Titulo Estágio
SDiC – Personal Layer
Área Tecnológica
Inteligência Artificial
Local do Estágio
LIA 2 - DEI
Enquadramento
The thesis will be developed in the context of the SDiC (Software Development in Context) research project, developed at the Knowledge and Intelligent Systems laboratory of the Cognitive and Multimedia Systems group of CISUC (http://sdic.dei.uc.pt). The main objective of the project is the development of context-based information retrieval algorithms for software development.
The term context has an intuitive meaning for humans, but due to this intuitive connotation it remains vague and generalist. Furthermore, the interest in the many roles of context comes from different fields such as literature, philosophy, linguistics and computer science, with each field proposing its own view of context. As a general definition, context typically refers to the set of circumstances and facts that surround the center of interest, providing additional information and increasing understanding.
In software development, the context of a developer can be viewed as a rich and complex network of elements across different dimensions that are not limited to the work developed on an IDE. Due to the difficulty on approaching such challenge, there is not a unique notion of what it really covers and how it can be truly exploited. With the increasing dimension of software development projects, the work of developers has grown and became more complex, with an increasing number of concepts and technologies involved. During their work, software developers need to cope with a large amount of contextual information that is typically not captured and processed in order to enrich their work environment.
Our aim is to explore the use of context to improve information retrieval in software development, through the various dimensions that exist in the work environment of the developer and from different perspectives. We propose that these dimensions can be represented as a layered model comprising a personal, a project, an organization and a community layer. The contextual information will be used to improve information retrieval in these different dimensions, through search, recommendation and browsing.
We are developing a prototype, in the form of a plugin for the Eclipse IDE, which will be used as proof of concept and testing platform for the algorithms developed. The prototype will evolve as the project progresses through its various dimensions and perspectives. Currently, the plugin provides context-based search and recommendation of source code artifacts in the workspace of the developer.
Objetivo
The objective of this thesis is the improvement and expansion of current prototype, exploring new ways of using the context of the developer to improve search, recommendation and browsing of information. Especially, we want to help developers find relevant information easier, faster and more intelligently, using their context to filter, elicit and rank the information that is more important as they focus of attention changes. The approach developed should be integrated into the existing prototype, extending the functionalities already developed.
The candidate will elaborate a state of the art study on the topics and technologies covered by this thesis. After this initial phase, the candidate will implement a prototype using the most appropriate approaches. The work concludes with the prototype experimentation and thesis writing.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
- State of the Art [Set – Nov]
- Information Retrieval
- Semantic Web Technologies
- Related Work
- Analysis and Specification [Dec]
- Definition of System Requirements
- Use Case Definition
- Design and Specification
- Thesis Proposal Writing [Dec – Feb]
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
- Prototype Development [Mar – Jun]
- Prototype Experimentation [Jun – Jul]
- Funtional Tests
- Quality Tests
- Performance Tests
- Thesis Writing [Jun – Jul]
Condições
The research work will take place in the Knowledge and Intelligent Systems laboratory of the Cognitive and Multimedia Systems group of CISUC.
Orientador
Paulo Gomes, Bruno Antunes
pgomes@dei.uc.pt 📩