Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

Metamodels of information technology best practices frameworks

This article deals with the generation and application of ontological metamodels of frameworks of best practices in IT. The ontological metamodels represent the logical structures and fundamental semantics of framework models and constitute adequate tools for the analysis, adaptation, comparison and integration of the frameworks of best practices in IT. The MetaFrame methodology for the construction of the metamodels, founded on the discipline of the conceptual metamodelling and on the extended Entity/Relationship methodology is described herein, as well as the metamodels of the best practices for the outsourcing of IT, the eSCM-SP v2.01 (eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers) and the eSCM-CL v1.1 (eSourcing Capability Model for Client Organizations), constructed according to the MetaFrame methodology

Using Ontologies for Semantic Data Integration

While big data analytics is considered as one of the most important paths to competitive advantage of today’s enterprises, data scientists spend a comparatively large amount of time in the data preparation and data integration phase of a big data project. This shows that data integration is still a major challenge in IT applications. Over the past two decades, the idea of using semantics for data integration has become increasingly crucial, and has received much attention in the AI, database, web, and data mining communities. Here, we focus on a specific paradigm for semantic data integration, called Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of OBDA, pointing out both the techniques that are at the basis of the paradigm, and the main challenges that remain to be addressed

Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes

By analyzing the last years of software development evolution, it is possible to observe that the involved technologies are increasingly focused on the definition of models for the specification of the intended software products. This model-centric development schema is the main ingredient for the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm. In general terms, the MDD approaches propose the automatic generation of software products by means of the transformation of the defined models into the final program code. This transformation process is also known as model compilation process. Thus, MDD is oriented to reduce (or even eliminate) the hand-made programming, which is an error-prone and time-consuming task. Hence, models become the main actors of the MDD processes: the models are the new programming code. In this context, the interoperability can be considered a natural trend for the future of model-driven technologies, where different modeling approaches, tools, and standards can be integrated and coordinated to reduce the implementation and learning time of MDD solutions as well as to improve the quality of the final software products. However, there is a lack of approaches that provide a suitable solution to support the interoperability in MDD processes. Moreover, the proposals that define an interoperability framework for MDD processes are still in a theoretical space and are not aligned with current standards, interoperability approaches, and technologies. Thus, the main objective of this doctoral thesis is to develop an approach to achieve the interoperability in MDD processes. This interoperability approach is based on current metamodeling standards, modeling language customization mechanisms, and model-to-model transformation technologies. To achieve this objective, novel approaches have been defined to improve the integration of modeling languages, to obtain a suitable interchange of modeling information, and to perform automatic interoperability verification.Giachetti Herrera, GA. (2011). Supporting Automatic Interoperability in Model-Driven Development Processes [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11108Palanci

Modular Software Process Simulation Models Through Metamodeling

In this paper we present the main concepts and principles of a multilevel architecture to help in the development of modularized and reusable software process models under the System Dynamics approach. The conceptual ideas of the multilevel architecture have been formalized using UML as a notation. Metamodeling is used to support the process of abstract modules development. The architecture proposed is also based on ISO’s Information Resource Dictionary System. The principles of the architecture and overall guide to develop software process simulation models are described in this work.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2004-06689-C03-0

Four Reasoning Models for C3 Metamodel

International audienceThe architecture is considered to be the driving aspect of the development process; it allows specifying which aspects and models in each level needed according to the software architecture design. Early Architecture Description Languages (ADLs), nearly exclusive, focus on structural abstraction hierarchy ignoring behavioural description hierarchy, conceptual hierarchy, and metamodeling hierarchy. In our approach these four hierarchies constitute views to appropriately “reason about” the architecture of a system described using our C3 metamodel. C3 is defined to be a minimal and complete architecture description language. In this paper we provide a set of mechanisms to deal with different levels of each type of hierarchy, also we introduce our proper structural definition for connector types used to instantiate any connexion elements deployed at the architectures and application levels

Analytical metadata modeling for next generation BI systems

Business Intelligence (BI) systems are extensively used as in-house solutions to support decision-making in organizations. Next generation BI 2.0 systems claim for expanding the use of BI solutions to external data sources and assisting the user in conducting data analysis. In this context, the Analytical Metadata (AM) framework defines the metadata artifacts (e.g., schema and queries) that are exploited for user assistance purposes. As such artifacts are typically handled in ad-hoc and system specific manners, BI 2.0 argues for a flexible solution supporting metadata exploration across different systems. In this paper, we focus on the AM modeling. We propose SM4AM, an RDF-based Semantic Metamodel for AM. On the one hand, we claim for ontological metamodeling as the proper solution, instead of a fixed universal model, due to (meta)data models heterogeneity in BI 2.0. On the other hand, RDF provides means for facilitating defining and sharing flexible metadata representations. Furthermore, we provide a method to instantiate our metamodel. Finally, we present a real-world case study and discuss how SM4AM, specially the schema and query artifacts, can help traversing different models instantiating our metamodel and enabling innovative means to explore external repositories in what we call metamodel-driven (meta)data exploration.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft