ASPECTS REGARDING THE INTEGRATION OF THE MODERN INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Developing an information system integration strategy, at enterprise level is one of the most difficult issues that the information systems managers must solve, within the present conditions. When settling the integration strategy, two aspects must mainly be taken into account: assuring a complete integration solution of the information systems and building an integration infrastructure of the applications. The present paper aims at presenting few aspects regarding the integration of the information systems at organizational level and describing a specifically developed IBM architecture.information systems integration, software modelling, Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Model Driven Development (MDD)

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

An MDA approach for developing Secure OLAP applications: metamodels and transformations

Decision makers query enterprise information stored in Data Warehouses (DW) by using tools (such as On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools) which employ specific views or cubes from the corporate DW or Data Marts, based on multidimensional modelling. Since the information managed is critical, security constraints have to be correctly established in order to avoid unauthorized access. In previous work we defined a Model-Driven based approach for developing a secure DW repository by following a relational approach. Nevertheless, it is also important to define security constraints in the metadata layer that connects the DW repository with the OLAP tools; that is, over the same multidimensional structures that end users manage. This paper incorporates a proposal for developing secure OLAP applications within our previous approach: it improves a UML profile for conceptual modelling; it defines a logical metamodel for OLAP applications; and it defines and implements transformations from conceptual to logical models, as well as from logical models to secure implementation in a specific OLAP tool (SQL Server Analysis Services).This research is part of the following projects: SIGMA-CC (TIN2012-36904), GEODAS-BC (TIN2012-37493-C01) and GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03) funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER. SERENIDAD (PEII11-037-7035) and MOTERO (PEII11- 0399-9449) funded by the Consejería de Educación, Ciencia y Cultura de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla La Mancha, and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER

Showing the Benefits of Applying a Model Driven Architecture for Developing Secure OLAP Applications

Data Warehouses (DW) manage enterprise information that is queried for decision making purposes by using On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools. The establishment of security constraints in all development stages and operations of the DW is highly important since otherwise, unauthorized users may discover vital business information. The final users of OLAP tools access and analyze the information from the corporate DW by using specific views or cubes based on the multidimensional modelling containing the facts and dimensions (with the corresponding classification hierarchies) that a decision maker or group of decision makers are interested in. Thus, it is important that security constraints will be also established over this metadata layer that connects the DW's repository with the decision makers, that is, directly over the multidimensional structures that final users manage. In doing so, we will not have to define specific security constraints for every particular user, thereby reducing the developing time and costs for secure OLAP applications. In order to achieve this goal, a model driven architecture to automatically develop secure OLAP applications from models has been defined. This paper shows the benefits of this architecture by applying it to a case study in which an OLAP application for an airport DW is automatically developed from models. The architecture is composed of: (1) the secure conceptual modelling by using a UML profile; (2) the secure logical modelling for OLAP applications by using an extension of CWM; (3) the secure implementation into a specific OLAP tool, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS); and (4) the transformations needed to automatically generate logical models from conceptual models and the final secure implementation.This research is part of the following projects: SERENIDAD (PEII11- 037-7035) financed by the ”Viceconsejería de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha” (Spain) and FEDER, and SIGMA-CC (TIN2012-36904) and GEODAS (TIN2012-37493-C03-01) financed by the ”Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad” (Spain)

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)

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

An MDA approach for developing secure OLAP applications: Metamodels and transformations

Decision makers query enterprise information stored in DataWarehouses (DW) by using tools (such as On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools) which employ specific views or cubes from the corporate DW or Data Marts, based on multidimensional modelling. Since the information managed is critical, security constraints have to be correctly established in order to avoid unauthorized access. In previous work we defined a Model-Driven based approach for developing a secure DW repository by following a relational approach. Nevertheless, it is also important to define security constraints in the metadata layer that connects the DW repository with the OLAP tools; that is, over the same multidimensional structures that end users manage. This paper incorporates a proposal for developing secure OLAP applications within our previous approach: it improves a UML profile for conceptual modelling; it defines a logical metamodel for OLAP applications; and it defines and implements transformations from conceptual to logical models, as well as from logical models to secure implementation in a specific OLAP tool (SQL Server Analysis Services). © 2015 ComSIS Consortium. All rights reserved.This research is part of the following projects: SIGMA-CC (TIN2012-36904), GEODAS-BC (TIN2012-37493-C01) and GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03) funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER

Modeling views in the layered view model for XML using UML

In data engineering, view formalisms are used to provide flexibility to users and user applications by allowing them to extract and elaborate data from the stored data sources. Conversely, since the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, and interchanging data among various web and heterogeneous data sources. In combination with XML Schema, XML provides rich facilities for defining and constraining user-defined data semantics and properties, a feature that is unique to XML. In this context, it is interesting to investigate traditional database features, such as view models and view design techniques for XML. However, traditional view formalisms are strongly coupled to the data language and its syntax, thus it proves to be a difficult task to support views in the case of semi-structured data models. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Layered View Model (LVM) for XML with conceptual and schemata extensions. Here our work is three-fold; first we propose an approach to separate the implementation and conceptual aspects of the views that provides a clear separation of concerns, thus, allowing analysis and design of views to be separated from their implementation. Secondly, we define representations to express and construct these views at the conceptual level. Thirdly, we define a view transformation methodology for XML views in the LVM, which carries out automated transformation to a view schema and a view query expression in an appropriate query language. Also, to validate and apply the LVM concepts, methods and transformations developed, we propose a view-driven application development framework with the flexibility to develop web and database applications for XML, at varying levels of abstraction