Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Service-centric systems pose new challenges and opportunities for requirements processes and techniques. This paper reports new techniques developed by the EU-funded SeCSE Integrated Project that enable service discovery during early requirements processes and exploit discovered services to enhance requirements specifications. The paper describes the algorithm for discovering services from requirements expressed using structured natural language, and demonstrates it using an automotive example. The paper also reports a first evaluation of the utility of the environment that implements this algorithm when improving the specification of requirements with retrieved services.

Despite the growing acceptance of SOA, service-oriented computing remains a computing mechanism to speed-up the design of software applications by assembling ready-made services. We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit of the SOA if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move towards a description of services in business terms, i.e. intentions and strategies to achieve them and to organize their publication, search and composition on the basis of these descriptions. In this way, it leverages on the SOA to an intentional level, the ISOA. We present , the model to describe intentional services, and to populate the service registry. We highlight its intention driven perspective for service description, retrieval and composition. Thereafter, we propose a methodology to determine intentional services that meet business goals. Finally, we introduce agent architecture to support model driven execution of intentional services.

With the rapid development of e-commerce over Internet, web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Nowadays, enterprises are able to outsource their internal business processes as services and make them accessible via the Web. Then they can dynamically combine individual services to provide new value-added services. A main problem that remains is how to discover desired web services. In this paper, we propose WSXplorer, a novel scheme for identifying potentially relevant web services given a textual description of services. In particular, we propose a new schema matching algorithm for supporting web-service operations matching. The matching algorithm catches not only structures, but even better semantic information of schemas. Based on service operations matching, the concept of is introduced to identify associations between web-service operations. We also propose a ranking strategy to satisfy a user’s top- requirements. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach can achieve high precision and recall ratio.

Enterprises increasingly form networked value constellations; networks of enterprises that can jointly satisfy complex consumer needs, while still focusing on core competencies. Information technology and information systems play an important role for such constellations, for instance to coordinate inter-organizational business processes and/or to offer an IT-intensive product, such as music or games. To do successful requirements engineering for these information systems it is important to understand its context; being here the constellation itself. To this end, business value modeling approaches for networked constellations, such as , BMO, or REA, can be used. In this paper, we extend these business value modeling approaches to understand the of business value models. We introduce two dominant schools on strategic thinking: (1) the “environment” school and (2) the “core competences” school, and present the ontology that considers business strategy as a positioning problem in a complex environment. We illustrate the practical use and reasoning capabilities of the ontology by using a case study in the Dutch aviation industry.

Aligning Information Systems (IS) to organization’s strategic business objectives is one of organizations’ top preoccupations. Misalignment is considered as a reason of IT’s failure to improve organizational performance. If strategic alignment is relatively simple to understand, it is not so easy to implement. Our experience showed us that organizations are not really able to systematically evaluate whether there is alignment, mainly because of the lack of documentation on strategic alignment. This paper intends to deal with this issue by proposing an approach to describe organizations’ strategic objectives and its IS, in order to document and analyze strategic alignment, i.e. how the IS contributes to strategic objectives satisfaction. The proposed method, called ISA(Intentional Strategic Alignment), reuses organization documents as a basis to formalize strategic alignment. ISAwas created following the principles of an action research approach, which consists in developing the approach while exploring issues raised by the case study.

Hospitals strive to improve the quality of the healthcare they provide. To achieve this, they require access to health data. These data are sensitive since they contain personal information. Governments have legislation to ensure that privacy is respected and hospitals must comply with it. Unfortunately, most of the procedures meant to control access to health information remain paper-based, making it difficult to trace. In this paper, we introduce a framework based on the User Requirements Notation that models the business processes of a hospital and links them with legislation such as the Ontario Personal Health Information Privacy Act (PHIPA). We analyze different types of links, their functionality, and usefulness in complying with privacy law. This framework will help health information custodians track compliance and indicate how their business processes can be improved.

Internet users are becoming increasingly concerned about their personal information being collected and used by Web service providers. Since the privacy policies are mainly developed and maintained separately from the business process that collects and manipulates data, it is hard to perform analysis and management of the processes in terms of privacy policies. We propose a formal technique with which Web service providers describe the use and storage of requesters’ personal data. The description is integrated with a Web service protocol using an extended state machine model. Having such a conceptual model will enable model-driven development and management of Web service protocols with respect to their privacy aspects such as collection, disclosure, and obligation.

This paper presents an approach that uses policies to manage context-driven transactional Web services. Context feeds policies with details on Web services like current status, which permits aligning the behavior of these Web services to the transactional properties they need to satisfy. Context refers here to any information on the interactions a Web service initiates with peers and external environment. Three types of transactional properties are used namely pivot, compensatable, and retriable. Each property satisfaction calls for a set of policies that are specified with a policy language like WSPL. This paper also presents the adaptation strategy that supports developing context-driven transactional Web services. A prototype that implements this strategy is discussed in the paper, too.

Before a service invocation takes place, an agreement between the service provider and the service user might be required. Such an agreement is the result of a negotiation process between the two parties and defines how the service invocation has to occur. Considering the Service Oriented Computing paradigm, the relationship among providers and users is extremely loose. Traditional agreements are likely to concern long term relationships and to be manually performed. In this paper, we propose a model to generate service level agreement on-the-fly. Just before the invocation commences, the quality of the service is negotiated in order to generate a service level agreement tied to that specific invocation. Such an approach relies on a quality model that supports both users requirements and providers capabilities definition.

Software product lines (SPL) modeling has proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development. Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actually address the issue of deriving product requirements. Indeed, while the modeling approaches sell on requirements reuse, the associated derivation techniques actually focus on deriving and reusing technical product data.

This paper presents a method that intends to support requirements derivation. Its underlying principle is to take advantage of approaches made for reuse PL requirements and to complete them by a requirements development process by reuse for single products. The proposed approach matches users’ product requirements with PL requirements models and derives a collection of requirements that is (i) consistent, and (ii) optimal with respect to users’ priorities and company’s constraints. The proposed methodological process was validated in an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers.