Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032

The role of the service concept in model-driven applications development

This paper identifies two paradigms that have influenced the design of distributed applications: the middleware-centred and the protocol-centred paradigm, and proposes a combined use of these two paradigms. This combined use incorporates major benefits from both paradigms: the ability to reuse middleware infrastructures and the ability to treat distributed coordination aspects as a separate object of design through the use of the service concept. A careful consideration of the service concept, and its recursive application, allows us to define an appropriate and precise notion of platform-independence that suits the needs of model-driven middleware application development

The role of the RM-ODP computational viewpoint concepts in the MDA approach

An MDA design approach should be able to accommodate designs at different levels of platform-independence. We have proposed a design approach previously (in [2]), which allows these levels to be identified. An important feature of this approach is the notion of abstract platform. An abstract platform is determined by the platform characteristics that are relevant for applications at a certain level of platform-independence, and must be established by considering various design goals. In this paper, we define a framework that makes it possible to use RM-ODP concepts in our MDA design approach. This framework allows a recursive application of the computational viewpoint at different levels of platform-independence. This is obtained by equating the RM-ODP notion of infrastructure to our notion of abstract platform

On the Notion of Abstract Platform in MDA Development

Although platform-independence is a central property in MDA models, the study of platform-independence has been largely overlooked in MDA. As a consequence, there is a lack of guidelines to select abstraction criteria and modelling concepts for platform-independent design. In addition, there is little methodological support to distinguish between platform-independent and platform-specific concerns, which could be detrimental to the beneficial exploitation of the PIM-PSM separation-of-concerns adopted by MDA. This work is an attempt towards clarifying the notion of platform-independent modelling in MDA development. We argue that each level of platform-independence must be accompanied by the identification of an abstract platform. An abstract platform is determined by the platform characteristics that are relevant for applications at a certain level of platform-independence, and must be established by balancing various design goals. We present some methodological principles for abstract platform design, which forms a basis for defining requirements for design languages intended to support platform-independent design. Since our methodological framework is based on the notion of abstract platform, we pay particular attention to the definition of abstract platforms and the language requirements to specify abstract platforms. We discuss how the concept of abstract platform relates to UML

Abstract Platform and Transformations for Model-Driven Service-Oriented Development

In this paper, we discuss the use of abstract platforms and transformation for designing applications according to the principles of the service-oriented architecture. We illustrate our approach by discussing the use of the service discovery pattern at a platform-independent design level. We show how a trader service can be specified at a high-level of abstraction and incorporated in an abstract platform for service-oriented development. Designers can then build platform-independent models of applications by composing application parts with this abstract platform. Application parts can use the trader service to publish and discover service offers. We discuss how the abstract platform can be realized into two target platforms, namely Web Services (with UDDI) and CORBA (with the OMG trader)

Content-driven design and architecture of E-learning applications

E-learning applications combine content with learning technology systems to support the creation of content and its delivery to the learner. In the future, we can expect the distinction between learning content and its supporting infrastructure to become blurred. Content objects will interact with infrastructure services as independent objects. Our solution to the development of e-learning applications – content-driven design and architecture – is based on content-centric ontological modelling and development of architectures. Knowledge and modelling will play an important role in the development of content and architectures. Our approach integrates content with interaction (in technical and educational terms) and services (the principle organization for a system architecture), based on techniques from different fields, including software engineering, learning design, and knowledge engineering

Platform-independent Dynamic Reconfiguration of Distributed Applications

The aim of dynamic reconfiguration is to allow a system to evolve incrementally from one configuration to another at run-time, without restarting it or taking it offline. In recent years, support for transparent dynamic reconfiguration has been added to middleware platforms, shifting the complexity required to enable dynamic reconfiguration to the supporting infrastructure. These approaches to dynamic reconfiguration are mostly platform-specific and depend on particular implementation approaches suitable for particular platforms. In this paper, we propose an approach to dynamic reconfiguration of distributed applications that is suitable for application implemented on top of different platforms. This approach supports a platform-independent view of an application that profits from reconfiguration transparency. In this view, requirements on the ability to reconfigure components are expressed in an abstract manner. These requirements are then satisfied by platform-specific realizations