A methodological proposal and tool support for the HL7 standards compliance in the development of health information systems

Health information systems are increasingly complex, and their development is presented as a challenge for software development companies offering quality, maintainable and interoperable products. HL7 (Health level 7) International, an international non-profit organization, defines and maintains standards related to health information systems. However, the modelling languages proposed by HL7 are far removed from standard languages and widely known by software engineers. In these lines, NDT is a software development methodology that has a support tool called NDT-Suite and is based, on the one hand, on the paradigm of model-driven engineering and, on the other hand, in UML that is a widely recognized standard language. This paper proposes an extension of the NDT methodology called MoDHE (Model Driven Health Engineering) to offer software engineers a methodology capable of modelling health information systems conforming to HL7 using UML domain models

QuantUM: Quantitative Safety Analysis of UML Models

When developing a safety-critical system it is essential to obtain an assessment of different design alternatives. In particular, an early safety assessment of the architectural design of a system is desirable. In spite of the plethora of available formal quantitative analysis methods it is still difficult for software and system architects to integrate these techniques into their every day work. This is mainly due to the lack of methods that can be directly applied to architecture level models, for instance given as UML diagrams. Also, it is necessary that the description methods used do not require a profound knowledge of formal methods. Our approach bridges this gap and improves the integration of quantitative safety analysis methods into the development process. All inputs of the analysis are specified at the level of a UML model. This model is then automatically translated into the analysis model, and the results of the analysis are consequently represented on the level of the UML model. Thus the analysis model and the formal methods used during the analysis are hidden from the user. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach using an industrial strength case study.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL 2011, arXiv:1107.074

A formal theory of conceptual modeling universals

Conceptual Modeling is a discipline of great relevance to several areas in Computer Science. In a series of papers [1,2,3] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underlying upper level ontology, proposed in [4,5], to evaluate the ontological correctness of conceptual models and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of a modeling language (UML) should be used in conceptual modeling. In this paper, we focus on the modeling metaconcepts of classifiers and objects from an ontological point of view. We use a philosophically and psychologically well-founded theory of universals to propose a UML profile for Ontology Representation and Conceptual Modeling. The formal semantics of the proposed modeling elements is presented in a language of modal logics with quantification restricted to Sortal universals

Expressing Measurement Uncertainty in OCL/UML Datatypes

Uncertainty is an inherent property of any measure or estimation performed in any physical setting, and therefore it needs to be considered when modeling systems that manage real data. Although several modeling languages permit the representation of measurement uncertainty for describing certain system attributes, these aspects are not normally incorporated into their type systems. Thus, operating with uncertain values and propagating uncertainty are normally cumbersome processes, di cult to achieve at the model level. This paper proposes an extension of OCL and UML datatypes to incorporate data uncertainty coming from physical measurements or user estimations into the models, along with the set of operations de ned for the values of these types.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Towards Model-Driven Development of Access Control Policies for Web Applications

We introduce a UML-based notation for graphically modeling systems’ security aspects in a simple and intuitive way and a model-driven process that transforms graphical specifications of access control policies in XACML. These XACML policies are then translated in FACPL, a policy language with a formal semantics, and the resulting policies are evaluated by means of a Java-based software tool

A Static Verification Framework for Secure Peer-to-Peer Applications

In this paper we present a static verification framework to support the design and verification of secure peer-to-peer applications. The framework supports the specification, modeling, and analysis of security aspects together with the general characteristics of the system, during early stages of the development life-cycle. The approach avoids security issues to be taken into consideration as a separate layer that is added to the system as an afterthought by the use of security protocols. The main functionality supported by the framework are concerned with the modeling of the system together with its security aspects by using an extension of UML, modeling of abuse cases to represent scenarios of attackers and assist with the identification of properties to be verified, specification of properties to be verified in a graphical template language, verification of the models against the properties, and visualization of the results of the verification process

MDA-based ATL transformation to generate MVC 2 web models

Development and maintenance of Web application is still a complex and error-prone process. We need integrated techniques and tool support for automated generation of Web systems and a ready prescription for easy maintenance. The MDA approach proposes an architecture taking into account the development and maintenance of large and complex software. In this paper, we apply MDA approach for generating PSM from UML design to MVC 2Web implementation. That is why we have developed two meta-models handling UML class diagrams and MVC 2 Web applications, then we have to set up transformation rules. These last are expressed in ATL language. To specify the transformation rules (especially CRUD methods) we used a UML profiles. To clearly illustrate the result generated by this transformation, we converted the XMI file generated in an EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) model.Comment: International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology-201

Aspect-oriented design model.

Designing crosscutting concerns (aspects) is a challenging task. Since crosscutting concerns were not addressed while developing contemporary software design techniques, so they lack support for accommodating representation of such concerns along with base program. Some design languages like UML have been extended to express aspects and their elements but they do not fully represent aspects. Some lack adequate representation of aspect elements and some lack an efficient and reusable composition technique. In this paper, some of the aspect-oriented design techniques have been critically discussed. A proposed aspect model has been discussed which helps in overcoming the deficiencies in the contemporary aspect-oriented design techniques. This model represents aspects and their elements throughout the software development life cycle