Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Improving Requirements Specification in WebREd-Tool by Using a NFR's Classification

In Software Engineering (SE), a system has properties that emerge from the combination of its parts, these emergent properties will surely be a matter of system failure if the Non-Fuctional Requirements (NFRs), or system qualities, are not specified in advance. In Web Engineering (WE) field occurs very similar, but with some other issues related to special characteristics of the Web applications such as the navigation (with the application of the security). In this paper, we improve our Model-Driven tool, named WebREd-Tool, extending the requirements metamodel with a NFRs classification, the main idea is to help the Web application designer with the NFRs specification to make better design decisions and also to be used to validate the quality of the final Web application