EMMSAD 2005 was organized in Porto, Portugal, on June 13-14, 2005. It was held in conjunction with CAiSE'05.
The field of information systems analysis and design includes numerous information modeling methods and notations (e.g. ER, ORM, UML, DFDs, Petri Nets), that are typically evolving. Even with some attempts to standardize (e.g. UML for object-oriented design), new modeling methods are constantly being introduced, many of which differ only marginally from existing approaches. These ongoing changes significantly impact the way information systems are analyzed and designed in practice.
This workshop focuses on exploring, evaluating, and enhancing current information modeling methods and methodologies. Though the need for such studies is well recognized, there is a paucity of such research in the literature. The objective of EMMSAD'05 is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners interested in modeling methods in systems analysis and design to meet, and exchange research ideas and results. EMMSAD'05 is the tenth in a very successful series of EMMSAD workshops, previously held in Crete, Barcelona, Pisa, Heidelberg, Stockholm, Interlaken, Toronto, Velden, and Riga. To mark the tenth anniversary of the workshop, this year the workshop includes an invited keynote address by Prof. Janis Bubenko Jr. that reflects on historical trends in information modeling.
EMMSAD'05 is jointly sponsored by the Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.1 (IFIP WG 8.1), the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.1 (IFIP WG 8.1), the Network of Excellence for Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software (INTEROP), and the Association for Information Systems Special Interest Group on Systems Analysis and Design (AIS-SIGSAND). This year we had 36 submissions from all over the globe. After an extensive review process by a distinguished international program committee, with each paper receiving three or more reviews, we accepted the 21 papers that appear, together with an abstract of the keynote address, in these proceedings. Congratulations to the successful authors!
Extended versions of the best EMMSAD 2005 papers have been included in Advanced Topics in Database Research, Volume 5.
This paper presents a first attempt to realize a methodological framework supporting the most relevant phases of the design of a value-added service. A value-added service is defined as a functionality of an adaptive and multi-channel information system obtained by composing services offered by different providers. The framework has been developed as part of the MAIS project. The MAIS framework focuses on the following phases of service life cycle: requirements analysis, design, deployment, run time use and negotiation. In the first phase, the designer elicits, validates and negotiates service require-ments according to social and business goals. The design phase is in charge of modelling services with an enhanced version of UML, augmented with new features developed within the MAIS project. The deployment phase considers the network infrastructure and, in particular, provides an approach to imple-ment and coordinate the execution of services from different providers. In the run time use and negotiation phase, the MAIS methodology provides support to the optimal selection and quality renegotiation of services and to the dynamic evaluation of management costs. The paper describes the MAIS methodological tools available for different phases of service life cycle and discusses the main guidelines driving the implementation of a service management architecture, called reflective architecture, that complies with the MAIS methodological approach.
Ontology is the core component in semantic Web applications. The employment of an ontology building method affects the quality of ontology and the applicability of ontology language. A weighted evaluation approach for ontology building guidelines is presented in this paper. The evaluation criteria are based on an existing classification scheme of a semiotic framework for evaluating the quality of conceptual models. A sample of Web-based ontology building method guidelines is evaluated in general and experimented with when using data from a case study in particular. Directions for further refinement of ontology building methods are discussed.
Systems development methods are used to express and communicate knowledge about systems and software development processes; i.e. methods encapsulate knowledge. Since methods encapsulate knowledge, they also encapsulate rationale. Rationale can in this context be understood as the reasons and arguments for particular method prescriptions. In this paper we show how the combination of two different aspects of method rationale can be used to shed some light on the communication and apprehension of methods in systems development. This is done by way of clarifying how method rationale is present at three different levels of method existence. By mapping existing research on methods onto this model, we conclude the paper by pointing at some research areas that deserve attention and where method rationale could be used as an important analytic tool.
Many companies are using model-based techniques to offer a competitive advantage in an increasingly globalised systems development industry. Central to model-based development is the concept of models as the basis from which systems are generated, tested and maintained. The availability of high-quality tools, and the ability to adopt and adapt them to the company practice, are important qualities. Model interchange between tools becomes a major issue. Without it, there is significantly reduced flexibility, and a danger of tool lock-in. We explore the use of a standardised interchange format (XMI) for increasing flexibility in a company environment. We report on a case study in which a systems development company has explored the possibility of complementing their current proprietary tools with open source products for supporting their model-based development activities. We found that problems still exist with interchange, and that the technology needs to mature before industrial- strength model interchange becomes a reality.
Large amounts of data are managed by organizations, available to be viewed and analysed from multiple perspectives, which becomes a fundamental resource to the effectiveness of the organizations. An organization can achieve full benefit from the available information by managing its data resource, through the planning of its exploitation and its maintenance. The concept of data repository fulfils these requirements, due to the fact that it contains the de-scription of all types of data produced, managed, maintained and exchanged in an organization. This paper describes an experience of the use of an existing repository of conceptual schema, representing a wide amount of entities of in-terest for Central Public administration, in order to produce the corresponding repository of the administrations located in a region. Several heuristics are de-scribed and experiments are reported.
UML is used for at least two purposes: OO software design, and conceptual modeling. However, UML's origins in software engineering may limit its appropriateness for conceptual modeling. Evermann and Wand [5,6,7] have developed a set of formal ontological rules that constrain the construction of UML diagrams to reflect underlying ontological assumptions about the real world. This paper examines issues in implementing that functionality in a UML CASE tool. The main contribution of our research is to distinguish four categories of rules for implementation purposes, reflecting the relative importance of different rules and the degree of flexibility available in enforcing them. We further propose four implementation strategies that correspond to these rule categories, and identify some rules that cannot be implemented without changing the UML specification. We have implemented the rules in an open-source UML CASE tool, providing a proof-of-concept demonstration of the feasibility and usefulness of the approach.
This article reports the findings from a controlled experiment where both the comprehensibility and the quality of UML interaction diagrams were investigated in two application domains: management information system (MIS) and real-time (RT) system. The results indicate that collaboration diagrams are easier to comprehend than sequence diagrams in RT systems, while there is no difference in their comprehension in MIS. With respect to quality of diagrams constructed by analysts, in MIS collaboration diagrams are of better quality than sequence diagrams, while in RT there is no significant difference in their quality.
UML is a standard modelling language that is able to specify a wide range of object-oriented concepts. However, the diagrams it offers are many times accused of lack of rigour to specify precisely some critical requirements and therefore it is often needed to complement the semantics of the UML diagrams using OCL or any other formal language. In the case of activity diagrams (used here to describe use cases), OCL is not the most appropriate formal language, as it does not represent temporal aspects directly. Our aim is to complement the well-accepted simplicity of activity diagrams with a temporal logic specification to give a more precise semantics to the final model. This specification can be further used to validate requirements against the stakeholders using animation techniques.
We present an initial framework resulting from our ongoing research concerning modelling strategies. Our approach is rooted in a subjectivist, communication-based view on modelling. Under this approach, models are viewed as the result of modelling dialogues, which are a specialized sub-type of the diverse conversations that constitute a system development conversation at large. By focussing on the process of modelling instead of properties of models or modelling languages, we expect, eventually, to be able to better understand and deal with some currently problematic aspects of modelling, in particular model validation in context. We sketch plans for an environment for studying modelling conversations and strategies.
The goal-oriented paradigm is widely popular in Requirements Engineering. However, the central notion of goal remains one of the most controversial in the field. A possible cause might be that research has devoted too little attention to studying the ontological foundations of goal-oriented languages. In this paper, we have studied the case of GRL, the goal-oriented requirements language being standardized by the ITU. Our analysis followed the template-based approach proposed by Opdahl and Henderson-Sellers. After defining a metamodel for GRL, we have applied the template to each of its constructs to extract and formalize detailed syntactic and semantic information. The semantic part of the template focuses on establishing a mapping between a construct and its meaning, defined in term of the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology. Evaluations of both GRL and the template are provided as well as suggestions to improve them.
The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is an initiative of the Object Management Group (OMG) to model-centric software development. MDA distinguishes different kinds of models: Platform Independent Models (PIM), Platform Specific Models (PSM) and code models. Metamodeling plays a key role in MDA. A combination of formal specification techniques and metamodeling can help us to address Model-Driven Developments (MDD). In this paper we describe a MDA framework that comprises the NEREUS metamodeling notation, a system of transformation rules to bridge the gap between UML/OCL and NEREUS and, the definition of MDA-based components and model/metamodeling transformations. NEREUS can be viewed as an intermediate notation open to many other formal languages. In particular, we show how to integrate NEREUS with algebraic languages such as CASL.
The evolution of research and practice in the area of conceptual in-formation systems modelling during more than four decades is reviewed. This is done from the author's Scandinavian perspective, and focuses on activities and results related to research and practice in the early system development phases. It covers the CODASYL Development Committee's Language Structure Group's report 'An Information Algebra' in 1962, continues with the introduc-tion of the infological approach and elementary messages by Langefors in 1965, comments on a large number of modelling methods published in the 1970-ies and 80-ies as well as the report 'Concepts and Terminology of the Conceptual Schema and the Information Base' reporting the work by the ISO working group ISO/TC97/SC5/WG5 in the early 80-ies. Approaches which are based on a temporal and deductive view of the application domain as well as object-oriented modelling languages are acknowledged. The talk continues with a dis-cussion of principles and research problems related to a topic we call 'Enter-prise Modelling' and 'Ontology Modelling'. The role of conceptual modelling in information systems development during all these decades is seen as an ap-proach for capturing fuzzy, ill-defined, informal 'real-world' descriptions and user requirements, and then transforming them to formal, in some sense com-plete, and consistent conceptual specifications. During the last two decades an additional role of modelling has evolved - to support user and stakeholder par-ticipation in enterprise analysis and requirements formulation and in develop-ment of shared conceptualisations of specific domains. The talk concludes that the gap between what is current thinking in research of conceptual modelling and current thinking in practice still seems to be rather wide.
Some information modeling approaches allow instances of relationships to be treated as entities in their own right. In the Unified Modeling Language (UML), this is called 'reification', and is mediated by association classes. In Object-Role Modeling (ORM), this is called 'objectification' or 'nesting'. While this modeling option is rarely supported by industrial versions of Entity-Relationship Modeling (ER), some academic ER versions do support it. Objectification is related to the linguistic activity of nominalization, of which two flavors may be distinguished: circumstantial; and propositional. In practice, objectification is prone to misuse, and some modeling approaches provide incomplete or flawed support for it. This paper analyzes objectification in-depth, shedding new light on its fundamental nature, and providing practical guidelines on using objectification to model information. Because of its richer semantics, the main graphic notation used is that of ORM. However, the main ideas are relevant to UML and ER as well.
Evaluation of modelling languages is important both to be able to select the most suitable languages according to the needs, and to improve existing languages. In this paper Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is presented and analytically evaluated according to the Semiotic Quality Framework. BPMN is a functionally oriented language well suited for modeling within the domain of business processes, but probably also general processes not only within the business domain. The evaluation indicates that BPMN is easily learned for simple use, and Business Process Diagrams (BPDs) are relatively easy to understand. Tools may fairly easily map BPDs into the BPEL4WS format, but executable systems then require creation of Web Services representing the Activities in BPDs. An evaluation according to the BWW ontology is useful for finding ontological discrepancies, and the semiotic framework is useful for evaluating quality on a relatively general level. These methods thus complement each other.
We describe in this paper an insurance company that has recently wanted to standardize on business process modeling language. To perform the evaluation, a generic framework for assessing the quality of models and modeling languages was specialized to the needs of the company. Three different modeling languages were evaluated according to the specialized criteria. The work illustrates the practical utility of the overall framework, where language quality features are looked upon as means to enable the creation of models of high quality. It also illustrates the need for specializing this kind of general framework based on the requirements of the specific organization.
Business Process Models are typically used to express inter or intra - enterprise business activities/processes. Contractual obligations need to be fulfilled through execution of business processes on behalf of the contracting parties . To do so, business contract terms and conditions need to be semantically integrated to existing internal business process models. Contract obligation, performance, non-performance and other related concepts have been expressed as conceptual models in a Multi-Tier Contract Ontology (MTCO). Based on the MTCO, business process modelers may model the contract obligation fulfillment process as Contract Workflow Models (CWM) using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) diagrams. The paper discusses the ongoing research and choices made in the semantic translation from contract obligations to CWM - BPMN Diagrams. Some of the contract workflow patterns are also presented.
Information Systems (IS) research has so far been primarily concerned with the development of new modeling languages, techniques, and methods. Also, evaluation approaches have been developed in order to assess the appropriateness of a modeling approach in a given context. Both modeling and evaluation approaches, however, lack epistemological rigor, leading to problems regarding the applicability of a certain modeling language in a given context on the one hand, and regarding the feasibility of certain evaluation approaches towards certain modeling questions on the other hand. We therefore argue for a philosophical-paradigmatic discussion of evaluation methods for conceptual modeling languages in order to assess their applicability in given modeling contexts and present our research in progress towards a framework for paradigmatic discussion on model evaluation.
Usually, the process of development of services available as web applications considers only functional requirements. Since, an evergrowing number of users take advantage of di erent kinds of communi- cation channels and devices, this process must be revised by considering new aspects: quality of service (QoS), user pro les and technical charateristics of channels. In previous works, we proposed a methodology that provides a rational to formalize the redesign process of existing services to support multi-channel access. This paper extends our approach and highlights how the QoS dimensions can be considered quantitatively in the different phases of the methodology. Moreover, an hybrid approach that allows the QoS evaluation, during the development of a service, is proposed.
Process templates are stored as valuable resources and then are retrieved and reused in other projects. In order to find a desired template, the semantics of various process templates should be machine-readable and interoperable. However, the heterogeneity of both model representations and modeling languages makes it difficult to reuse the templates. Here we adopt one of the emerging semantic web techniques - the semantic annotation of process templates in order to enhance the interoperability for better reuse of process templates. Our semantic annotation consists of three basic parts: model profile, model content and meta model annotation. A general process ontology and domain ontologies are referenced as the annotation information. Given process templates annotated by ontology, they are abstracted from language-specific details but to the level of necessary details for process templates to be reused.
We propose a lightweight approach that provides mechanisms for dynamic agent behavior at run-time. Agent collaborations are modeled in UML diagrams and agent behaviors are encoded in XML-based business rules. The combination of these captures the behavioral requirements and governs interagent and intra-agent behaviors. A CASE tool has been developed to enable the dynamic specification of agent behaviors and the generation of the agent systems. Agents get the appropriate rules in XML format and then translate and execute them at run-time. These rules are externalized and so maintenance effort is reduced, since there is no need to recode and regenerate the agent system. Rather, the system model is easily configured by users and agents will always get up-to-date rules to execute at run-time. The approach is illustrated with the aid of an e-business example and its efficacy discussed.
The paper is focused on a concept-based query language that permits querying by using only application domain concepts. The query language has features making it simple and transparent for end-users: each query operation is completely defined by its result signature and nested operation's signatures; a query's signature represents an unordered set of application domain concepts; join predicates are not to be specified in an explicit form. In addition, the paper introduces constructions of closures and contexts as applied to the language. The constructions permit querying some indirectly associated concepts as if they are associated directly and adopting queries to user's needs without rewriting. All the properties make query creation and reading simpler in comparison with other known query languages. This query language is named as SCQL (Semantically Complete Query Language).
Traditional modeling techniques typically focus on the static part of databases and ignore their dynamic part (e.g., queries or data-centric workflows). In this paper, we first introduce and sketch a graph-based model that captures relations, views, constraints and queries. We then present HECATAEUS, a tool for implementing and visualizing the above framework.
Apart from the contribution by paper authors, the quality of this workshop depends on no small way on the generous contribution of time and effort by the program committee. Their work is greatly appreciated. We also express our sincere thanks to the CAiSE organizing committee, especially the CAiSE Workshop organizers Jaelson Castro, (Univ. Federal de Pernambuco, Brasil) and Ernest Teniente (Univ. Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain) for overseeing the workshop programs, and providing the local support and facilities needed for the smooth running of the workshop. Enjoy the workshop, and Porto! We look forward to your continuing support for EMMSAD.