Search functionality and technology is a growing area of research. However, simple search approaches are still frequently used. A simple keyword or thesauri-based search is efficient and can be easily scaled. However, keyword-based search cannot be used to infer what may or may not be relevant to the user and thesauri, or any other expert generated model, is expensive to produce and tends to be of limited applicability. Semantic Component Selection (SemaCS) approach is not tied to any specific domain and does not rely on expert input. SemaCS is based on actual data and statistical semantic distances between words. Information on semantic distances is used for searching and for automated generation of domain model taxonomy. This paper presents SemaCS's means of acquiring these semantic distances - mNGD (2) - and its initial evaluation.

This paper presents a European Master programme on global software engineering (SE), being put forward by four leading institutions from Sweden, UK, Netherlands and Italy. The Global SE European Master (GSEEM) programme aims to provide students with an excellence in SE based on sound theoretical foundations and practical experience, as well as prepare them to participate in global development of complex and large software systems. GSEEM has been designed with three noteworthy aspects: 1) Three specialization profiles in which the consortium excels: Software Architecting, Real-time Embedded Systems Engineering, and Web Systems and Services Engineering. 2) Two market-driven routes: "professional" to work as professionals, and "scientific" to continue the education towards research degrees. 3) An innovative concept of "shared modules", delivered together by multiple institutions. Four types of shared modules are foreseen: "parallel" twin modules which run remotely between universities, "shifted" modules which teach SE concepts incrementally with shifts in study locations and timeline ,"complementary" modules in which complementary SE concepts are taught in parallel through shared projects, and "common" modules which share the presentations and the project. The profiles realize "integrated knowledge" by complementing partial knowledge available at partner institutions. The paper explains how GSEEM achieves the objectives of educating global software engineers.

The development and validation of fault-tolerant computers for critical real-time applications are currently both costly and time consuming. Often, the underlying technology is out-of-date by the time the computers are ready for deployment. Obsolescence can become a chronic problem when the systems in which they are embedded have lifetimes of several decades. This paper gives an overview of the work carried out in a project that is tackling the issues of cost and rapid obsolescence by defining a generic fault-tolerant computer architecture based essentially on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components (both processor hardware boards and real-time operating systems). The architecture uses a limited number of specific, but generic, hardware and software components to implement an architecture that can be configured along three dimensions: redundant channels, redundant lanes, and integrity levels. The two dimensions of physical redundancy allow the definition of a wide variety of instances with different fault tolerance strategies. The integrity level dimension allows application components of different levels of criticality to coexist in the same instance. The paper describes the main concepts of the architecture, the supporting environments for development and validation, and the prototypes currently being implemented.

Previous ultra-dependable real-time computing architectures have been specialised to meet the requirements of a particular application domain. Over the last two years, a consortium of European companies and academic institutions has been investigating the design and development of a Generic Upgradable Architecture for Real-time Dependable Systems (GUARDS). The architecture aims to be tolerant of permanent and temporary, internal and external, physical faults and should provide confinement or tolerance of software design faults. GUARDS critical applications are intended to be replicated across the channels which provide the primary hardware fault containment regions. In this paper, we present our approach to real-time scheduling of the GUARDS architecture. We use an extended response-time analysis to predict the timing properties of replicated real-time transactions. Consideration is also given to the scheduling of the inter-channel communications network.