BCS (Body Condition Score) is a method to estimate body fat reserves and accumulated energy balance of cows, placing estimations (or BCS values) in a scale of 1 to 5. Periodically rating BCS of dairy cows is very important since BCS values are associated with milk production, reproduction, and health of cows. However, in practice, obtaining BCS values is a time-consuming and subjective task performed visually by expert scorers. There have been several efforts to automate BCS of dairy cows by using image analysis and machine learning techniques. In a previous work, an automatic system to estimate BCS values was proposed, which is based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In this paper we significantly extend the techniques exploited by that system via using transfer learning and ensemble modeling techniques to further improve BCS estimation accuracy. The improved system has achieved good estimations results in comparison with the base system. Overall accuracy of BCS estimations within 0.25 units of difference from true values has increased 4% (up to 82%), while overall accuracy within 0.50 units has increased 3% (up to 97%).

Although Web service technologies promote reuse, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents that are supposed to describe the API that services offer often fail to do so properly. Therefore, finding services, understanding what they do, and reusing them are challenging tasks. The authors describe the most common errors they've found in real WSDL documents, explain how these errors impact service discovery, and present some guidelines for revising them.

SUMMARY: The service‐oriented computing (SOC) paradigm has recently gained a lot of attention in the software industry because SOC represents a novel and a fresh way of architecting distributed applications. SOC is usually materialized via web services, which allows developers to structure applications exposing a clear, public interface to their capabilities. Although conceptually and technologically mature, SOC still lacks adequate development support from a methodological point of view. In this paper, we present the EasySOC project, a set of guidelines to simplify the development of service‐oriented applications and services. EasySOC is a synthesized catalog of best SOC development practices that arise as a result of several years of research in fundamental Services Computing topics, that is, Web Service Description Language‐based technical specification, Web Service discovery, and Web Service outsourcing. In addition, we describe a materialization of the guidelines for the Java language, which has been implemented as a plug‐in for the Eclipse IDE. We believe that both the practical nature of the guidelines and the availability of this software that enforces them may help software practitioners to rapidly exploit our ideas for building real SOC applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.