Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures

Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Analysing usability and security issues in design and development of information systems

Recent technological advancements and the global economic challenges have meant that, individuals and businesses are constantly seeking new ways to exploit Information Systems (IS) and in manners that not only enhance user experiences and/or improve business processes and productivity, but also protect the individual‟s privacy and business assets for competitive advantage. Therefore, Information Systems need to be designed and developed to meet these challenges and/or other objectives. This thesis will delve primarily into the history of IS as a basis for establishing where the problem(s) lie or emanate from. It will focus on critically analysing existing Information Systems, and investigating the conflicting issues of usability and security, from an Information Systems Design and Development perspective by analysing various approaches. An in-depth review of literature and critical analysis of requirements necessary for the design and development of a usable and secure Information System will be carried out and will form the intellectual framework for this research. The premise therefore, is to look for a balanced approach or appropriate trade-off framework for designing usable-secure systems. The research will conclude with a discussion on how an envisaged conceptual framework or model can be developed based on certain influential factors, and how the framework can be experimentally evaluated, and to suggest areas for further improvement or future research

Viewpoints and goals: towards an integrated approach

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaRequirements elicitation and analysis have been studied according to several approaches that differ mostly on their "orientation", in this case relying on goals or viewpoints. Goal-Oriented approaches such as KAOS rely on goals to direct their process of eliciting requirements: a goal is an objective the system under consideration should achieve and represents a system property that may reflect either a functional (e.g. a service provided by the system) or a non-functional (e.g. security, performance) requirement; its satisfaction may imply the participation of several agents and the resolution of possible obstacles that may arise. The KAOS approach offers an unambiguous method for requirement decomposition and may provide a set of heuristics to approaches where one does not exist. Viewpoint-Oriented approaches such as PREview focus on gathering information pertaining to the problem from several agents that may have different, often equally valid, and incomplete perspectives on the problem. These partial intakes reflect their different responsibilities, roles, goals, or interpretations of the information sources; hence the combination of the agent and its input on the system is called a viewpoint. PREview benefits from a particularly lightweight approach to requirements encapsulation, but fails to provide a set of heuristics for the process of identifying the system's requirements. Considering the issues identified in each approach, it is verifiable that both approaches are complementary: on the one hand, KAOS offers a set of requirements elicitation heuristics through goal decomposition; on the other hand, PREview is a lightweight approach to viewpoint oriented requirements engineering, tailored especially for integration, however lacks a more systematic mechanism to guide the requirements elicitation process. The objective of this dissertation is therefore to propose a hybrid approach that builds on the PREview approach and brings together the benefits of the KAOS approach. The result is synergetic where, for example, completion is better addressed by providing a set of heuristics for requirement elicitation