A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT MODEL BETWEEN BUSINESS PROCESSES AND ICT’S THROUGH ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURES FOR SME’S

Small and Medium manufacturing companies, as a result of globalization, have serious difficulties to compete in international markets, studies show that has been difficult for these businesses to adopt new methods of work organization, that does become more competitive and productive. In Mexico, SME’s have successfully integrated the administrative processes into information and communication technology; moreover the processes of quality and production have less support by ICT’s. This research project proposes a model of strategic alignment between the key business processes of SME’s and the ICT’s, using enterprise architectures. The proposal was applied to a firm of a pilot sample, finding a complete support of management processes by ICT’s. Partial support for production and quality processes, resulting an improvement proposal for the integration of the essential processes of manufacturing SME’s into ICT’s

STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT MODEL BETWEEN BUSINESS PROCESSES AND ICT’S THROUGH ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURES FOR SME’S

Small and Medium manufacturing companies, as a result of globalization, have serious difficulties to compete in international markets, studies show that has been difficult for these businesses to adopt new methods of work organization, that does become more competitive and productive. In Mexico, SME’s have successfully integrated the administrative processes into information and communication technology; moreover the processes of quality and production have less support by ICT’s. This research project proposes a model of strategic alignment between the key business processes of SME’s and the ICT’s, using enterprise architectures. The proposal was applied to a firm of a pilot sample, finding a complete support of management processes by ICT’s. Partial support for production and quality processes, resulting an improvement proposal for the integration of the essential processes of manufacturing SME’s into ICT’s

OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems

The domains and problems for which it would be desirable to introduce information systems are currently very complex and the software development process is thus of the same complexity. One of these domains is health-care. Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are software development approaches that raise to deal with complexity, to reduce time and cost of development, augmenting flexibility and interoperability. However, many techniques and approaches that have been introduced are of little use when not provided under a formalized and well-documented methodological umbrella. A methodology gives the process a well-defined structure that helps in fast and efficient analysis and design, trouble-free implementation, and finally results in the software product improved quality. While MDD and SOA are gaining their momentum toward the adoption in the software industry, there is one critical issue yet to be addressed before its power is fully realized. It is beyond dispute that requirements engineering (RE) has become a critical task within the software development process. Errors made during this process may have negative effects on subsequent development steps, and on the quality of the resulting software. For this reason, the MDD and SOA development approaches should not only be taken into consideration during design and implementation as usually occurs, but also during the RE process. The contribution of this dissertation aims at improving the development process of health-care applications by proposing OpenUP/MDRE methodology. The main goal of this methodology is to enrich the development process of SOA-based health-care systems by focusing on the requirements engineering processes in the model-driven context. I believe that the integration of those two highly important areas of software engineering, gathered in one consistent process, will provide practitioners with many benets. It is noteworthy that the approach presented here was designed for SOA-based health-care applications, however, it also provides means to adapt it to other architectural paradigms or domains. The OpenUP/MDRE approach is an extension of the lightweight OpenUP methodology for iterative, architecture-oriented and model-driven software development. The motivation for this research comes from the experience I gained as a computer science professional working on the health-care systems. This thesis also presents a comprehensive study about: i) the requirements engineering methods and techniques that are being used in the context of the model-driven development, ii) known generic but flexible and extensible methodologies, as well as approaches for service-oriented systems development, iii) requirements engineering techniques used in the health-care industry. Finally, OpenUP/MDRE was applied to a concrete industrial health-care project in order to show the feasibility and accuracy of this methodological approach.Loniewski, G. (2010). OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11652Archivo delegad

Semantic Bridging between Conceptual Modeling Standards and Agile Software Projects Conceptualizations

Software engineering benefitted from modeling standards (e.g. UML, BPMN), but Agile Software Project Management tends to marginalize most forms of documentation including diagrammatic modeling, focusing instead on the tracking of a project\u27s backlog and related issues. Limited means are available for annotating Jira items with diagrams, however not on a granular and semantically traceable level. Business processes tend to get lost on the way between process analysis (if any) and backlog items; UML design decisions are often disconnected from the issue tracking environment. This paper proposes domain-specific conceptual modeling to obtain a diagrammatic view on a Jira project, motivated by past conceptualizations of the agile paradigm while also offering basic interoperability with Jira to switch between environments and views. The underlying conceptualization extends conceptual modeling languages (BPMN, UML) with an agile project management perspective to enrich contextual traceability of a project\u27s elements while ensuring that data structures handled by Jira can be captured and exposed to Jira if needed. Therefore, concepts underlying the typical software development project management are integrated with established modeling concepts and tailored (with metamodeling means) for the domain-specificity of agile project management. A Design Science approach was pursued to develop a modeling method artifact, resulting in a domain-specific modeling tool for software project managers that want to augment agile practices and enrich issue annotation

Integrated Clinical Pathways: A Model-based Holistic Method

Against the background of increasing multidisciplinarity as well as the focus on quality, transparency and economic efficiency of medical services, clinical pathways (CPs) have been established as a promising tool at the organizational level in recent years. They are primarily intended to ensure an adequate description of the care processes and to manage the balance between best treatment practice and economic viability. CPs standardize the internal care services by explicating the institution-specific knowledge with regard to recommendations for action, service portfolio, organizational structures, infrastructure, etc. of a specific service provider. The development of hospital information systems (HIS) has so far been characterized by an evolutionary development of modules in the field of laboratory, radiology, nursing and picture archiving systems as well as in the area of administrative systems. As one result of this development, the HIS usually comprises a heterogeneous network of software systems of different types and manufacturers. However, the actual control of patients by means of evidence-based processes and integration of CPs into HIS was not addressed until the recent years, when HIS manufacturers started developing modules for CP modeling and workflow support. The objective of this thesis is to provide a holistic methodical support for the description of clinical pathways and their integration into a hospital information system to finally improve the compliance of daily care to standard process definitions. Therefore, conceptual models provide an adequate mean to describe and communicate complex matters in a comprehensible form as well as to configure IT systems due to their semi-formal nature. Hence, a first research thread investigates the question, how clinical pathways can be described adequately using conceptual models. This results in an iterative design of adequate modeling languages for clinical pathways. A second research thread further investigates the question, how conceptual models of clinical pathways can be used to configure process-oriented application systems in health care. This thread therefore describes the design of a model-based method, that enables a consecutive transformation of CPs into technical (workflow) specifications, based on the principles of the Model-Driven Architecture.:A. Synopsis of the Doctoral Dissertation B. Agility in Medical Treatment Processes C. Domain Specific Modeling Language - CPmod D. BPMN4CP - Version 1.0 E. BPMN4CP - Version 2.0 F. BPMN4CP - Version 2.1 G. MDA in Health Care IS Development H. Transforming Clinical Pathways into Care Workflows I. CDA Templates - Utilizing the MediCUB

Recovering Sequence Diagrams from Object-oriented Code

Software modernization is a current research area in the software industry intended to transform an existing software system to a new one satisfying new demands. The initiative Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) helps software developers in tackling reverse engineering, software evolution and, software modernization in general. To support modernization problems, the ADM Task Force has defined a set of metamodels such as KDM (Knowledge Discovery Metamodel), being the Eclipse-MDT MoDisco project the official support for software modernization. We propose the application of ADM principles to provide relevant model-based views on legacy systems. We describe a framework to reverse engineering models from object-oriented code. In this context, we show how to recover UML sequence diagrams from Java code. We validate our approach by using ADM standards and MoDisco platform. Our research can be considered a contribution to the MoDisco community; MoDisco does not support reverse engineering of sequence diagrams and, on the other hand, the MoDisco KDM Discover was used and enriched to obtain the required information for recovering interaction diagrams

Comprehensive measurement framework for enterprise architectures

Enterprise Architecture defines the overall form and function of systems across an enterprise involving the stakeholders and providing a framework, standards and guidelines for project-specific architectures. Project-specific Architecture defines the form and function of the systems in a project or program, within the context of the enterprise as a whole with broad scope and business alignments. Application-specific Architecture defines the form and function of the applications that will be developed to realize functionality of the system with narrow scope and technical alignments. Because of the magnitude and complexity of any enterprise integration project, a major engineering and operations planning effort must be accomplished prior to any actual integration work. As the needs and the requirements vary depending on their volume, the entire enterprise problem can be broken into chunks of manageable pieces. These pieces can be implemented and tested individually with high integration effort. Therefore it becomes essential to analyze the economic and technical feasibility of realizable enterprise solution. It is difficult to migrate from one technological and business aspect to other as the enterprise evolves. The existing process models in system engineering emphasize on life-cycle management and low-level activity coordination with milestone verification. Many organizations are developing enterprise architecture to provide a clear vision of how systems will support and enable their business. The paper proposes an approach for selection of suitable enterprise architecture depending on the measurement framework. The framework consists of unique combination of higher order goals, non-functional requirement support and inputs-outcomes pair evaluation. The earlier efforts in this regard were concerned about only custom scales indicating the availability of a parameter in a range.Comment: 22 Page

Automating Enterprise Architecture Documentation using an Enterprise Service Bus

Currently the documentation of Enterprise Architectures (EA) requires manual collection of data resulting in an error prone, expensive, and time consuming process. Recent approaches seek to automate and improve EA documentation by employing the productive system environment of organizations. In this paper, we investigate a specific Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) considered as the nervous system of an enterprise interconnecting business applications and processes as an information source. We evaluate the degree of coverage to which data of a productive system can be used for EA documentation. A vendor-specific ESB data model is reverse-engineered and transformation rules for three representative EA information models are derived. These transformation rules are employed to perform automated model transformations making the first step towards an automated EA documentation. We evaluate our approach using a productive ESB system from a leading enterprise of the fashion industry

Measuring Trustworthiness of AI Systems: A Holistic Maturity Model

Artificial intelligence (AI) has an impact on business and society at large while posing challenges and risks. For AI adoption, trustworthiness is paramount, yet there appears to be a gap between theory and practice. Organizations need guidance in quantitatively assessing and improving the trustworthiness of AI systems. To address such challenges, maturity models have shown to be a valuable instrument. However, recent AI maturity models address trustworthiness only at the maturest level. As a response, we propose a model to integrate the concept of trustworthiness across the AI lifecycle management. In doing so, we follow Design Science Research to develop a holistic model highlighting the importance of trustworthiness throughout the AI adoption journey to realize the real value potential. This research-in-progress contributes to the emerging research on human-AI systems and managing AI. Our objective is to use the model for assessing, evaluating, and improving trustworthy AI on an organizational level