KOSEN 한인과학기술자네트워크

Welcome to OMiLAB Korea!

This is the first collaboratory of OMiLAB, established on 2 Nov 2015 at Chonbuk National Unviersity in Republic of Korea. It was the first outcome of collaboration between Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis, The University of Vienna, and Prof. Moonkun Lee, Chonbuk National University since 2013. Further the lab became the bridge for MOU between the faculty of Computer Science, The University of Vienna, and The School of Engineering, Chonbuk National University.

The main goal of the laboratory is to initiate the Open Model Community in Korea, as well as, to expend the community to East and South Asia. Originally the Open Model is a movement of collective "open" intelligence from the Knowledge Engineering Group in The University of Vienna, as José Palazzo M. de Oliveira defined with goals as follows:

"Open models is the idea that certain models should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control."

"The goals of the open models movement are similar to those of other open movements such as open source, open hardware, open content, open data, open science, and open access."

OMiLAB Korea will follow the notion and goals of the Open Models to realize the openness of the knowledge of mankind.

This will be the the first step for the OMiLAB movement in Korea as well as East and South Asia.

2 Nov 2015

Prof. Moonkun Lee

The Head of the OMiLAB Korea Research Center 

ADOxx: My Lifesaver! 

Life can be fairly unfair in one perspective, or unfairly fair in another perspective.

One experience in his/her life may change his/her entire life. It may be true in the academic life, too.

I was using DECDesign for modelling the visual representation of SRE(Software Re/reverse-engineering Environment) at Penn and CCCC, USA, for 5 years, from 1992 to 1996. DECDesign was a remarkable meta-CASE tool to develop a CASE tool for software engineering. During this period, I and my colleagues developed the SRE tool for SW re/reverse engineering of numerous complex systems. Especially we processed millions lines of classified US Navy's mission-critical SW and OS for re- and reverse-engineering. Unfortunately, at the beginning of 1996, DEC gave up DECDesign due to the downsizing of research teams caused by their financial problems. 

If I recall, DECDesign had been developed by DEC over 10 years, investing billions of dollars with more than 50 PhD computer scientists and programmers. The investment might be roughly more than 10 million dollars per year. It might have cost DEC more than 100 millions dollars overall in total. At that time, DEC was about to release the first commercial version of DECDesign. The future of DECDesign looked very promising since there were more than 3000 customers using just the beta version of it. The customers would have paid tens of thousands dollars to purchase the commercial version. And the yearly license fee would be thousands of dollars. Once it had been released and commercialized, all investment would have been rewarded in several years, depending on marketing strategy. I couldn't understand the decision of DEC on DECDesign at that time. Later I heard that DECDesign had been sold to Teamwork. And Teamwork never released DECDesign, but, interestingly, just abolished it. This could be a basic strategy how big IT companies dealt with their competitors.

After I came to the university in Korea, I tries to establish the similar platform for SRE and its related research and works. But there was no meta-CASE tool that satisfied the requirements of SRE and its related. For example, Meta-Dome or Dome and other tools did not have the full features of meta-CASE like DECDesign to develop SRE. And their description languages were not as efficient as that of DECDesign, that is, MIF (Methodology Implementation Facility). It implied that I had to develop SRE by not using any meta-CASE tool at all. It was hard and took too much time for me to develop each component of SRE. For example, it took couple years just to develop a visual editor for SRE. And there was no consistency of such works due to the lack of both commitment by the long-term graduate students and the technical and financial supports. 

For example, Jinho, the best programmer in our lab, spent 3~4 years just to develop the prototype of SAVE for specification and pre-analysis of his Onion. One of the main causes for such a long period of the development was the difficulty of developing the visual editors and tool for each phase of the SAVE processes just by using Java and its components. I was about to quit my research and works. I was about to go back to the normal life before doing nothing but thinking. Only thing that I could do was just to formalize the approaches for SAVE and SRE. But it was not good enough for me. I was eager for something like DECDesign.

Fortunately, in 2013, ADOxx came to me with Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis. I met him at COMPSAC in Kyoto. We had the same session and he made a presentation on ADOxx. He introduced ADOxx as a meta-modeling tool. I understood it as a kind of a meta-CASE tool, similar to DECDesign. He sent me papers and offered a free training in his OMiLab at the University of Vienna.Fortunately I had a quick learner, Yeongbok, and the fund from the SSRC ITRC. I and Yeongbok flied to Vienna in November of 2013 for the training. After training and investigation, I concluded that I could use ADOxx like DECDesign to develop the full version of SAVE as well as SRE. Now I am sure that I can transform all the works of SRE and the components of the Java-based SAVE into the SAVE on ADOxx. I think I can translate and update all the works that I have done in the university so far into the SAVE just in two years. This is the power of the ADOxx meta-modeling platform, just like the DECDesign meta-CASE tool.

Now I can be alive, just as in 20 years ago at both Penn and CCCC!

I truly thank to Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis for this opportunity. I truly thank to my graduate students, Yeongbok, Woorim, Sunghyun and Junsup, for working together to develop SAVE on ADOxx. I guarantee that they will the best experts about ADOxx in Korea and East Asia. I truly thank to Prof. Jinyoung Choi for the initial fund from the SSRC ITRC to participate the training and the school.

One day, I would be able to pay them with the SAVE and other tools on ADOxx in openness for their contributions.

(9 April 2015)