Understanding Technological Spaces


On 14 June, CWI (the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam) organizes the CWI Lectures on Understanding Software. I quote from the website: "The lectures are organized in honor of Paul Klint having been awarded a CWI research fellowship, as well as his 40th anniversary at CWI. The program features internationally renowned speakers, that represent different visions on understanding software. Understanding how to build better software is as important as understanding how existing software can be maintained and improved. The lectures are accessible for software engineering practitioners, software engineering students, business practitioners and academic researchers alike."

My years in Amsterdam (1999-2004), at CWI and VU, in the research groups of Paul Klint and Chris Verhoef have profoundly shaped me as a scientist and a software engineer. After all these years, I feel very much honored to deliver a lecture at Paul Klint's distinguished anniversary.

Details of my talk follow below.

Regards,
Ralf


Title: Understanding Technological Spaces

Abstract: Comprehensive understanding of software necessitates understanding of technological spaces, i.e., community and technology contexts as they include specific software languages, software technologies, software development methods, related knowledge resources, community venues and fora. In this lecture, I will motivate and demonstrate the emerging community project 101companies as means of gathering and organizing knowledge about technological spaces for the broad benefit of software engineers, software scientists, educators, and learners. Further, I will discuss some methods of knowledge acquisition and representation, e.g., megamodeling, API analysis, and language-usage analysis.

Acknowledgment: 101companies is a community project which I am happy to represent in this talk. I am grateful for broader collaboration with (in alphabetical order) Coen De Roover, Jean-Marie Favre, Ekaterina Pek, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich.

Bio of the speaker: See here.

Related links:

The 101companies Project:
http://101companies.org/

An introduction to the project:
http://softlang.uni-koblenz.de/101companies/inauguration/

A related megamodeling effort:
http://softlang.uni-koblenz.de/mega/

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