Computer-Aided Warehouse Engineering (CAWE): Leveraging MDA and ADM for the Development of Data Warehouses

During the last decade, data warehousing has reached a high maturity and is a well-accepted technology in decision support systems. Nevertheless, development and maintenance are still tedious tasks since the systems grow over time and complex architectures have been established. The paper at hand adopts the concepts of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) taken from the software engineering discipline to the data warehousing discipline. We show the works already available, outline further research directions and give hints for implementation of Computer-Aided Warehouse Engineering systems

Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Designing secure data warehouses by using MDA and QVT

The Data Warehouse (DW) design is based on multidimensional (MD) modeling which structures information into facts and dimensions. Due to the confidentiality of the data that it stores, it is crucial to specify security and audit measures from the early stages of design and to enforce them throughout the lifecycle. Moreover, the standard framework for software development, Model Driven Architecture (MDA), allows us to define transformations between models by proposing Query/View/Transformations (QVT). This proposal permits the definition of formal, elegant and unequivocal transformations between Platform Independent Models (PIM) and Platform Specific Models (PSM). This paper introduces a new framework for the design of secure DWs based on MDA and QVT, which covers all the design phases (conceptual, logical and physical) and specifies security measures in all of them. We first define two metamodels with which to represent security and audit measures at the conceptual and logical levels. We then go on to define a transformation between these models through which to obtain the traceability of the security rules from the early stages of development to the final implementation. Finally, in order to show the benefits of our proposal, it is applied to a case study.This work has been partially supported by the METASIGN project (TIN2004-00779) from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, of the Regional Government of Valencia, and by the QUASIMODO and MISTICO projects of the Regional Science and Technology Ministry of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)

Migrating Traditional Web Applications to CMS-based Web Applications

AbstractIn recent years, Content Management Systems (CMS) have proven to be the best platforms for maintaining the large amount of digital content managed by Web applications. Thus, many organizations have experienced the necessity to base its Web applications on these CMS platforms. To do this, they start a migration process which is complex and error prone. To support this process, we propose a method based on the principles of Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) which automates the migration of Web applications to CMS-based Web applications. This article focuses on the implementation of two artifacts of this method: 1) the DSL ASTM_PHP, a modeling language for defining a model from PHP code (ASTM_PHP model) and 2) the model-to-model transformation rules which generate automatically a KDM model from a ASTM_PHP model. To show the feasibility of this implementation, we use a case study based on a widget implemented in PHP which lists the online users of a Web application

Cloud BI: A Multi-party Authentication Framework for Securing Business Intelligence on the Cloud

Business intelligence (BI) has emerged as a key technology to be hosted on Cloud computing. BI offers a method to analyse data thereby enabling informed decision making to improve business performance and profitability. However, within the shared domains of Cloud computing, BI is exposed to increased security and privacy threats because an unauthorised user may be able to gain access to highly sensitive, consolidated business information. The business process contains collaborating services and users from multiple Cloud systems in different security realms which need to be engaged dynamically at runtime. If the heterogamous Cloud systems located in different security realms do not have direct authentication relationships then it is technically difficult to enable a secure collaboration. In order to address these security challenges, a new authentication framework is required to establish certain trust relationships among these BI service instances and users by distributing a common session secret to all participants of a session. The author addresses this challenge by designing and implementing a multiparty authentication framework for dynamic secure interactions when members of different security realms want to access services. The framework takes advantage of the trust relationship between session members in different security realms to enable a user to obtain security credentials to access Cloud resources in a remote realm. This mechanism can help Cloud session users authenticate their session membership to improve the authentication processes within multi-party sessions. The correctness of the proposed framework has been verified by using BAN Logics. The performance and the overhead have been evaluated via simulation in a dynamic environment. A prototype authentication system has been designed, implemented and tested based on the proposed framework. The research concludes that the proposed framework and its supporting protocols are an effective functional basis for practical implementation testing, as it achieves good scalability and imposes only minimal performance overhead which is comparable with other state-of-art methods

A Model-Driven Architecture based Evolution Method and Its Application in An Electronic Learning System

Software products have been racing against aging problem for most of their lifecycles, and evolution is the most effective and efficient solution to this problem. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a new technique for software product for evolving development and reengineering methods. The main steps for MDA are to establish models in different levels and phases, therefore to solve the challenges of requirement and technology change. However, there is only a standard established by Object Management Group (OMG) but without a formal method and approach. Presently, MDA is widely researched in both industrial and research areas, however, there is still without a smooth approach to realise it especially in electronic learning (e-learning) system due to the following reasons: (1) models’ transformations are hard to realise because of lack of tools, (2) most of existing mature research results are working for business and government services but not education area, and (3) most of existing model-driven researches are based on Model-Driven Development (MDD) but not MDA because of OMG standard’s preciseness. Hence, it is worth to investigate an MDA-based method and approach to improve the existing software development approach for e-learning system. Due to the features of MDA actuality, a MDA-based evolution method and approach is proposed in this thesis. The fundamental theories of this research are OMG’s MDA standard and education pedagogical knowledge. Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Unified Modelling Language Profile are hired to represent the information of software system from different aspects. This study can be divided into three main parts: MDA-based evolution method and approach research, Platform-Independent Model (PIM) to Platform-Specific Model (PSM) transformation development, and MDA-based electronic learning system evolution. Top-down approach is explored to develop models for e-learning system. A transformation approach is developed to generate Computation Independent Model (CIM), Platform-Independent Model (PIM), and Platform-Specific Model (PSM); while a set of transformation rules are defined following MDA standard to support PSM’ s generation. In addition, proposed method is applied in an e-learning system as a case study with the prototype rules support. In the end, conclusions are drawn based on analysis and further research directions are discussed as well. The kernel contributions are the proposed transformation rules and its application in electronic learning system

Nudging lifestyles for better health outcomes: crowdsourced data and persuasive technologies for behavioural change

For at least three decades, a Tsunami of preventable poor health has continued to threaten the future prosperity of our nations. Despite its effective destructive power, our collective predictive and preventive capacity remains remarkably under-developed This Tsunami is almost entirely mediated through the passive and unintended consequences of modernisation. The malignant spread of obesity in genetically stable populations dictates that gene disposition is not a significant contributor as populations, crowds or cohorts are all incapable of experiencing a new shipment of genes in only 2-3 decades. The authors elaborate on why a supply-side approach: advancing health care delivery cannot be expected to impact health outcomes effectively. Better care sets the stage for more care yet remains largely impotent in returning individuals to disease-free states. The authors urge an expedited paradigmatic shift in policy selection criterion towards using data intensive crowd-based evidence integrating insights from system thinking, networks and nudging. Collectively these will support emerging potentialities of ICT used in proactive policy modelling. Against this background the authors proposes a solution that stated in a most compact form consists of: the provision of mundane yet high yield data through light instrumentation of crowds enabling participative sensing, real time living epidemiology separating the per unit co-occurrences which are health promoting from those which are not, nudging through persuasive technologies, serious gaming to sustain individual health behaviour change and intuitive visualisation with reliable simulation to evaluate and direct public health investments and policies in evidence-based waysJRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

UX Requirements Engineering in Network Management Software Development: Case study in Finland

UX development for enterprise software is often challenging and in complex business environments like telecommunication industry the challenge level is extreme. Complex products such as network management systems are used by engineers in network operations centers to manage vast and complex radio access networks. As these networks are part of critical infra-structure for many nations, the communication between vendors and customers is often bureaucratic, and the software development process is handled by a complex organization the UX research and development must adapt to the challenge level. This thesis is a case study of a major telecommunications equipment vendor which is struggling with the mentioned challenge. UX research and development has traditionally focused on much simpler products and problems so there are not any working examples to refer to. Modern agile software development has proven to be so hasty that there is not enough time for UX research and development. This has resulted in poor feedback and a delayed product schedule. It is important to know how users experience the use of a network management system in different times and situations and which experiences turn their motivation from wanting to use the system to wanting to use some other system instead. Learning to do this in such a challenging environment could be a contribution to the scientific community as well because the most challenging cases can discover new areas of research that can provide knowledge for the good of everyone. The first question was to find out how a UX requirement could be defined and formulated so that everyone could understand and test that the case product follows the UX vision. The second thing to find out was if experts in the R&D organization could be able to relate to the users and be able to discover the experiences that are crucial for the success of the product. And third was to find out if a separate team could improve the product by experimenting with prototypes before new features are taken into implementation. The research method was a semi structured interview for convenient sample of R&D experts and a qualitative analysis of the answers. The result was that UX requirements are complex, dependent on UX strategy, and their exact formulation needs more research and experimentation. It turned out that R&D experts have an opportunity to discover some experiences but not all, and the discovery relies on raising the UX maturity of the organization and introduction of researchers, resources, and creative freedom for the task. The experimentation ahead of implementation appears to involve many caveats but will most probably improve the design dramatically if prerequisites are met

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers