requirements and use cases

In this report, we introduce our initial vision of the Corporate Semantic Web as the next step in the broad field of Semantic Web research. We identify requirements of the corporate environment and gaps between current approaches to tackle problems facing ontology engineering, semantic collaboration, and semantic search. Each of these pillars will yield innovative methods and tools during the project runtime until 2013. Corporate ontology engineering will improve the facilitation of agile ontology engineering to lessen the costs of ontology development and, especially, maintenance. Corporate semantic collaboration focuses the human-centered aspects of knowledge management in corporate contexts. Corporate semantic search is settled on the highest application level of the three research areas and at that point it is a representative for applications working on and with the appropriately represented and delivered background knowledge. We propose an initial layout for an integrative architecture of a Corporate Semantic Web provided by these three core pillars

Recombinant Service Systems Engineering

Although many methods have been proposed for engineering service systems and customer solutions, most of these approaches give little consideration to recombinant service innovation. Recombinant innovation refers to reusing and integrating resources that were previously unconnected. In an age of networked products and data, we can expect that many service innovations will be based on adding, dissociating, and associating existing value propositions by accessing internal and external resources instead of designing them from scratch. The purpose of this paper is to identify if current service engineering approaches account for the mechanisms of recombinant innovation and to design a method for recombinant service systems engineering. In a conceptual analysis of 24 service engineering methods, the study identified that most methods (1) focus on designing value propositions instead of service systems, (2) view service independent of physical goods, (3) are either linear or iterative instead of agile, and (4) do not sufficiently address the mechanisms of recombinant innovation. The paper discusses how these deficiencies can be remedied and designs a revised service systems engineering approach that reorganizes service engineering processes according to four design principles. The method is demonstrated with the recombinant design of a service system for predictive maintenance of agricultural machines

Aspect-Oriented Modeling: Applying Aspect-Oriented UML Use Cases and Extending Aspect-Z

Considering predominant aspect-oriented software development (asymmetric AOSD), this paper discusses the application of aspect-oriented UML use case diagrams and formal language AspectZ to part of a classic AOSD case study, the Health-Watcher software system. In addition, this article proposes an extension of AspectZ to reach a new property for asymmetric AOSD which reacts after a schema successfully finishes, or not, showing messages for that situation, with an implicit join point; and a way for generalizing similar operations in a system using AspectZ. Thus, the main goal of this article is to show the application of and differences between asymmetric aspect-oriented formal and non-formal modeling, and to highlight potential advantages of aspect-oriented formal modeling over aspect-oriented non-formal modeling. First, this article describes the main concepts of the classic AOSD paradigm focusing on problems unsolved by previous forms of software development and resolved by AOSD. Second, by applying aspect-oriented UML use case diagrams, this paper highlights the use of dominion classes and extend-relationships. Considering the Health-Watcher case study and an asymmetric AOSD approach, this study found that using extend-relationships in UML use cases does not completely follow the basic principles of the prevailing AOSD approach in which a base element does not know about aspects, whereas an extending use case must explicitly know its extension points. Third, this article shows a formal modeling of the case study using AspectZ. Moreover, extensions of this aspect-oriented formal language are proposed and applied to the same case study to show their practical properties for modeling. These extensions allow showing success or error messages, and inserting or not a new item in a set of elements to take care of invalid situations

Tradespace and Affordability – Phase 2

MOTIVATION AND CONTEXT: One of the key elements of the SERC’s research strategy is transforming the practice of systems engineering – “SE Transformation.” The Grand Challenge goal for SE Transformation is to transform the DoD community’s current systems engineering and management methods, processes, and tools (MPTs) and practices away from sequential, single stovepipe system, hardware-first, outside-in, document-driven, point-solution, acquisition-oriented approaches; and toward concurrent, portfolio and enterprise-oriented, hardware-software-human engineered, balanced outside-in and inside-out, model-driven, set-based, full life cycle approaches.This material is based upon work supported, in whole or in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)) under Contract H98230-08- D-0171 (Task Order 0031, RT 046).This material is based upon work supported, in whole or in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)) under Contract H98230-08- D-0171 (Task Order 0031, RT 046)

Towards the measurement of Enterprise Information Systems agility to support EIS improving projects

International audienceEnterprise information systems (EIS) are directly implied in the global performance of an organisation. Nevertheless, their potential rigidity in comparison with the required fast evolution of the supported organisation remains an important open research question. The proposed research work aims to define and evaluate the agility of an EIS, in order to assist both software engineers and business managers in EIS improvement projects. In particular, a framework is proposed to structure the different existing metrics on agility according to the improvements needs and the intrinsic characteristics of an information system