Alignment of Business Models and Software: Using an Architecture-Centric Method to the Case of a Healthcare Information System

The alignment of business issues with technological service-oriented solutions has proven to be a crucial aspect of modern business development. In this regard, the provision of methods to solve the gap between business and technology becomes absolutely necessary. This paper presents a proposal to systematize that leap by defining a development method centred on the concept of Architecture. The use of different architectural models at different levels of abstraction (along with the definition of model transformations between them) allows for the establishment of a trace between the business-level elements and software elements that are derived from them. Key benefits of our proposal are, on the one hand, the provision of a method for business-technology alignment and, on the other hand, the definition of a new model to represent the structure of a business. This proposal has been refined and validated using the case of an information system for the management of paediatric percentiles

An investigation of modelling and design for software service applications

Software services offer the opportunity to use a component-based approach for the design of applications. However, this needs a deeper understanding of how to develop service-based applications in a systematic manner, and of the set of properties that need to be included in the ‘design model’. We have used a realistic application to explore systematically how service-based designs can be created and described. We first identified the key properties of an SOA (service oriented architecture) and then undertook a single-case case study to explore its use in the development of a design for a large-scale application in energy engineering, modelling this with existing notations wherever possible. We evaluated the resulting design model using two walkthroughs with both domain and application experts. We were able to successfully develop a design model around the ten properties identified, and to describe it by adapting existing design notations. A component-based approach to designing such systems does appear to be feasible. However, it needs the assistance of a more integrated set of notations for describing the resulting design model

Web service architecture for scholarly publication

The main objective of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Malaysia is to become the world class university. An academic staff in a university will be assessed according to their performance metrics that consists of based on teaching performance, research performance and supervision performance. It is important for academic staff to publish as much as possible in scholarly publication activities. But, not all researchers are capable to produce scholarly publication within university target. Scholarly publication is a competitive and critical phase for researchers. The aim of this study is to assemble the incorporation of web service concept in term of architecture, development methodology and the reuse of web service itself in term of integrating them with the established information provider company. The use of Service Oriented Modelling and Architecture (SOMA) is viewed as a widely used architecture in industry that focusing on the reusing of services and provides flexibility to use legacy applications. An interview was organized to investigate the scenario and elicit the challenges in achieving the publication target of scholarly publication among academicians. The preliminary results show that identifying a suitable journal to be published on is a tiresome task. Besides, it is intricate to distinguish the journal’s quartile and its impact factor (IF). This scenario affect academician’s performance metrics target for particular year. The web service architecture was extracted from six prior literature reviews of web service based architectures and four services oriented modelling techniques. The proposed web service architecture was integrated with Elsevier Scopus APIs, Elsevier ScienceDirect APIs, SCImago XML web service and Web of Science OpenURL Resolver web service. The research proposed a solution in the form of a prototype, which would serves as web service architecture in monitoring scholarly publication performance. Validation of the usability of prototype is conducted using User Acceptance Testing (UAT) among academicians in Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Actas del Taller de Trabajo Zoco’08 / JISBD Integración de Aplicaciones Web : XIII Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos Gijón, 7 al 10 de Octubre de 2008

Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-0260