Scientific databases (ScDBs) are used to archive and retrieve data describing objects of scientific inquiry. Since these ScDBs must provide continuous and efficient access to large communities of scientists, they are often developed with reliable commercial relational database management systems (DBMSs) or file systems. However, relational DBMSs and flat files do not provide constructs for repr...

In this paper we describe techniques that we have found helpful for adding unit tests to existing code that has been written without tests. The paper presents some common coding practices that make unit tests hard to retrofit, and why. For each practice we suggest minimal refactorings to open up the code for testing.

In this work we analyse the suitability of using object-oriented features in high integrity systems, and the interest of redesigning a system implementation to include these constructs. The analysis was based on retrofitting object-oriented programming into the pre-object oriented design of the OBOSS software package. The evaluation of the impact was measured in a number of ways. The implicatio...

Methods for retrofitting representations learned from distributional data to the structure of a knowledge graph typically assume that entities are embedded in a connected space and that relations imply similarity. However, knowledge graphs containing diverse entities and relations often do not accord with these assumptions. To overcome these limitations, we present a framework that generalizes ...

Retrofitting works are immensely essential for deteriorated and damaged structures in Engineering and Medical fields, in order to keep, or return to, the originality for safe guarding the structures and consumers. In this paper, different types of methods of retrofitting review notes are given based on the experimental, numerical and analytical methods results on strengthening the Reinforced ce...

The aim of this study was to determine the potential benefits of retrofitting a seat belt reminder device to passenger vehicles in the Australian fleet. The analysis was restricted to vehicles up to ten years of age at the time of retrofitting which were assumed to have at least a driver airbag fitted. While seat belt wearing rates have been observed at around 95% in the front seat, non–wearing...

The Semantic Web promises much for software developers, but because its claimed benefits are rather abstract, there is little obvious incentive to master its unfamiliar technology. In contrast, many ‘Social Web’ applications seem rather trivial, and not obviously useful for astronomy. The SKUA project (Semantic Knowledge Underpinning Astronomy) is implementing a service which will realise the b...

Reverse engineering has many important applications in computer security, one of which is retrofitting software for safety and security hardening when source code is not available. By surveying available commercial and academic reverse engineering tools, we surprisingly found that no existing tool is able to disassemble executable binaries into assembly code that can be correctly assembled back...

This paper presents a study on determining the degree of effectiveness of earthquake risk mitigation measures and how to prioritize such efforts in developing countries. In this paper a model is proposed for optimizing funds allocation towards risk reduction measures (building retrofitting) and reconstruction process after potential earthquakes in a regional level. The proposed model seeks opti...