EMMSAD 2007 was organized in Trondheim, Norway, on June 11-15, 2007. It was held in conjunction with CAiSE'07.
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.
The EMMSAD workshop series started in 1996. Over the years, EMMSAD has matured and is now recognized by researchers worldwide as a premier workshop focusing on the exploration and evaluation of modelling methods and methodologies. Similar to previous years, we had many good submissions. After an intensive reviewing process, we accepted 19 out of 33 papers. The submissions came from every corner of the globe. We have received submissions from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia and the USA. 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.
EMMSAD'07 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).
To assist the authors in finding outlet for their papers, we have been recommending top papers from the workshop to journals. In this vein, the accepted papers of this year's workshop will be considered for a special issue of World Scientific's International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems (IJCIS) or as book chapters in Idea Group's: Advances in Database Research Book Series.
Evidence-Based Web Engineering (WE) is necessary in order to (1) help industry practitioners in making rational decisions about technology adoption and (2) increase the acceptability of WE methodologies. Particularly, empirical data should be provided to support traditional WE claims such as increased productivity or better quality of the applications deployed using a WE methodology. Unfortunately the WE community is not yet familiar with either systematic quality evaluation issues or empirical research, and therefore tools and guidelines to ease this shift are necessary. In this paper we extend the traditional WE Development Process with quality evaluation and assurance activities that are compliant with the ISO/IEC 14598 set of standards and guarantee that Web applications developed with WE approaches fulfill certain quality criteria. This extension follows the MDA paradigm in order to ensure that the development productivity is not hampered by the additional focus on quality aspects.
The mere unmanageable amount of techniques for conceptual modeling of information systems poses a challenge both for users of existing techniques and for developers of new techniques. However, interpreting the emergence of new conceptual modeling techniques as a result of changing architectural paradigms for information systems seems to be inappropriate. Through inspection of prevalent architectural paradigms, we show that the derivation of requirements for respective modeling techniques has been neglected frequently and an appropriate connection between architectural paradigms and conceptual modeling techniques is lacking. Motivated by these findings we argue that primarily pragmatic considerations can and should guide the development of new conceptual modeling techniques.
We propose a three stage method development life cycle. The requirements engineering phase consists of elicitation and representation of method intentions, the design phase produces the architecture of the method and the construction phase consists of organizing method features in a coherent whole. We concentrate in this paper on the Design and Construction phases of the life cycle. We explain our notion of method architecture and organization and illustrate them. Finally we show the relevance of method architecture and organization in SME. The design and construction engineering phases of our life cycle are illustrated for a small SME example.
The discipline of situational method engineering (SME) promotes the idea of retrieving, adapting, and tailoring fragments, rather than complete methodologies, to specific situations. In order to succeed in creating good methodologies that best suit given situations, fragment representation and cataloguing are very important activities. We introduce a visual SME approach, whose roots are in domain engineering. This approach relies on the Application-based DOmain Modeling (ADOM) approach, which provides a framework for representing both applications and domains and validating them each against the other. Furthermore, the proposed ADOM-based approach aims at supporting all the SME-related activities, while in this paper we focus only on its fragment representation and cataloguing parts. The main advantages of the approach are its expressiveness, its support for specifying, constraining, and validating fragments and fragment types, its situational cataloguing abilities, and its accessibility to both software and method engineers.
A large number of strategies, approaches, meta models, techniques and procedures have been suggested to support method engineering (ME). Most of these artifacts, here called the ME artifacts, have been constructed, in an inductive manner, synthesizing ME practice and existing ISD methods without any theory-driven conceptual foundation. Also those ME artifacts which have some conceptual groundwork have been anchored on foundations that only partly cover ME. This paper presents an ontological framework, called OntoFrame, which can be used as a coherent conceptual foundation for the construction, analysis and comparison of ME artifacts. Due to its largeness, we describe here its modular structure composed of multiple ontologies. For each ontology, we highlight its purpose, sub-domains and theoretical foundations. We also mention the approaches and process by which OntoFrame has been constructed.
Experience plays an important role in Information Systems data modelling activity. This role is justified by the fact that determining the correct and consistent information requirements is a difficult and a challenging task. Currently three types of data modelling techniques are widely used: entity-attribute-relationship, object-relationship and object-oriented. There is not a consensus about which one is the best. This article proposes a framework, supported by a software tool, that uses Case-Based-Reasoning (CBR) methodology to represent and use experience in the data modelling task. The proposed framework does not depend on the data modelling technique nor on the modelling tool.
In this paper we will extend the ORM conceptual modeling language with constructs for capturing the relevant parts of an application ontology in a list of concept definitions. In addition we give the adapted ORM meta model and an adaptation of the accompanying Conceptual Schema Design procedure (CSDP) to cater for the explicit modeling of the relevant parts of an application- or domain ontology in a list of concept definitions.
We discuss how an Enterprise Modelling approach, namely C3S3P, has been applied in an automotive supplier company. The paper concentrates on the phases of the C3S3P development process such as Concept Study, Scaffolding, Scoping, and Requirements Modelling. We have also presented the concept of task pattern which has been used in the MAPPER project for capturing, documenting and sharing best practices concerning business processes in organisation. Within this application context we have analysed our experiences concerning stakeholder participation and task pattern development.
UML's complexity is regularly criticized by practitioners and researchers alike, who argue that such complexity is a considerable detriment to the adoption and use of UML in the field. Attempts have been made to assess and/or measure UML's complexity in a number of ways. Erickson and Siau proposed that a subset (kernel) of UML, composed of the most important constructs, could be equated with the complexity that practitioners face when using the modeling language. This research extends Erickson and Siau's work by proposing a UML kernel in three application areas, real-time, webbased and enterprise systems. Compared to other modeling methods and languages, UML is very complex. As such, identifying a UML kernel will help in the training and usage of the language. In this research, we conduct a Delphi study using UML experts, to identify three UML kernels, and a nonspecific kernel, which are then combined into a single kernel.
This paper presents experiences and reflections from using the EKD Enterprise Modeling method since the beginning of the 1990'ies. A large number of application cases have been carried out. The paper focuses on the EKD modeling language, the EKD modeling process and supporting tools.
Quality of modeling for information systems analysis and design is an important field of research in which, however, a comprehensive and generally acknowledged understanding is still outstanding. Notions of 'model' and 'quality' often remain vague and focus on particular aspects such as 'syntax'or 'semantics' rather than a comprehensive perspective on model quality. In this paper we argue that it is foremost the question of modeling pragmatics that is of pertinence when trying to ascertain the quality of a modeling artefact. We illustrate how pragmatic concerns mediate traditional conceptions of model quality. We refer to the well-established Bunge-Wand-Weber representation model and discuss how pragmatic concerns affect the understanding of model quality in addition to the quality criteria provided by such ontology-based theories of modeling. We apply the formalism provided by Kuehne to clarify the influence of pragmatic concerns on modeling as a mapping activity with choices.
This paper aims to contribute to the area of conceptual model quality assessment and improvement. We present a preliminary modelling process-oriented 'Quality of Modelling' framework (QoMo), mainly based on the estab-lished SEQUAL framework for quality of models. QoMo is based on knowl-edge state transitions, cost of the activities bringing such transitions about, and a goal structure for activities-for-modelling. Such goals are directly linked to concepts of SEQUAL. We discuss how goals for modelling can be linked to a rule-based way of describing processes for modelling. Such process descrip-tions hinge on strategy descriptions, which may be used descriptively (for studying/analysing real instances of processes) as well as prescriptively (for the guiding of modelling processes). Descriptive utility of the framework is critical for the quality/evaluation angle on processes-for-modelling, and reflects the main intended contribution of this paper.
In information systems modeling, the business domain being mod-eled often exhibits subtyping aspects that can prove challenging to implement in either relational databases or object-oriented code. In practice, some of these aspects are often handled incorrectly. This paper examines a number of subtyp-ing issues that require special attention (e.g. derivation options, subtype rigidity, subtype migration), and discusses how to model them conceptually. Because of its richer semantics, the main graphic notation used is that of Object-Role Mod-eling (ORM). However, the main ideas could be adapted for UML and ER, so these are also included in the discussion. A basic implementation of the pro-posed approach has been prototyped in an open-source ORM tool.
In this paper we will present the results of research into factoriented business service modeling. The set of modeling constructs that are defined in this paper are fully 'compatible' with the models in the dataoriented perspective in the fact oriented school of conceptual modeling.
The rapid evolution of the area of Web Engineering has motivated the proposal of several methods and frameworks for the development of Web Information Systems (WISs). In particular, it is becoming more and more common to use containerbased architectures and frameworks when it comes to their development. Following this idea, we have proposed a method for designing frameworkbased WISs, called FrameWeb. and, in this paper, we present FrameWeb's UML profile for modeling framework components in design models.
Conceptual models are an important repository for knowledge in companies and public institutions. The retrieval of this knowledge can prepare reorganisations projects and support IT investment decisions. However, so far this information source has hardly been utilized in automated analyses. We argue that if modelling languages are endowed with specific characteristics the resulting models can be analysed in an automatic manner. We formally show that with such languages: (1) type, synonym, homonym, and abstraction conflicts are eliminated as well as (2) the identification of semantically equivalent model elements can be traced back to finding syntactic ones.
Introducing process-aware information systems (PAIS) in enterprises (e.g., workflow management systems, case handling systems) is associated with high costs. Though cost evaluation has received considerable attention in software engineering for many years, it is difficult to apply existing evaluation approaches to PAIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these techniques to deal with the complex interplay of the many technological, organizational and project-driven factors which emerge in the context of PAIS engineering projects. In response to this problem this paper proposes an approach which utilizes simulation models for investigating costs related to PAIS engineering projects. We motivate the need for simulation, discuss the design and execution of simulation models, and give an illustrating example.
In this paper, we pursue a modelling approach to address security requirements for multi-agent systems (MAS). This will allow developers to account for both the system and agent-specific security requirements of a MAS during the requirements phase and throughout the whole Software Development Lifecycle of the system. We focus on autonomy, mobility and cooperation of individual agents and how these create additional security vulnerabilities to the system. In proposing a set of generic modelling primitives for these engendered requirements in the analysis of the MAS, we extend our recently proposed MAS metamodel.
Insider threat is becoming comparable to outsider threat in frequency of security events. This is a worrying situation, since insider attacks have a high probability of success because insiders have authorized access and legitimate privileges. Despite their importance, insider threats are still not properly addressed by organizations. We contribute to reverse this situation by introducing a framework composed of a method for identification and assessment of insider threat risks and of two supporting deliverables for awareness of insider threat. The deliverables are: (i) attack strategies structured in four decomposition trees, and (ii) a matrix which correlates defense strategies, attack strategies and control principles. The method output consists of goal-based requirements for the defense against insiders.
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.