Narrow Results

To manage the development of cooperative information systems that support the dynamics and mobility of modern businesses, separation of concern mechanisms and abstractions are needed. Model driven development (MDD) approaches utilize abstraction and transformation to handle complexity. In MDD, specifying transformations between models at various levels of abstraction can be a complex task. Specifying transformations for pervasive system services that are tangled with other system services is particularly difficult because the elements to be transformed are distributed across a model. This paper presents an aspect oriented model driven framework (AOMDF) that facilitates separation of pervasive services and supports their transformation across different levels of abstraction. The framework facilitates composition of pervasive services with enterprise services at various levels of abstraction. The framework is illustrated using an example in which a platform independent model of a banking service is transformed to a platform specific model.

Semantic Web evolution brought a new vision into agent research. The interpretation of this second generation web will be realized by autonomous computational entities, called agents, to handle the semantic content on behalf of their human users. Surely, Semantic Web environment has specific architectural entities and a different semantic which must be considered to model a Multi-agent System (MAS) within this environment. Hence, in this study, we introduce a MAS development process which supports the Semantic Web environment. Our approach is based on Model Driven Development (MDD) which aims to change the focus of software development from code to models. We first define an architecture for Semantic Web enabled MASs and then provide a MAS metamodel which consists of the first class meta-entities derived from this architecture. We also define a model transformation process for MDD of such MASs. We present a complete transformation process in which the source and the target metamodels, entity mappings between models and the implementation of the transformation for two different real MAS frameworks by using a well-known model transformation language are all included. In addition to the model-to-model transformation, the implementation of the model-to-code transformation is given as the last step of the system development process. The evaluation of the proposed development process by considering its use within the scope of a real commercial software project is also discussed.

In recent years, the automation of business processes has become one of the most prominent and promising uses of Web service technology. Consequently several languages have been created for the execution of business processes, making it possible to define new and more complex services or business processes which are implemented for example by means of Web service composition. Nevertheless, these kinds of languages are not suitable for use in the early stages of the development process of information systems. Special methodologies or techniques are therefore necessary to allow systems analysts to understand services from a business point of view, while facilitating the design and development of Web service composition. In this paper, we present a service-oriented approach to information system development that starts by identifying, through business modeling, the services required by the customers of a business, to make it possible to create a Web service composition model. This model will facilitate the transformation to specific languages for business process execution, thereby reducing the development efforts made in service-oriented applications. The method proposed is illustrated by means of a Web application for the management of medical images, which we have taken as a case study.

Concept location is a key activity during software modernization since it allows maintainers to exactly determine what pieces of source code support a specific concept. Real-world business processes and information systems providing operational IT support for respective processes can be misaligned as a consequence of uncontrolled maintenance over time. When concepts supported by an information system are getting outdated or misaligned, concept location becomes a time-consuming and error-prone task. Moreover, enterprise information systems (which implement business processes) embed significant business knowledge over time that is neither present nor documented anywhere else. To support the evolution of existing information systems, the embedded knowledge must first be retrieved and depicted in up-to-date business process models and then be mapped to the source code. This paper addresses this issue through a concept location approach that considers business activities as the key concept to be located and discovers different partial business process views for each piece of source code. Thus, the concept location problem becomes the problem of extracting such views. This approach follows model-driven development principles and an automatic model transformation is implemented to facilitate its adoption. Moreover, a case study involving two real-life information system demonstrates its feasibility.