Component Composition in Business and System Modelling

Bespoke development of large business systems can be couched in terms of the composition of components, which are, put simply, chunks of development work. Design, mapping a specification to an implementation, can also be expressed in terms of components: a refinement comprising an abstract component, a concrete component and a mapping between them. Similarly, system extension is the composition of an existing component, the legacy system, with a new component, the extension. This paper overviews work being done on a UK EPSRC funded research project formulating and formalizing techniques for describing, composing and performing integrity checks on components. Although the paper focuses on the specification and development of information systems, the techniques are equally applicable to the modeling and re-engineering of businesses, where no computer system may be involved

The influence of conceptual user models on the creation and interpretation of diagrams representing reactive systems

In system design, many diagrams of many different types are used. Diagrams communicate design aspects between members of the development team, and between these experts and the non-expert customers and future users. Mastering the creation of diagrams is often a challenging task, judging by particular errors persistently found in diagrams created by undergraduate computer science students. We assume a possible misalignment between human perception and cognition on the one hand and the diagrams’ structure and syntax on the other. This article presents the results of an investigation of such a misalignment. We focus on the deployment of so-called 'conceptual user models' (mental models, created by users in their mind) at the creation of diagrams. We propose a taxonomy for mental mappings, used for categorization of representations. We describe an experiment where naive and novice subjects created one or several diagrams of a familiar task. We use our taxonomy for analysing these diagrams, both for the represented task structure and the symbols used. The results indeed show a mismatch between mental models and currently used diagram techniques

Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis (Extended)

This extended paper presents 1) a novel hierarchy and recursion extension to the process tree model; and 2) the first, recursion aware process model discovery technique that leverages hierarchical information in event logs, typically available for software systems. This technique allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions at multiple levels of granularity. The work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life (software) event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach and show the huge potential to speed up discovery by exploiting the available hierarchy.Comment: Extended version (14 pages total) of the paper Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis. This Technical Report version includes the guarantee proofs for the proposed discovery algorithm

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

Drawing OWL 2 ontologies with Eddy the editor

In this paper we introduce Eddy, a new open-source tool for the graphical editing of OWL~2 ontologies. Eddy is specifically designed for creating ontologies in Graphol, a completely visual ontology language that is equivalent to OWL~2. Thus, in Eddy ontologies are easily drawn as diagrams, rather than written as sets of formulas, as commonly happens in popular ontology design and engineering environments. This makes Eddy particularly suited for usage by people who are more familiar with diagramatic languages for conceptual modeling rather than with typical ontology formalisms, as is often required in non-academic and industrial contexts. Eddy provides intuitive functionalities for specifying Graphol diagrams, guarantees their syntactic correctness, and allows for exporting them in standard OWL 2 syntax. A user evaluation study we conducted shows that Eddy is perceived as an easy and intuitive tool for ontology specification

Visual exploration of semantic-web-based knowledge structures

Humans have a curious nature and seek a better understanding of the world. Data, in- formation, and knowledge became assets of our modern society through the information technology revolution in the form of the internet. However, with the growing size of accumulated data, new challenges emerge, such as searching and navigating in these large collections of data, information, and knowledge. The current developments in academic and industrial contexts target the corresponding challenges using Semantic Web techno- logies. The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web and provides machine-readable representations of knowledge for various domains. These machine-readable representations allow intelligent machine agents to understand the meaning of the data and information; and enable additional inference of new knowledge. Generally, the Semantic Web is designed for information exchange and its processing and does not focus on presenting such semantically enriched data to humans. Visualizations support exploration, navigation, and understanding of data by exploiting humans’ ability to comprehend complex data through visual representations. In the context of Semantic- Web-Based knowledge structures, various visualization methods and tools are available, and new ones are being developed every year. However, suitable visualizations are highly dependent on individual use cases and targeted user groups. In this thesis, we investigate visual exploration techniques for Semantic-Web-Based knowledge structures by addressing the following challenges: i) how to engage various user groups in modeling such semantic representations; ii) how to facilitate understanding using customizable visual representations; and iii) how to ease the creation of visualizations for various data sources and different use cases. The achieved results indicate that visual modeling techniques facilitate the engagement of various user groups in ontology modeling. Customizable visualizations enable users to adjust visualizations to the current needs and provide different views on the data. Additionally, customizable visualization pipelines enable rapid visualization generation for various use cases, data sources, and user group

The Object Management Group Ontology Definition Metamodel

Report of a submission being made to a major international software engineering standards group, the Object Management Group which ties together OMG standards with World-Wide Web Consortium and International Standards Organization standards. Major industry bodies including IBM are collaborating, and the submission has the support of 24 companies. OMG, W3C and ISO standards strongly influence the industry, especially in combination. Colomb was a major contributor, responsible for 30% of the submission, and the primary author of the paper

Aspect-oriented Approach to Metamodel Abstraction

A software system maintenance represents an important part of software system's lifetime. The most common reasons to change a software system are bug fixes and adding of a new functionality. Software maintenance itself is a difficult and complex process. Before applying a change, it is important to understand the software system's source code as well as the application domain. This paper presents our innovative approach to improve software system comprehension in order to simplify its maintenance. Instead of analyzing all the program code, our approach focuses on parts which are built using predefined well known software libraries. The knowledge of both -- the libraries and the way they are used in software systems -- allows us to identify certain concepts of the software system. This information is used to create metamodels of these concepts. The metamodel is created at a higher level of abstraction than the level of concept implementation