Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The goal of automating information systems building was stated in the sixties. Forty years later it is clear that the goal has not been achieved in a satisfactory degree. One of the problems has been the lack of standards in languages and platforms. In this respect, the recent efforts on standardization provide an opportunity to revive the automation goal. This is the main purpose of this paper. We have named the goal “conceptual schema-centric development” (CSCD) in order to emphasize that the conceptual schema should be the center of the development of information systems. We show that to develop an information system it is necessary to define its conceptual schema and that, therefore, the CSCD approach does not place an extra burden on developers. In CSCD, conceptual schemas would be explicit, executable in the production environment and the basis for the system evolution. To achieve the CSCD goal it is necessary to solve many research problems. We identify and comment on a few problems that should be included in a research agenda for CSCD. Finally, we show that the CSCD goal can be qualified as a grand challenge for the information systems research community.

To cope with the ever increasing diversity of markup languages, programming languages, tool kits and interface development environments, conceptual modeling of user interfaces could bring a framework for specifying, designing, and developing user interfaces at a level of abstraction that is higher than the level where code is merely manipulated. For this purpose, a complete environment is presented based on conceptual modeling of user interfaces of information systems structured around three axes: the models that characterize a user interface from the end user’s viewpoint and the specification language that allows designers to specify such interfaces, the method for developing interfaces in forward, reverse, and lateral engineering based on these models, and a suite of tools that support designers in applying the method based on the models. This environment is compatible with the Model-Driven Architecture recommendations in the sense that all models adhere to the principle of separation of concerns and are based on model transformation between the MDA levels. The models and the transformations of these models are all expressed in UsiXML (User Interface eXtensible Markup Language) and maintained in a model repository that can be accessed by the suite of tools. Thanks to this environment, it is possible to quickly develop and deploy a wide array of user interfaces for different computing platforms, for different interaction modalities, for different markup and programming languages, and for various contexts of use.

Genomic researchers use a number of heterogeneous data sources including nucleotides, protein sequences, 3-D Protein structures, taxonomies, and research publications such as MEDLINE. This research aims to discover as much biological knowledge as possible about the properties and functions of the structures such as DNA sequences and protein structures and to explore the connections among all the data, so that the knowledge can be used to improve human lives. Currently it is very difficult to connect all of these data sources seamlessly unless all the data is transformed into a common format with an id connecting all of them. The state-of-the-art facilities for searching these data sources provide interfaces through which scientists can access multiple databases. Most of these searches are primarily text based, requiring users to specify keywords using which the systems search through each individual data source and returns results. The user is then required to create the connections between the results from each source. This is a major problem because researchers do not always know how to create these connections. To solve this problem we propose a semantics-based mechanism for automatically linking and connecting the various data sources. Our approach is based on a model that explicitly captures the semantics of the heterogeneous data sources and makes them available for searching. In this talk I will discuss issues related to capturing the semantics of biological data and using these semantics to automate the integration of diverse heterogeneous sources.

Associations are a widely used construct of object-oriented languages. However, the meaning of associations for conceptual modelling of application domains remains unclear. This paper employs ontological analysis to first examine the software semantics of the association construct, and shows that they cannot be transferred to conceptual modelling. The paper then explores associations as ’semantic connections’ between objects and shows that this meaning cannot be transferred to conceptual modelling either. As an alternative to the use of associations, the paper proposes using shared properties, a construct that is rooted directly in ontology. An example from a case study demonstrates how this is applied. The paper then shows an efficient implementation in object-oriented programming languages to maintain seamless transitions between analysis, design, and implementation.

Integrity checking is aimed at efficiently determining whether the state of the information base is consistent after the application of a set of structural events. One possible way to achieve efficiency is to consider only the relevant instances that may violate an integrity constraint instead of the whole population of the information base. This is the approach we follow in this paper to automatically check the integrity constraints defined in a UML conceptual schema. Since the method we propose uses only the standard elements of the conceptual schema to process the constraints, its efficiency improvement can benefit any implementation of the schema regardless the technology used.

Ontologies play a key role in the realization of the Semantic Web. An ontology is used as an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization of a given domain. When such a domain evolves, the describing ontology needs to evolve too. In this paper, we present an approach that allows tracing evolution on the instance level. We use event types as an abstraction mechanism to define the semantics of changes. Furthermore, we introduce a new event-based approach to keep depending artifacts consistent with a changing instance base.

In this paper we propose an approach conceived to handle the interoperability in meta-environments. The paper first illustrates the relevance of model interoperability in the present software engineering applications; then, it presents the proposed approach, with a particular emphasis to the relevant role MOF and XMI play in it. Finally, it illustrates a prototype we have realized for verifying the applicability of the proposed approach in a real case, namely the Business Process Management domain.

Repository systems handle the management of metadata and meta-models. They act as data store with a custom-defined and dynamically adaptable system catalogue. This feature finds a useful application in systems such as process engines, collaborative and information systems, CASE tools and transformation engines, in which custom-defined catalogues are rarely available due to their complex nature. In this context repositories would improve those systems’ ability to adapt and allow for dynamic information discovery. Preserving the consistency of the repository data is a major challenge. Repository consistency has several aspects, the most important of which is structural consistency. It is insufficiently specified in the metadata and repository standards, and is incompletely implemented in existing systems. In this paper we propose a novel approach to enforcing structural consistency in MOF-based repositories. We describe its implementation in iRM/RMS – a prototypical OMG MOF-based repository system [35]. We show how this algorithm overcomes the deficiencies of the existing approaches and products.

Word processing systems ignore the fact that the history of a text document contains crucial information for its management. In this paper, we present database-based word processing, focusing on the incorporated document management system. During the creation process of a document, meta data are being gathered. This information is generated on the level of the whole document, on sections of a document or even on individual characters and is used for advanced retrieval by so-called dynamic folders, which are superior to advanced hierarchical file systems.

The notion of spatio-temporal multi-granularity is fundamental when modeling objects in GIS applications in that it supports the representation of the temporal evolutions of these objects. Concepts and issues in multi-granular spatio-temporal representations have been widely investigated by the research community. However, despite the large number of theoretical investigations, no comprehensive approaches, have been proposed dealing with the representation of multi-granular spatio-temporal objects in commercially available DBMSs. The goal of the work that we report in this paper is to address this gap. To achieve it, the paper first introduces an object-relational model based on OpenGis specifications described in SQL3. Several extensions are developed in order to improve the semantics and behavior for spatio-temporal data types introducing an approach to represent the temporal dimension in this model and the multi-representation of spatio-temporal granularities.