Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Large open electronic markets rely on some sort of self-organization, primarily those of a market economy. To function properly and continuously there must be an element of trust among the participants. Trust is achieved by imposing a legal framework within which all business is conducted. This paper examines how well the agent concept can, both as a design method and a software technology, support market participants in concluding legal contracts.

This paper describes the evolution of hardware and software technology over the past three decades, focusing on approaches for building interactive information systems and web applications. Successive generations of technology have used advances in hardware and software technology, along with increasingly sophisticated development methods and tools, to reduce development times and to produce a better user experience. After describing the key technology characteristics of each generation, this paper also describes the evolution of a specific methodology, User Software Engineering, from its origins in the 1970’s to its applicability to the development of modern Web applications.

From an Information Systems (IS) perspective, a myriad of specific approaches exist to deal with the different parts of a software production process. How to align them correctly taking a conceptual approach is still a very open problem. Instead of facing how to incrementally improve pre-existing methods, more and more proposals that are based on different paradigms or combine current IS concepts in some apparently innovative way are introduced. The conclusion of all of this is that, more than ever, we should concentrate on the essentials of IS modelling. A set of precise concepts is essential to be able to understand what each technique offers. A conceptual reference framework is needed to appropriately align the different proposals. This work presents a conceptual framework to be used for the conceptual alignment of software production methods. As a practical application, it is applied to the OO-Method, which is a conceptual model-based software production method, in order to show how the different pieces of the method fit the proposed framework conceptually.

It is widely recognized that in system development, innovative requirements and innovative architectural solutions need to be co-developed. Yet, no comprehensive method exists to support the co-development of requirements and architecture. This chapter describes the COSMOD-RE method for supporting the co-development of requirements and architectural artefacts at four distinct levels of abstraction. An overview on the method is provided, and the activities for supporting the development of system requirements and the functional system architecture are described.

To improve the focus on security and other dependability issues it might be useful to include such concerns into mainstream diagram notations used in information systems analysis. In particular, there have been proposals introducing inverted icons to depict functionality wanted in the system (e.g., misuse cases) or actors with malicious intent (in i* diagrams), thus addressing security issues in such notations. But there are many other modelling notations also used in early systems development, and the focus on dependability could be strengthened if these provided similar means to incorporate dependability issues. This paper looks at the possibilities for addressing dependability in information models and workflow models. To maintain visual consistency with the abovementioned proposals, it is suggested to apply inverted icons also here. In information models this can be used to represent misinformation, and in workflow models malicious or fraudulent actions attacking the business process. In both cases, inversion of icons contributes to clearly distinguishing between what is wanted in the system and what must be avoided, thus enabling a visual representation of dependability concerns.

Iteration is a fundamental principle of information system engineering, yet the concept remains under-theorized in the literature. In this chapter we articulate a lens for studying iteration through four types of iterating artifacts: concepts, representations, instantiations, and methodologies, and we apply this lens to a variety of prescriptive approaches to system development. Our review of these approaches suggests that iteration across one artifact or set of artifacts may substitute for iterations across another. We conclude with a reflection on how it is not the presence of iteration that distinguishes between methodologies, as iteration can be assumed in all system development efforts. Rather, the that various methodologies imply, and the across specific artifacts that the various approaches prescribe do more to differentiate between methodologies.

Over the past 30 years or more information systems engineers have attempted to improve the cost effectiveness of systems development by improving requirements capture and analysis, by structured design, by utilising design languages that can be verified for consistency more or less formally and in some cases matched formally to requirements. While data design methods improved significantly with relational and extended relational paradigms, program design was not so successful. Jackson input-process-output and hierarchic design methods gave way to functional. Object-orientation soon came up against the inability of hierarchic/inheritance mechanisms to represent the real world requirements which has more complexity. Aspect-oriented programming was intended to resolve this problem but appears to have caused even more confusion. Meantime, a bringing together of functional and object-oriented process design as service-oriented architecture, together with relational data design principles, has given some hope for progress. Early system design achieved device independence of programs and then (with relational technology) true data independence. However, general virtualisation of computing, data storage and communications resources has hitherto not been possible. The GRIDs paradigm achieves this latest step forward. Starting with metacomputing (linked supercomputers) in the USA, the European vision of GRIDs is a general IT ‘surface’ with which the end-user interacts intelligently to determine her requirement and the system behind the surface offers a ‘deal’ to fulfil the request. Beneath the ‘surface’ various architectures have been attempted. The GLOBUS architecture provides computational scheduling, but does not virtualise generally computation, data or network resources. The bringing together of WS (web services) with the GRIDs environment led to OGSA (Open Grids Services Architecture). Work with OGSA has exposed two major problems: the operating system facilities provided today are inadequate in various areas including security and resilience and the multiple layers in the service-oriented architecture expose too much complexity. The latest thinking revolves around SOKU (Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities) which are composed of self-managing, self-assembling, self-organising and self-destroying processes with exposed parametric and data input/output interfaces as well as its service description including non-functional aspects. The key is metadata (describing the SOKU processes and the data resources) and its use.

Adaptivity in information systems is proposed in the context of mobile and multichannel applications of information systems. Adaptivity may range from interaction functionality to variable ways of providing services according to a variable context of use. The paper will focus on adaptivity of process-based service provisioning, following a service oriented approach, to information system development, in which services are selected, deployed, and invoked in variable contexts. Support to self-healing features of service-based information systems will also be discussed.

Modeling approaches as we know them today started to be used in a large scale around 30 years ago, using DFDs and ER-diagrams. Still the main focus is for intermediaries to document the knowledge as held by different stakeholders for further use, rather than for people themselves to use these means for knowledge representation for their own needs. Although useful e.g. in systems development, for modeling to have a larger effect, we propose a move the field to enable all knowledge workers to be active modelers. This chapter provides an overview of interactive models as an approach to support this vision, and gives an overview of the necessary future development to make this a reality on a large scale.

Conceptual schema-centric development (CSCD) is a research goal that reformulates the historical aim of automating information systems development. In CSCD, conceptual schemas would be explicit, executable in the production environment and the basis for the system’s evolution. To achieve the CSCD goal, several research problems must be solved. In this paper we identify and comment on sixteen problems that should be included in a research agenda for CSCD.