Design of a communication framework for interpoerable information systems

Frameworks are class hierarchies plus models of interactions which can be turned into complete applications through various kinds of specialization. Design patterns often guide the construction and documentation of frameworks. The runtime architecture of a framework is characterized by an inversion of control: event handler objects of the application are invoked via the framework s reactive dispatching mechanism. This paper reports the development process of a software architecture that has been designed for accomplishing the transfer of operation specifications among interoperable information systems within a larger project, such that -the communication framework does not need to know the structure and different types of operation specifications to be transferred and the individual information systems do not need to know the communication platform (in our case CORBA). Some design patterns guided the construction of the resulting object-oriented framework to achieve a flexible software architecture. The emphasis of this paper is the description of the way in which the communication framework has been designed

Nachvollziehbarkeit von den Anforderungen zum entwickelten System durch den Einsatz von Piktogrammen

Ein Piktogramm ist eine stilisierte bildliche Darstellung zur Informationsvermittlung. Solche graphischen Darstellungen haben i.a. eine spezifische Bedeutung für verschiedene Anwendungsbereiche (z.B. ein Halteverbotszeichen für den Straßenverkehr). Im vorliegenden Beitrag berichten wir über unsere Erfahrungen mit dem Einsatz von Techniken zur interdisziplinären Anforderungsanalyse für Krankenhausinformationssysteme und über die dabei erreichte Nachvollziehbarkeit von den Anforderungen zum entwickelten System mit ilfe des durchgängigen Einsatzes von anwendungsorientierten Piktogrammen in den verschiedenen Phasen der Modellierung bis hin zur Implementierung, wobei auch das frühzeitige Prototyping eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Die Unterstützung der Nachvollziehbarkeit durch den Einsatz von Piktogrammen in Modellierungswerkzeugen wird kurz diskutiert

Approaches to High-Level Programming and Prototyping of Concurrent Applications

Concurrent programming is conceptually harder to undertake and to understand than sequential programming, because a programmer has to manage the coexistence and coordination of multiple concurrent activities. To alleviate this task several high-level approaches to concurrent programming have been developed. For some high-level programming approaches, prototyping for facilitating early evaluation of new ideas is a central goal. Prototyping is used to explore the essential features of a proposed system through practical experimentation before its actual implementation to make the correct design choices early in the process of software development. Approaches to prototyping concurrent applications with very high-level programming systems intend to alleviate the development of parallel algorithms in quite different ways. Early experimentation with alternate design choices or problem decompositions for concurrent applications is suggested to make concurrent programming easier. This paper presents a survey of approaches to high-level programming and prototyping of concurrent applications to review the state of the art in this area. The surveyed approaches are classified with respect to the prototyping process

Model-driven performance evaluation for service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Software quality aspects such as performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and calculating performance metrics of the implemented software. We present an approach for the empirical, model-based performance evaluation of services and service compositions in the context of model-driven service engineering. Temporal databases theory is utilised for the empirical performance evaluation of model-driven developed service systems

Ontology-based modelling of architectural styles

The conceptual modelling of software architectures is of central importance for the quality of a software system. A rich modelling language is required to integrate the different aspects of architecture modelling, such as architectural styles, structural and behavioural modelling, into a coherent framework. Architectural styles are often neglected in software architectures. We propose an ontological approach for architectural style modelling based on description logic as an abstract, meta-level modelling instrument. We introduce a framework for style definition and style combination. The application of the ontological framework in the form of an integration into existing architectural description notations is illustrated

Sprat: Hierarchies of Domain-Specific Languages for Marine Ecosystem Simulation Engineering

Scientific software is becoming more complex and its development nowadays is often an interdisciplinary process in which usually scientists - most of them without training in software engineering - implement the software themselves. To help them achieve a good code quality, we propose to employ a process called Sprat based on the concept of hierarchies of domain-specific languages (DSLs). In such a hierarchy, every DSL constitutes an implementation platform for the DSL directly above it. Each role in the development process (i.e., a scientist from a specific discipline) implements a layer of the software in a DSL belonging to the hierarchy. Therefore, the scientists only deal with abstractions they are familiar with from their respective domain and a clear separation of components is attained. To evaluate the Sprat approach, we present its application to the development of the Sprat simulation - a marine ecosystem model for long-term fish stock prediction

A Generative Communication Service for Database Interoperability

Parallel and distributed programming is conceptually harder to undertake and to understand than sequential programming, because a programmer often has to manage the coexistence and coordination of multiple concurrent activities. The model of Generative Communication in Linda a paradigm that has been developed for parallel computing emphasizes the decoupling of cooperating parallel processes; thus, relieving the programmer from the burden of having to consider all process interrelations explicitly. In many application areas, data is distributed over a multitude of heterogeneous, autonomous information systems. These systems are often isolated and an exchange of data among them is not easy. On the other hand, support for dynamic exchange of data is required to improve the business processes. Cooperative information systems enable such autonomous systems to interoperate. They are complex systems of systems which require a well designed and flexible software architecture. The Linda model had a great influence on research in parallel programming languages. Stimulated by this success, a Generative Communication Service, which offers a very flexible associative addressing mechanism based on metadata matching, has been developed for supporting interoperability of cooperative information systems. Some design patterns guided the construction of the resulting communication service that has been implemented on top of CORBA for an ODMG canonical data model

Hierarchical Combination of Internal and External Domain-Specific Languages for Scientific Computing

To adapt established methods of software engineering for scientific computing, we propose a software development approach for interdisciplinary teams of scientists called Sprat. The approach is organized around a hierarchical architecture that combines internal and external domain-specific languages (DSLs). For its evaluation, Sprat is employed in the implementation of a marine ecosystem model. We highlight what is to be observed while integrating the DSLs into the hierarchy in order to enable a successful cooperation of scientists in interdisciplinary teams as well as to achieve a maintainable code base

Interdisciplinary Object-Oriented Domain Analysis for Electronic Medical Records

The experience gained during the domain analysis for data models of electronic medical records is discussed. Topics of interest are the way in which the domain is analyzed by means of expert interviews, the observed need for parallelism in the learning process, object-oriented modeling of the results, tool support for rapid evaluation of models with an object-oriented database, and an assessment of the requirements on electronic medical records. The emphasis of this paper is to discuss the process of participatory analysis of the domain for electronic medical records in an interdisciplinary setting. Some extracts of the results of the domain analysis are presented