Christian Tunjic

Orthographic Service Modeling

As the size and complexity of services has grown over the years, so has the number of different models and view types used to visualize them. However, in most development environments used today, views are usually organized in a fairly simple way within an arrangement of trees, and are often mixed arbitrarily with the artifacts they contain or visualize. In this position paper we propose a new paradigm for creating, organizing and managing the different views that are required in modern software development projects inspired by the orthographic projection paradigm that has been used for many years in other engineering disciplines. The approach therefore makes software engineering environments more like computer-aided design (CAD) tools for physical products. After explaining the basic idea behind the approach, which we refer to as Orthographic Service Modeling (OSM), we outline its three key ingredients - (1) on- demand view generation, (2) dimension-based navigation (3) and an inherently view-based method.

Enhancing classic transformation languages to support multi-level modeling

As practical tools for disciplined multi-level modeling have begun to mature, the problem of supporting simple and efficient transformations to-and-from multi-level models to facilitate interoperability has assumed growing importance. The challenge is not only to support efficient transformations between multi-level models, but also between multi-level and two-level model content represented in traditional modeling infrastructures such as the UML and programming languages. Multi-level model content can already be accessed by traditional transformation languages such as ATL and QVT, but in a way that is blind to the ontological classification information they contain. In this paper, we present an approach for making rule-based transformation languages “multi-level aware” so that the semantics of ontological classification as well as linguistic classification can be exploited when writing transformations.

A prototype implementation of an orthographic software modeling environment

Orthographic Software Modeling (OSM) is a view-centric software engineering approach that aims to leverage the orthographic projection metaphor used in the visualization of physical objects to visualize software systems. Although the general concept of OSM does not prescribe specific sets of views, a concrete OSM environment has to be specific about the particular views to be used in a particular project. At the University of Mannheim we are developing a prototype OSM environment, nAOMi, that supports the views defined by the KobrA 2.0 method, a version of KobrA adapted for OSM. In this paper we provide an overview of the KobrA 2.0 metamodel underpinning nAOMi and give a small example of its use to model a software system.

Criteria for Orthographic Viewpoints

Although there is growing consensus on the need to move to comprehensive, view-based approaches to software engineering, there is much less consensus on what views and viewpoints should be used to do this and what relationship they should have to the system being viewed. One approach that aims to provide a simple yet powerful approach to view-based software engineering is the orthographic modeling approach inspired by the orthographic projection technique used in CAD systems. However, the criteria that a set of views and viewpoints should fulfill to be regarded as orthographic have never been clearly defined. Nor have the criteria that a set of dimensions should fulfill in order to be regarded as orthogonal. In this paper we aim to take some initial steps towards defining such criteria. After first identifying some of the main weaknesses in existing view-based modeling approaches we provide an overview of orthographic modeling and clarify some of the principles that underpin it.

Fundamental Realization Strategies for Multi-view Specification Environments

All Enterprise Architecture Modeling (EAM) approaches revolve around the use of multiple, inter-related views to describe the properties of a system and its surrounding environment - that is, they are multi-view specification (MVS) approaches. However, there is still little consensus on how such modeling environments should be realized and on the pros and cons of the different fundamental design choices involved in building them. In this paper we identify the different design choices put forward in the literature, evaluate their mutual compatibility, and discuss the extent to which they scale up to large enterprise systems. Finally we present some additional choices and outline some of the key features that future multi-view modeling environments should ideally support.

Supporting the Model-Driven Organization Vision through Deep, Orthographic Modeling

In a model-driven organization, all stakeholders are able to deal with information about an organization in the way that best supports their goals and tasks. In other words, they are able to select models of the organization at the optimal level of abstraction (e.g. platform independent) in the optimal form (e.g. graph-based) and with the optimal scope (e.g. a single component). However, no approach exists today that seamlessly supports this capability over the entire life-cycle of organizations and the IT systems that drive them. Enterprise architecture modeling approaches focus on supporting model-based views of the static architecture of organizations (i.e. enterprises) but generally provide little if any support for operational views. On the other hand, business intelligence approaches focus on providing operational views of organizations and usually do not accommodate static architectural views. In order to fully support the model-driven organization (MDO) vision, therefore, these two worlds need to be unified and a common, natural and uniform approach for defining and supporting all forms of views on organizations, at all stages of their life-cycles, needs to be defined and implemented in an efficient and scalable way. This paper presents a vision for achieving this goal based on the notions of deep and orthographic modeling. After explaining the background to the problem and introducing these two paradigms, the paper presents a novel approach for unifying them, along with a prototype implementation and example.

Synchronization of Projective Views on a Single-Underlying-Model

View-based modeling approaches based on the notion of a Single Underlying Model (SUM) revolve around the use of projective views to manipulate the SUM. Defining view types is a challenging task since it includes the definition of view element types and the definition of transformations to extract data from the SUM to populate the view. The latter can be supported by an automatic transformation mechanism that easies the definition and maintenance of transformations. Such an approach leads to simple and fast definition of views and easies the work of the methodologist in defining relations between the elements in the SUM and the elements in the views.