Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

An important milestone in the evolution of the Web is the Semantic Web: a Web in which the semantics of the available content and functionality is made explicit. Web design methods, originally aimed at offering a well-structured, systematic approach to Web design, now face new opportunities and challenges: Semantic Web technology can be used to make the semantics of the conceptual design models explicit; however a major challenge is to (semi-) automatically generate the semantic annotations, effectively enabling the Semantic Web. In this paper, we describe how WSDM, a well-known Web design method, was adapted to use Semantic Web technology for its conceptual modeling and how this can be exploited to generate semantically annotated websites. We consider two types of semantic annotations: content-related annotations and structural annotations. The first type allows to describe the semantics of the content of the website, the latter are annotations that explicitly describe the semantics of the different structural elements used in the website.

Initial software quality requirements tend to be imprecise, subjective, idealistic, and context-specific. An extended characterization of the common Softgoal concept is proposed for representing and reasoning about such requirements during the early stages of the requirements engineering process. The types of information often implicitly contained in a Softgoal instance are highlighted to allow richer requirements to be obtained. On the basis of the revisited conceptual foundations, guidelines are suggested as to the techniques that need to be present in requirements modeling approaches that aim to employ the given Softgoal conceptualization.

In today’s ever-transforming business environment, information systems need to evolve in concert with changes in their organizational settings. In order to help system analysts conceptualize the co-evolution of organizations and information systems, we adopt an agent-oriented perspective to develop the Tropos Evolution Modeling Process for Organizations (TEMPO). Specifically, inspired by Kauffman’s NKC model, we introduce the concept of goal interface into the traditional agent-oriented Tropos methodology; within this interface, evolution is conceptualized as a negotiation process between agents. TEMPO is illustrated with a case study that demonstrates how to evolve a retail website under new European e-commerce legislation. TEMPO is also evaluated with a small behavioral experiment, which offers additional evidence on the usefulness of the approach.

Conceptual modelling in the area of data-intensive systems produces database schemata and a variety of systems characteristics, which ideally could be used to facilitate the generation of an implementation. This paper proposes a framework for the development of patterns and components that will permit a direct computation of the corresponding functions, whenever all system parameters and the schemata of the application are known. For this a theory of genericity that is based on the linguistic theory of government and binding (GB), which consists of a two-step specialization of ideas or raw utterances, is developed. This theory of GB genericity is applied to obtain generic workflows and the functionality involved in them.

The recent popularity of social software in the wake of the much hyped “Web2.0” has resulted in a flurry of activity around folksonomies, the emergent systems of classification that result from making public the individual users’ personal classifications in the form of simple free form “tags”. Several approaches have emerged in the analysis of these folksonomies including mathematical approaches for clustering and identifying affinities, social theories about cultural factors in tagging, and cognitive theories about their mental underpinnings. In this paper we argue that the most useful analysis is in terms of mental phenomena since naive classification is essentially a cognitive task. We then describe a method for extracting structural properties of free form user tags, based on the linguistic properties of the tags. This reveals some deep insights in the conceptual modeling behavior of naive users. Finally we explore the usefulness of the latent structural properties of free form “tag clouds” for interoperability between folksonomies from different services.

Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to the large number of interoperating components and semantic heterogeneity. Platform-based approaches such as service-oriented architectures address the technical integration of systems. However, a deep integration needs to cover the whole lifecycle of the interoperable system. We propose method engineering as a means for encoding situated knowledge about achieving interoperability in the form of method chunks. We analysed the field of interoperability for enterprise applications and propose that a tool modelling the business- and ICT-related choices in the form of method chunks is needed for a knowledge-based solution of interoperability problems. An industrial case is included to back our claims.

Though new technological trends and paradigms arise for developing complex software systems, systematic reuse continues to be an elusive goal. In this context, the adoption of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technologies introduces many challenges that still have not been fully overcome, such as the lack of comprehensive mechanisms to record and manage the required information for supporting COTS components selection. In this paper we present a domain analysis approach for gathering the information needed to describe COTS market segments as required for effective COTS components selection. Due to the diversity of the information to capture, we propose different dimensions of interest for COTS components selection that are covered by different domain models. These models are articulated by means of a single framework based on a widespread software quality standard.

During the metadata creation based on Common Warehouse Metamodel(CWM), the different experiences and views of describing data of organizations involved in metadata creation bring metadata on some problems inevitably, such as inconsistencies and redundancies. However, reasoning on CWM metadata for automatically detecting these problems is difficult because CWM metamodel and metadata lack precise semantics. In this paper, we formalize and reason on CWM metamodel and metadata in terms of a logic belonging to Description Logics, which are subsets of First-Order Logic. We distinguish consistency into horizontal consistency and evolution consistency. Towards evolution consistency, we extend CWM metamodel with version capabilities so that reasoning about inconsistency caused by evolution can be done. Then reasoning engine LOOM is applied to check consistency for the above two situations, the results are encouraging.

It is widely accepted that a requirement analysis phase is necessary to develop data warehouses (DWs) which adequately represent the information needs of DW users. Moreover, since the DW integrates the information provided by data sources, it is also crucial to take these sources into account throughout the development process to obtain a consistent representation. In this paper, we use multidimensional normal forms to define a set of Query/View/Transformation (QVT) relations to assure that the DW designed from user requirements agrees with the available data sources that will populate the DW. Thus, we propose a hybrid approach to develop DWs, i.e., we firstly obtain the conceptual schema of the DW from user requirements and then we verify and enforce its correctness against data sources by using a set of QVT relations based on multidimensional normal forms.

In this paper we describe the main results of a fifteen years research activity in the area of repositories of Entity-Relationship conceptual schemas. We first introduce a set of integration/abstraction primitives that are used in order to organize a large set of conceptual schemas in a repository. We describe the methodology conceived to produce the repository of schemas of central public administrations in Italy. Then we describe an heuristic methodology, applied in the production of the set of schemas of the public administrations of an italian region. We also compare the former exact methodology and the heuristic one according to their correctness, completeness, and efficiency. Finally, we show how such repositories can be used in eGovernment initiatives for planning activities and in the identification of projects. Further work highlights possible evolutions of the repositories toward enhanced semantic representations and usage.