9 research outputs found

    Applying SDBC in the Cultural-Heritage Sector

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    An actual cultural-heritage-related problem is how to effectively manage the global distribution of digitized cultural and scientific information, taking into account that such a global distribution is only doable through the Internet. Hence, adequately designing software applications realizing brokerage functionality in the global space, particularly concerning digitized cultural/scientific information, is to be considered as an essential cultural-heritage-related task. However, due to its great complexity, the usage of the existing popular modelling instrumentarium seems insufficiently useful; this is mainly because the realization of a satisfactory cultural-heritage brokering requires a deep understanding and consideration of the original business reality. Inspired by this challenge, we have aimed at exploring relevant strengths of the SDBC approach which is currently being developed. SDBC’s being capable of properly aligning business process modelling and software specification, allowing for re-use and being consistent with the latest software design standards, are among the facts in support of the claim that SDBC could bring value concerning the design of cultural-heritage-related brokerage applications. Hence, in this paper we motivate and illustrate the usefulness of SDBC for the cultural-heritage sector

    Model-driven design of context-aware applications

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    In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to context changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications. Firstly, at the business modeling level, it is considered crucial that the different possible context states can be properly captured and modeled, states that correspond to certain desirable behaviors. Secondly, it must be known what are the dependencies between the two, namely between states and behaviors. And finally, what is valid for application design in general, business needs are to be aligned to application solutions. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by approaching the notion of context and extending from this perspective a previously proposed business-software alignment approach. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be useful as an additional result concerning the alignment between business modeling and software design

    Software Specification Based on Re-usable Business Components

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    Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

    From user context states to context-aware applications

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    In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to user context state changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications: (i) At the business level, the different possible context states of the user must be properly identified and modeled; (ii) Both at the business and application level, the corresponding desirable behaviors must be identified and modeled, as well as the overall behavior which represents the required adaptability in terms of valid switches between desirable behaviors; (iii) The models at the business and application level must be aligned, i.e. the application models should represent proper solutions with respect to functionality and adaptability needs expressed at the business level. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by furthering the development of a business-application-alignment approach, extending it to cover context-awareness. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be relevant and useful with respect to the challenge of aligning business modeling and software design

    On the design of context-aware applications

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    Ignoring the dynamic context of users may lead to suboptimal applications. Hence, context-aware applications have emerged, that are aware of the end-user context situation (for example, “user is at home”, “user is travelling”), and provide the desirable services corresponding to the situation at hand. Developing context aware applications is not a trivial task nevertheless and the following related challenges have been identified: (i) Properly deciding what physical context to ‘sense’ and what high-level context information to pass to an application, and bridging the gap between raw context data and high level context information; (ii) Deciding which end-user context situations to consider and which to ignore; (iii) Modeling context-aware application behavior including ‘switching’ between alternative application behaviors. In this paper, we have furthered related work on context-aware application design, by explicitly discussing each of the mentioned interrelated challenges and proposing corresponding solution directions, supported by small-scale illustrative examples. It is expected that this contribution would usefully support the current efforts to improve context-aware application development

    Model-driven specification of software services

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    Aligning adequately business requirements and software functionality as well as achieving ‘loose coupling’ for service functionalities, are identified challenges relevant to service-oriented software design. Furthering previous related work, we propose in this paper an application design process that, taking the above challenges into account, addresses systematically and separately business requirements, the identification of (desirable) service functionalities, and their mapping onto technology platforms. With respect to service modeling, a communication pattern has been identified that is relevant and useful. As for the enforcement of social restrictions in the application functionality, semiotic norms are helpfully applied. And finally, ‘loose coupling’ is achieved in an orchestration-driven way.\u

    Incorporating Trust into Context-Aware Services

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    Enabling technologies concerning hardware, networking, and sensing have inspired the development of context-aware IT services. These adapt to the situation of the user, such that service provisioning is specific to his/her corresponding needs. We have seen successful applications of context-aware services in healthcare, well-being, and smart homes. It is, however, always a question what level of trust the users can place in the fulfillment of their needs by a certain IT-service. Trust has two major variants: policy-based, where a reputed institution provides guarantees about the service, and reputation-based, where other users of the service provide insight into the level of fulfillment of user needs. Services that are accessible to a small and known set of users typically use policy-based trust only. Services that have a wide community of users can use reputation-based trust, policy-based trust, or a combination. For both types of trust, however, context awareness poses a problem. Policy-based trust works within certain boundaries, outside of which no guarantees can be given about satisfying the user needs, and context awareness can push a service out of these boundaries. For reputation-based trust, the fact that users in a certain context were adequately served, does not mean that the same would happen when the service adapts to another user’s needs. In this paper we consider the incorporation of trust into context-aware services, by proposing an ontological conceptualization for user-system trust. Analyzing service usage data for context parameters combined with the ability to fulfill user needs can help in eliciting components for the ontology.Policy Analysi
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