Abstract
Use case driven development methodologies put use cases at the center of the software development process. However, in order to support automated development and analysis, use cases need to be appropriately formalized. This will also help guarantee consistency between requirements specifications and developed solutions. Formal methods tend to suffer from take up issues, as they are usually hard to accept by industry. In this context, it is relevant not only to produce languages and approaches to support formalization, but also to perform their validation. In previous works we have developed an approach to formalize use cases resorting to ontologies. In this paper we present the validation of one such approach. Through a three stage study, we evaluate the acceptance of the language and supporting tool. The first stage focusses on the acceptance of the process and language, the second on the support the tool provides to the process, and finally the third one on the tool's usability aspects. Results show test subjects found the approach feasible and useful and the tool easy to use.

Abstract
Universities seek to promote entrepreneurship through effective education approaches, which need to be in permanent evolution. Nevertheless, the literature in entrepreneurship education lacks empirical evidence. This article discusses relevant issues related to promoting entrepreneurship in the software field, based on the experience of a 15-European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System course. This course seeks to instil in the students the recognition of the need to reconcile technical and business visions, organisational and commercial aspects, most of which have never been addressed previously. A series of semi-structured interviews made it possible to obtain relevant insights about the teaching-learning process underlying this course and its evolution over a seven-year period. Materials related with this course have been analysed, namely guidelines produced by the teachers and deliverables produced by the students. This article discusses the dimensions that were identified as fundamental for promoting entrepreneurship skills in the field of software, namely teamwork, project engagement, and contact with the market.

Abstract
Use case specifications have successfully been used for requirements description. They allow joining, in the same modeling space, the expectations of the stakeholders as well as the needs of the software engineer and analyst involved in the process. While use cases are not meant to describe a system's implementation, by formalizing their description we are able to extract implementation relevant information from them. More specifically, we are interested in identifying requirements patterns (common requirements with typical implementation solutions) in support for a requirements based software development approach. In the paper we propose the transformation of Use Case descriptions expressed in a Controlled Natural Language into an ontology expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL's query engines can then be used to identify requirements patterns expressed as queries over the ontology. We describe a tool that we have developed to support the approach and provide an example of usage. © 2014 R. Couto, A.N. Ribeiro & J.C. Campos.

Abstract
Digital public displays can have a key role in urban ubiquitous computing infrastructures, but they have not yet managed to fill this role. A key step in that direction would be the emergence of an application model for open display networks that would enable anyone to create applications for display infrastructures. In this work, we study the development of web-based applications for public displays. We report on our experience of application development for real world public deployment and also on an experiment with external web developers to assess their ability to create such applications using our own development tools. The results show that the web-based app model can effectively be used in the context of public displays and that web developers are able to leverage upon their expertise to create this type of applications. © Springer International Publishing 2013.

Abstract
Design patterns provide a means to reuse proven solutions during development, but also to identify good practices during analysis. These are particularly relevant in complex and critical software, such as is the case of ubiquitous and pervasive systems. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) presents a solution for this problem, with the usage of high level models. As part of an effort to develop approaches to the migration of applications to mobile contexts, this paper reports on a tool that identifies design patterns in source code. Code is transformed into both platform specific and independent models, and from these design patterns are inferred. MapIt, the tool which implements these functionalities is described. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
Today E-Government institutions face a lot of challenges related to the quality and effectiveness of the services they provide. In most cases, their users are more demanding, imposing new ways of acting and dealing with their needs, requesting often expeditious and effective attendance. Independently for their nature, we believe that such pertinent characteristics begin to be sustained immediately as we start to study and model E-Government processes. Modeling and simulation are useful tools on the assurance of the availability of E-Government services in many aspects, contributing significantly to improve processes implementation, ranging from their inception to their final software application roll-up and maintenance. In this paper we studied the use of YAWL - a work flowing language - for modeling E-Government processes, showing through a real world application case how it can help us in the construction of effective models that may be used as a basis for understanding and building the correspondent software applications. Copyright 2014 ACM.