Designing Reusable Systems that Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems : Revisiting Object-Oriented Principles

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure and 1 table. Accepted by the 9th Int Conf on the Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE'14). Lisbon, Portugal. April 201

A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

Pattern Reification as the Basis for Description-Driven Systems

One of the main factors driving object-oriented software development for information systems is the requirement for systems to be tolerant to change. To address this issue in designing systems, this paper proposes a pattern-based, object-oriented, description-driven system (DDS) architecture as an extension to the standard UML four-layer meta-model. A DDS architecture is proposed in which aspects of both static and dynamic systems behavior can be captured via descriptive models and meta-models. The proposed architecture embodies four main elements - firstly, the adoption of a multi-layered meta-modeling architecture and reflective meta-level architecture, secondly the identification of four data modeling relationships that can be made explicit such that they can be modified dynamically, thirdly the identification of five design patterns which have emerged from practice and have proved essential in providing reusable building blocks for data management, and fourthly the encoding of the structural properties of the five design patterns by means of one fundamental pattern, the Graph pattern. A practical example of this philosophy, the CRISTAL project, is used to demonstrate the use of description-driven data objects to handle system evolution.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure

Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems

Providing an appropriate level of accessibility and traceability to data or process elements (so-called Items) in large volumes of data, often Cloud-resident, is an essential requirement in the Big Data era. Enterprise-wide data systems need to be designed from the outset to support usage of such Items across the spectrum of business use rather than from any specific application view. The design philosophy advocated in this paper is to drive the design process using a so-called description-driven approach which enriches models with meta-data and description and focuses the design process on Item re-use, thereby promoting traceability. Details are given of the description-driven design of big data systems at CERN, in health informatics and in business process management. Evidence is presented that the approach leads to design simplicity and consequent ease of management thanks to loose typing and the adoption of a unified approach to Item management and usage.Comment: 10 pages; 6 figures in Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT-BDCS 2015), Singapore July 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5764, arXiv:1402.575

Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management

Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However, much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of extreme-scale science is notable by its absence. To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions

Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases

Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic classification of the natural language query is made

BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

Prospective Enhancement of Urban Planning Methodology Based on OO Modeling and Rational Unified Process

Objective of paper is to try to define preliminary release for new urban planning methodology24 based on strong positive knowledge and practice of Object Oriented Methodologies, particular Unified Process and Model Driven Architecture widely used in IT industry. This should be in the same time starting step for the whole process of establishing this methodology which we consider as extremely complex, extensive and long-lasting as it is described later. One of the most important and effective characteristics of Unified Process is its iterative approach resulting in incremental advancement towards targeted goals opposite to the more traditional “waterfall” approach. We suggest the same method for urban planning methodology definition process previously mentioned. Actually, this method suggests to start with simple and small models and methodology elements25, which may not look useful at the start, and iterative improve it to the complex, strong and valuable methodology at the end. This is the way how modern IT methodology and modeling techniques are built to this level of complexity and expressiveness. Recommended method is especially important for urban planning methodology establishment process as complex and multidisciplinary research of application of formal methods, modeling methods, and theory for the solution of spatial problems including building environment, spatial city or regional structure. Planning theory and practice currently use several different methodologies or planning techniques but most of them are typically partial, verbal and informal, restricted to the local ambient, non-automated and thus especially difficult to be established within the IT. There is reasonable advancement in the different categories like GIS, Planning Support Systems, Decision Support System, Sketch Design, Modeling and automata theory. GIS, as the most mature one, is still not solution for all and whole problem of urban planning as it is explained in the literature (L8, L18). Planning and Decision support systems are still more in the academic and discussion phase than in actual implementation and use (L11, L13). Automata theory is exceptionally good and already widely used but has very limited implementation covering only narrow problem domain subset (L1, L10). Sketch Design and Modeling are not developed to the useful level despite theirs recent resurrection (L5, L6, L16, L17). Situation within the IT industry is opposite and we may find emerging standards for Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing and Deployment of computer based systems which are successfully applied in many vertical industries. Results are improved controllability, quality, efficiency and accuracy of solutions, active participation of all participants, knowledge accumulation, knowledge transfer and at the end complete industry improvement. Papers propose multidisciplinary research focused on development, advancement and application of formal computer based modeling methodologies for better understanding and improvement of urban systems. Result of this research is not new programming or software tool, ready to solve all possible problems encountered to the planners in everyday work, but it is formal and standardized planning methodology. This methodology may be later used for software tool production as it was the case in the IT industry. For this we suggest as starting point OO Modeling (L7, L16), Unified Process (L12) and Unified Modeling Language (L4, L14). It is obvious that linear and direct application of Unified Process, to the urban systems, is not appropriate therefore localization to the urban domain should occur. Once again we strongly want to recommend iterative and incremental approach to the whole process and therefore we may consider this as a process of establishment of formal planning methodology26. Proposed Establishment Process is extremely difficult and complex therefore all participants should take active role. Moreover, it certainly requires a strong and widely supported strategic decision within the urban industry before it even starts. Without this support the whole research is destined to fail since it can not be established properly and will not be used and further developed. We will emphasize existence of two targeted directions of proposed research. The First considers mutation and application of Unified Process methodology and UML to the urban planning and urban systems domain and the second targets further enhancement of urban planning knowledge and techniques as the result of applied formal methodology. The First direction will question and improve Unified Process and UML completeness and universality through its further enrichment, by adding and generalize domain specific particularities. The Second direction aims to establish new planning methodology as solution for emerging problems found in contemporary urban systems

Event notification services: analysis and transformation of profile definition languages

The integration of event information from diverse event notification sources is, as with meta-searching over heterogeneous search engines, a challenging task. Due to the complexity of profile definition languages, known solutions for heterogeneous searching cannot be applied for event notification. In this technical report, we propose transformation rules for profile rewriting. We transform each profile defined at a meta-service into a profile expressed in the language of each event notification source. Due to unavoidable asymmetry in the semantics of different languages, some superfluous information may be delivered to the meta-service. These notifications are then post-processed to reduce the number of spurious messages. We present a survey and classification of profile definition languages for event notification, which serves as basis for the transformation rules. The proposed rules are implemented in a prototype transformation module for a Meta-Service for event notification

Distributed interoperable workflow support for electronic commerce.

Abstract. This paper describes a flexible distributed transactional workflow environment based on an extensible object-oriented framework built around class libraries, application programming interfaces, and shared services. The purpose of this environment is to support a range of EC-like business activities including the support of financial transactions and electronic contracts. This environment has as its aim to provide key infrastructure services for mediating and monitoring electronic commerce.