EMMSAD 2006 was organized in Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Luxembourg on June 5-9, 2006. It was held in conjunction with CAiSE'06.
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'06 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'06 is the eleventh in a very successful series of EMMSAD workshops, previously held in Crete, Barcelona, Pisa, Heidelberg, Stockholm, Interlaken, Toronto, Velden, Riga and Porto.
EMMSAD'06 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).
Similar to previous years, we had many good submissions. After an intensive reviewing process, we accepted 12 completed research papers for full presentations, and 4 research-in-progress papers for short presentations. The submissions came from every corner of the globe. We have submissions from Australia, New Zealand, Israel, USA, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. The International Program Committee consists of a group of well-known and highly qualified researchers. The success of EMMSAD is largely due to their generous contribution of time and effort. To assist the authors in finding outlet for their papers, we have been recommending top papers from the workshop to journals.
Extended versions of the best EMMSAD 2006 papers have been included in Contemporary Issues in Database Design and Information Systems Development and Research Issues in Systems Analysis and Design, Databases and Software Development.
Various frameworks, meta models and reference models have been proposed to describe information systems development (ISD) and ISD methods. Most of them are informal or focused on some specific aspects. This paper presents an ISD ontology, which aims to provide an integrated conceptualization of ISD through anchoring it upon the contextual approach. The ISD ontology is composed of concepts, relationships and constraints referring to purposes, actors, actions and objects of ISD. It is presented as a terminology with defined concepts and in meta models in a UML-based ontology representation language. We believe that although not being complete the ISD ontology can promote the achievement of a shared understanding of contextual aspects in ISD. It can be used to analyze and compare existing frameworks and meta models and as a groundwork for engineering new ISD methods, or parts thereof.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
Globally distributed software development (GSD) and agile methods are two current and important trends in software and systems engineering. While agile methods seem to cope well with increasingly changing business environments, it is far from obvious how these light-weight processes can best contribute to GSD. In this paper, method rationale is proposed as an analytical tool to understand the values that underpin agile methods and how these map to the GSD domain. Specifically, the paper presents an initial analysis of the values and goals embraced by the 'agile manifesto' and compares briefly with partial results from an ongoing study on the use of agile methods in GSD.
T.A. Halpin. Business Rule Modality. In J. Krogstie, T.A. Halpin, and H.A. Proper, editors, Proceedings of the Workshop on Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Design (EMMSAD'06), held in conjunctiun with the 18th Conference on Advanced Information Systems (CAiSE'06), Luxembourg, Luxembourg, pages 383-394. Namur University Press, Namur, Belgium, 2006. ISBN-10: 2870375255
A business domain is typically constrained by business rules. In practice, these rules often include constraints of different modalities (e.g. alethic and deontic). Alethic rules impose necessities, which cannot, even in principle, be violated by the business. Deontic rules impose obligations, which may be violated, even though they ought not. Conceptual modeling approaches typically confine their specification of rules to alethic rules. This paper discusses one way to model deontic rules, especially those of a static nature. A formalization based on modal operators is provided, and some challenging semantic issues are examined from both logical and pragmatic perspectives. Because of its richer semantics, the main graphic notation used is that of Object-Role Modeling (ORM). However, the main ideas could be adapted for UML and ER as well. A basic implementation of the proposed approach has been prototyped in a tool that supports automated verbalization of both alethic and deontic rules.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
Goal modelling is emerging as a central requirements engineering (RE) technique. Unfortunately, current goal-oriented languages are not interoperable with one another or with modelling languages that address other modelling perspectives. This is a problem because the emerging generation of modeldriven information systems are likely to depend on coordinated use of several modelling languages to represent different perspectives on the enterprise and its proposed information system. The paper applies a structured approach to describe a well-known goal-oriented language, KAOS, by mapping it onto a philosophically grounded ontology. The structured approach facilitates language interoperability because, when other languages are described using the same approach, they become mapped onto the same ontology. The approach thereby provides an intermediate language for comparison, consistency checking, update reflection, view synchronisation and, eventually, model-to-model translation both between goal-oriented languages and between different languages.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
Method Engineering aims at providing effective solutions to build, improve and support evolution of development methodologies. Contributions, in the field of situational method engineering, aim at providing techniques and tools allowing to construct project-specific methodologies. But little research has focused on how to tailor such situational methodologies when used as organization-wide standard approaches. In this context, we propose an approach which consists in federating the method chunks built from the different project-specific methods in order to allow each project to share its best practices with the other projects without imposing to all of them a new and unique organization-wide method.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
Several different approaches to Situational Method Engineering exist. They differ in terms of the primary element of the paradigm: the method fragment definition. Here, we introduce four method fragment definitions from the literature and compare their metamodels according to structural and functional criteria. The structural comparison showed a general alignment of some concepts that are sometimes referred with different names while the study of the compositional aspects results in evidence of substantial differences.
Integration of new components into existing information systems (IS) is a challenging problem mainly because of the data sharing. In this paper we propose a situation-driven approach for IS components (IS-COTS) integration into existing IS. We claim that such an approach has to take into account a large number of situations and therefore has to be built by applying situational method engineering principals and defined as a collection of reusable method chunks. The main contribution of this work consists of the metamodel for ISCOTS definition, the specification of the requirements for the proposed approach and the illustration of our approach with three method chunks.
Design by contract is a well-established paradigm in software engineering. Bertrand Meyer first introduced the rigorous distinction between the responsibilities of service provider and service consumer for fine grain software artifacts (classes). This paper considers service contracts in the context of service-oriented architecture for complex enterprise information infrastructures. Identifying dependencies between applications with service contracts may help to master the complexity of numerous interconnected information systems and to ease evolution towards a service-oriented architecture. This paper proposes both a model and a methodology to systematically apply the notion of contract for structuring relationships and identifying dependencies between applications in a service oriented architecture.
In most UML-based methodologies, the analysis tasks include mainly modeling the functional requirements using use cases, and modeling the problem domain using a class diagram. Different methodologies prescribe different orders of carrying out these tasks, and there is no commonly agreed order for performing them. In order to find out whether the order of these analysis activities makes any difference, and which order leads to better results, we carried out a comparative experiment. Subjects were asked to create the two analysis models for a certain system in two opposite orders, and the qualities of the produced models were then compared. The results of the experiment reveal that the class diagram is of better quality when created as the first modeling task, while no significant effect of the analysis order was found on the quality of the use cases. We also found out that analysts prefer starting the analysis with data modeling.
In this paper we present an approach for specifying and prioritizing information security requirements in organizations. It is important to prioritize security requirements since hundred per cent security is not achievable and the limited resources available should be directed to satisfy the most important ones. We propose to link explicitly security requirements with the organization's business vision, i.e. to provide business rationale for security requirements. The rationale is then used as a basis for comparing the importance of different security requirements. A conceptual framework is presented, where the relationships between business vision, critical impact factors and valuable assets (together with their security requirements) are shown.
Conceptual modelling methods such as Object-Role Modelling (ORM) have traditionally been developed with the aim of providing conceptual models of database structures. More recently, however, such modelling languages have shown their use for modelling (the ontology) of domains in general. In these latter cases, the modelling effort results in a (formally based) conceptual reasoning systems using a domain calculus on top of a domain grammar. As the title suggests, this paper is primarily concerned with the application of ORM 'rigour' to the modelling of active domains. In doing so, we will position the logbook paradigm as a history-oriented extension of the traditional natural language approach of ORM, and define an accompanying domain calculus (the Object-Role Calculus) which is suitable to deal with active domains. Finally, we will show how specific views (with dedicated notations), which zoom in on different aspects (such as flow of activities and actor involvement) of active domains, can easily be derived.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
We describe the automation of a novel technique (NaLER) which was originally designed to facilitate legacy database model validation. The NaLER technique uses natural language sentences built from live database content to elicit validation judgments from domain experts. However, during implementation we discovered that the method we had adopted for the automation had a serendipitous side effect in that the legacy model first had to be mapped to an upper ontology. This normally difficult process was significantly eased by the sentence templates which are defined as part of the NaLER technique. It is this novel process of mapping, and the choice of ontology it entails, which forms the focus of the paper. We therefore describe here the process of mapping to the upper model, and investigate how the motivation for modeling impacted on the choice of modeling language. Finally we describe the prototype of a tool and how it fits with the development methodology.
Business Process Management (BPM) systems provide a broad range of facilities to enact and manage operational business processes. Ideally, these systems should provide support for the complete BPM life-cycle: (re)design, configuration, execution, control, and diagnosis of processes. In the research presented, we evaluate the support provided by the FileNet P8 BPM Suite, which is consistently ranked as one of the leading commercial BPM systems. Taking realistic business scenarios as starting point, we completed a full pass through the BPM cycle with several tools from the FileNet P8 BPM Suite. We checked whether the expected support was provided by these tools and we also tested their interoperability. The outcome of our evaluation is that although strong support exists for the configuration, execution and control phase, process diagnosis and process redesign receive limited support. Interoperability exists between all phases, except between the diagnosis and the design phase.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
This paper introduces a graphical modeling notation based on coloured petri nets for the performance and cost evaluation of mobile applications. When developing such an application some restrictions due to the low bandwith of mobile networks need to be considered. The notation can be used to model the workflow of an mobile application with just a small effort. The resulting model can be (automatically) transformed into a coloured petri net for simulating the communication behaviour depending on typical user interactions. The simulation results are an important basis for improving the applications performance and the occuring costs for using mobile networks.
Business practice shows that, often, different process models are employed in the various phases of the Business Process Management life cycle, each providing a different paradigm for capturing and representing the business process domain. Recently, significant efforts have been made to overcome the disintegration of process models by providing complementary language standards for process design (BPMN) and execution (BPEL), based on the claim that these languages are semantically integrated. However, the conceptual mapping between both languages remains unclear, thus it is undecided whether any BPMN diagram can be transformed to BPEL. In this paper we argue that there is conceptual mismatch between BPMN and BPEL that needs to be identified in order to guide the language integration process semantically. In our analysis we take into account the various perspectives of the Business Process Management life cycle, in particular business and technical analyst perspectives. Our approach is generic and can also be utilized as a guiding framework for identifying conceptual mismatch between other business process modeling languages.
[Paper] [Presentation] [Extended version]
To assure the quality of software processes, models play an important role. Process models represent the officially sanctioned software development processes in the organization. Although important, they are not sufficient, since the practices of software developers often differ considerably from the official process. Practice models, describing the way software development is really done, are an important source of information for validating the software process. Using conceptual graph theory, we present a formal method for representing and comparing process and practice models in various combinations. The method allows for differences between these models to be easily detected. Software developers, such as managers or engineers, can then interpret these differences to make recommendations for software process improvement.
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.