our approach is based on the design of matching rules by means of mediators defined by sets of rules stating the condition for successful matches. These rules are based on the ontological description of objects representing NFPs that are required and offered. In particular, we define a set of rule schemas to support mediation and matching for a class of user-defined NFP-constraints clustered according to specified constraint operators. Rules support matching for both qualitative and quantitative non-functional properties.

BACKGROUND: The huge amount of biological information, its distribution over the Internet and the heterogeneity of available software tools makes the adoption of new data integration and analysis network tools a necessity in bioinformatics. ICT standards and tools, like Web Services and Workflow Management Systems (WMS), can support the creation and deployment of such systems. Many Web Services are already available and some WMS have been proposed. They assume that researchers know which bioinformatics resources can be reached through a programmatic interface and that they are skilled in programming and building workflows. Therefore, they are not viable to the majority of unskilled researchers. A portal enabling these to take profit from new technologies is still missing. RESULTS: We designed biowep, a web based client application that allows for the selection and execution of a set of predefined workflows. The system is available on-line. Biowep architecture includes a Workflow Manager, a User Interface and a Workflow Executor. The task of the Workflow Manager is the creation and annotation of workflows. These can be created by using either the Taverna Workbench or BioWMS. Enactment of workflows is carried out by FreeFluo for Taverna workflows and by BioAgent/Hermes, a mobile agent-based middleware, for BioWMS ones. Main workflows' processing steps are annotated on the basis of their input and output, elaboration type and application domain by using a classification of bioinformatics data and tasks. The interface supports users authentication and profiling. Workflows can be selected on the basis of users' profiles and can be searched through their annotations. Results can be saved. CONCLUSION: We developed a web system that support the selection and execution of predefined workflows, thus simplifying access for all researchers. The implementation of Web Services allowing specialized software to interact with an exhaustive set of biomedical databases and analysis software and the creation of effective workflows can significantly improve automation of in-silico analysis. Biowep is available for interested researchers as a reference portal. They are invited to submit their workflows to the workflow repository. Biowep is further being developed in the sphere of the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Technologies in Bioinformatics - LITBIO.

Many available services have been designed for a single-channel world, Web and Internet typically. In a real world scenario, an ever-growing number of users take advantage of different kinds of communication channels and devices. In this paper, we propose a methodology to formalize the re-design process of these services to support multi-channel access in different contexts. The methodology considers the channel characteristics, the location of users and the context of use to characterize the new services. It has been tested in a case study: the Italian National Project of Identification and Registration of Bovine Animals.

Most of the available knowledge management systems pay little attention to two important aspects: the need of supporting emerging communities of interest together with the official organizational structure; and the need of cluing together knowledge associated with any kind of involved entity including people, communities, and informal knowledge. The MILK system enhances knowledge discovery and sharing by providing services addressing these aspects and supplying innovative interfaces and interaction styles. The goal of MILK is to become a familiar environment integrated in the every-day activities of dynamic modern workers. To meet the users' needs, the solution proposed by MILK roots in ethnographic analysis capturing the common practices within an organization.

To address the development of complex systems, the definition of novel models that capture their nature and provide developers with abstractions and technologies to both imagine and implement effective solutions is needed. Promising models are those based on multi agent systems, since they naturally capture the concept of independent entities interacting in an environment. This paper presents a model and discusses its social interaction mechanisms to support multi-agent systems. The model, called the reaction diffusion machine (RDM), addresses the definition of environments hosting situated agents that may interact and move. Peculiarities of RDM are the inclusion of the topology of the space as a primitive aspect, and the definition of a interaction protocol that is based on the concept of distance among agents. The discussion on mechanisms addresses the issues to develop a framework that implements the model.

The work described in this paper deals with the problem of selecting, configuring, integrating and deploying COTS components to deliver tailored software systems. Since formal and precise description of components is not usually available, a reasonable approach is to augment the available documentation with the informal knowledge derived by practices and experience of experts. The development of a knowledge-based system is a way to organize this empirical knowledge and deliver a tool that can support software designers in the tough goal of COTS-based development.

As software systems become modular and distributed, the system architecture becomes a central design concern. Traditional environments provide poor support for crucial aspects such as configuration, interfacing to communication systems, global synchronization and scheduling. The paper identifies the basic abstractions for a complete description of a software system, possibly distributed and real-time. The proposed architectural model addresses software architecture issues to provide software engineers an integrated and coherent environment, and an architectural language to describe system components and their features. The environment is expected to support the complete life-cycle of software systems of different nature. It is accomplished by addressing each concern-design of single components, design of the system topology, set up and control system execution-as a separate issue, and by moving at design and programming level features traditionally belonging to operating systems and run-time supports of programming languages.

The paper presents an integrated approach to architectural design and to engineering of complex IT systems. It addresses the need for suitable architectural abstractions by introducing agents, connectors, configurators and controllers as abstract components exporting multi-view interfaces. Each view is visible to components implementing a specific abstraction. The paper also discusses how such abstract components can be implemented and engineered on different platforms by splitting them into concrete representations corresponding to specific views. The systematic use of these concepts leads to the definition of an integrated environment supporting the whole system life cycle.

The aim of a cooperative system is to coordinate and support group activities. CSDL (Cooperative Systems Design Language) is an experimental language designed to support the development of cooperative systems from specification to implementation. In CSDL a system is defined as a collection of reusable entities implementing floor control disciplines and shared workspaces. A cooperative system may be distributed over a variety of workstations and networks. Therefore, a design language should provide sound supports for system architecture definition and dynamic configuration. This paper surveys the language and discusses constructs for identifying starting and connecting system entities.>

The aim of a cooperative system is to coordinate and support group activities. Cooperative Systems Design Language (CSDL) is an experimental language designed to support the development of cooperative systems from specification to implementation. In CSDL, a system is defined as a collection of reusable entities implementing floor control disciplines and shared workspaces. CSDL tries to address the difficulties of integrating different aspects of cooperative systems: cooperation control, communication, and system modularization. This paper presents CSDL as a specification language. Basic units are coordinators that can be combined hierarchically. A coordinator is composed of a specification, a body, and a context. The specification defines the cooperation policy; the body controls the underlying communication channels; and the context defines coordinators' interaction in modular systems.>

Cooperative system programming deals with four topics: multiuser interfaces, coordination, shared workspace, and networking control. The goal of CSDL (Cooperative Systems Design Language) is to cover all these aspects. The authors present the development of a system in CSDL. The system allows a group of physically distributed users to edit a document concurrently. It permits sharing the single-user editor xedit by multiplexing the application's outputs to each participant, while inputs come from one user at a time. A simple floor control policy allows participants to designate who has that right. A detailed presentation of the coordination layer, and a discussion of system architecture are included.>

A technique and an environment-supporting specialization of generalized software components are described. The technique is based on symbolic execution. It allows one to transform a generalized software component into a more specific and more efficient component. Specialization is proposed as a technique that improves software reuse. The idea is that a library of generalized components exists and the environment supports a designer in customizing a generalized component when the need arises for reusing it under more restricted conditions. It is also justified as a reengineering technique that helps optimize a program during maintenance. Specialization is supported by an interactive environment that provides several transformation tools: a symbolic executor/simplifier, an optimizer, and a loop refolder. The conceptual basis for these transformation techniques is described, examples of their application are given, and how they cooperate in a prototype environment for the Ada programming language is outlined.>

A metric for concurrent software is proposed based on an abstract model (Petri nets) as an extension of T.J. McCabe's (1976) cyclomatic number. As such, its focus is on the complexity of control flow. This metric is applied to the assessment of Ada programs, and an automatic method for its direct computation based on the inspection of Ada code is provided. It is pointed out, however, that wider experimentation is needed in order to better assess its effectiveness.>