Tutoriel "Objets Distribués, Interopérabilité, CORBA''

Colloque sur invitation.Une première revolution, celle des architectures clients/serveurs, met fin aux applications monolithiques sur machine centralisée : elle donne naissance à des applications fragmentées sur des clients et des serveurs. Une seconde révolution, celle des objets distribués, introduit, en quelque sorte, du client/serveur au sein des architectures clients serveurs. En effet, tant du côté des clients que du côté des serveurs, les objets fragmentent une application en composants qui peuvent interopérer et coopérer dans un contexte réparti. Par ailleurs, l'émergence de standards industriels, comme CORBA ou OLE/COM, facilitent le développement d'application conformément à ces nouvelles architectures. Dans ce tutoriel, nous montrons l'apport des objets distribués pour l'interopérabilité entre systèmes, réseaux, langages ou outils éventuellement hétérogènes et particulièrement, leur apport par rapport à des environnements clients/serveurs fondés sur des serveurs de données ``traditionnels'' ou des moniteurs transactionnels. Nous parcourerons la philosophie et les services offerts par les standards. Enfin, nous explorerons quelques problèmes fondamentaux (comme la gestion des types) non encore totalement résolus dans le domaine

A Mediator-Based Architecture for Capability Management

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceThe capture, the structuring and the exploitation of the expertise or the capabilities of an ``object'' (like a business partner, an employee, a software component, a Web site, etc.) are crucial problems in various applications, like cooperative and distributed applications or e-business and e-commerce applications. The work we describe in this paper concerns the advertising of the capabilities or the know-how of an object. The capabilities are structured and organized in order to be used when searching for objects that satisfy a given objective or that meet a given need. One of the originality of our proposal is in the nature of the answers the intended system can return. Indeed, the answers are not Yes/No answers but they may be cooperative answers in that sense that when no single object meets the search criteria, the system attempts to find out what a set of ``complementary'' objects that do satisfy the whole search criteria, every object in the resulting set satisfying part of the criteria. In this approach, Description Logics is used as a knowledge representation formalism and classification techniques are used as search mechanisms

Software Engineering Education by Example

Based on the old but famous distinction between "in the small" and "in the large" software development, at Nancy Universit\'e, UHP Nancy 1, we experience for a while software engineering education thanks to actual project engineering. This education method has the merit to enable students to discover and to overcome actual problems when faced to a large project which may be conducted by a large development team. The mode of education is a simulation of an actual software engineering project as encountered in "real life\'e" activities

Annotation of enterprise models for interoperability purposes

ISBN 978-0-7695-3116-4International audienceThe purpose of annotations is to describe the content of “something” and they may be considered as meta-data. They are used for a while for text books, articles, hypertext documents and so on. We explore their usage in semantic-based and model-based interoperability, with the aim to make explicit the meaning and the structure of given models (artefacts) to enable not only their understanding, but also their exchange (and their possible transformation) between collaborating actors (human or machine). We propose categories and types of annotations helpful for expliciting the meaning of models and for easing their exchange within a collaborative contex

Competence Discovery and Composition

International audienceThe capture, the structuring and the exploitation of competences of an "object" (like a business partner, an employee, a software component, a Web service, etc.) are crucial problems in various applications, like cooperative and distributed applications or e\_business applications. The work we describe here concerns competence advertising, organization, discovery and composition. Indeed, one of the originality of the proposal is in the nature of the answers the intended system can return when seeking for individuals fitted with given competences: answers may be composite ones in that sense that when no single object meets the search criteria, we attempt to find out what a set of objects, when pooled together, do satisfy the whole search criteria. Conceptual Graphs (CGs) are used as a knowledge representation formalism and operations on graphs are used as a search mechanism. A client/server prototype, viewed as a federation of mediators, has been developed as a proof of concept

The basics of interoperability: a curricula

ISBN : 978-1-84821-134-6International audienceIn this paper, we introduce and we relate our experiment in lecturing the basics of interoperability. This lecturing includes an attempt to provide a formal foundation of interoperability, alternative approaches for model-based interoperability and related architectures, together with an introduction to semantic interoperability. A practical case study has been defined in order to put students into practice so they can discover some interoperability issues within an enterprise perspective

Enterprise Semantic Modelling for Interoperability

ISBN: 978-1-4244-0826-9International audienceThe purpose of annotations is to describe the content of “something” and they may be considered as meta-data. They are used for a while for text books, articles, hypertext documents and so on. We explore their usage in semantic-based and model-based interoperability, with the aim to make explicit the meaning and the structure of given models (artefacts) to enable not only their understanding, but also their exchange (and their possible transformation) between collaborating actors (human or machine). We propose categories and types of annotations helpful for expliciting the meaning of models and for easing their exchange within a collaborative context

An Experiment in Refactoring an Object Oriented CASE Tool

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture.This paper describes experience gained and lessons learned from restructuring OODesigner, a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool that supports Object Modelling Technique (OMT). This tool supports a wide range of features such as constructing the three models of OMT, managing information repository, documenting class resources, automatically generating C++ and Java code, reverse engineering C++ and Java code, searching and reusing classes in the corresponding repository and collecting metrics data. A version 1.x of OODesigner has been developed for 3 years since 1994. Although this version was developed using OMT (i.e. the tool has been designed using OMT) and C++, we recognized the potential maintenance problems that originated from the ill-designed class architecture. Thus that version was totally restructured, resulting in a new version that is easier to maintain than the old one. In this paper, we briefly describe the tool's functionality, its development process and its refactoring process, emphasizing the fact that the refactoring of the tool is conducted using the tool itself. Then we discuss lesson learned from these processes and we exhibit some comparative measurements of the developed versions

Conceptual Graphs for Fomally Managing and Discovering Complementary Competences

International audienceThe capture, the structuring of the expertise or the competences of an "object" (lie a business partner, an employee and even a software component or a Web service) are of very crucial interest in many application domains, like cooperative and distributed applications as well as in cooperative e\_business applications and in human resource managment. The work that is described in this paper concerns the advertising , the classification and the discovry of competences. The foundings of the proposals that are described here after are a formal representation of competences using conceptual graphs and the use of operations on conceptual graphs for competence discovery and their possible composition

Why, Where and How to use Semantic Annotation for Systems Interoperability

ISSN 2247-6040International audienceSemantic annotation is one of the useful solutions to enrich target's (systems, models, meta-models, etc.) information. There are some papers which use semantic enrichment for different purposes (integration, composition, sharing and reuse, etc.) in several domains, but none of them provides a complete process of how to use semantic annotations. This paper identifies three main components of semantic annotation, gives a formal definition of semantic annotation method and presents a survey of current semantic annotation methods which include: languages and tools that can be used to develop ontology, the design of semantic annotation structure models and the corresponding applications. The survey presented in this paper will be the basis of our future research on models, semantics and architecture for systems interoperability