José Luis Garrido

Definition and use of Computation Independent Models in an MDA-based groupware development process

Groupware systems allow users to be part of a shared environment in order to carry out groupwork. Members of a group belong to organizations in which each one fulfils general and specific enterprise objectives. This paper presents a proposal, from the perspective of the CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) systems, for modelling enterprise organization and developing groupware applications. This research work focuses on two specific models for the proposal: a conceptual domain model formalized through a domain ontology, and a system model built using a UML-based notation. The second stems from the first and each provides a Computation Independent View (CIV) with different objectives. Respectively, they allow a common vocabulary for knowledge sharing to be established, and organization functional requirements to be specified, particularly those concerning communication, coordination and collaboration. Furthermore, these models are part of a concrete MDA-based development process of groupware applications that is also introduced.

Ontology-driven analysis of UML-based collaborative processes using OWL-DL and CPN

A key ingredient in system and organization modeling is modeling business processes that involve the collaborative participation of different teams within and outside the organization. Recently, the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for collaborative business modeling has been increasing, thanks to its human-friendly visual representation of a rich set of structural and behavioral views, albeit its unclear semantics. In the meantime, the use of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) has also been emerging, thanks to its clearly-defined semantics, hence being amenable to automatic analysis and reasoning, although it is less human friendly than, and also perhaps not as rich as, the UML notation - especially concerning processes, or activities. In this paper, we view the UML and the OWL as being complementary to each other, and exploit their relative strengths. We provide a mapping between the two, through a set of mapping rules, which allow for the capture of UML activity diagrams in an OWL-ontology. This mapping, which results in a formalization of collaborative processes, also sets a basis for subsequent construction of executable models using the Colored Petri Nets (CPN) formalism. For this purpose, we also provide appropriate mappings from OWL-based ontological elements into CPN elements. A case study of a mortgage granting system is described, along with the potential benefits and limitations of our proposal.

A survey on indoor positioning systems: Foreseeing a quality design

The plethora of current positioning technologies, each one with very different features, together with the variety of environments wherein they are to be implanted, force system architects to thoroughly consider the choice for one of them in an isolated way, without combinining several options. Additionally, what makes a technology very appropriate in a certain constraints, may be the result of failing to fulfill others. Thus, trade-off solutions are usually to be made. In this paper, we provide a survey on different positioning techniques in relation to the satisfaction of certain non-functional requirements such as accuracy, responsiveness, complexity, scalability, etc, so that it can serve as guide to system designers in their ultimate decisions. The survey serves as an analysis and intends to highlight the need to undertake a new design capable of adapting this kind of distributed systems to specific characteristics of those technologies and environments; this objective could be achieved on the basis of a design considering non-functional such as requirements.

A Coloured Petri Net Formalisation for a UML-Based Notation Applied to Cooperative System Modelling

New approaches are currently being adopted to address the development of cooperative systems, although not many standards exist that can be used to develop this type of interactive system. We apply the standard Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation within a methodology aimed at the analysis and design of such systems, and present a semantic formalisation of the UML notation used to model cooperative systems. The semantics and its application are described on the basis of translation schemes to Coloured Petri Nets and the benefits of formalisation are shown.

REUBI: A Requirements Engineering method for ubiquitous systems

Recent technological advances are increasing the spread of Ubiquitous Computing, leading to the appearance of numerous software systems, which benefit from the features of this new paradigm. Nevertheless, there are a lack of methodologies to properly support the development process of these systems. An important part of the Software Engineering lifecycle is the Requirements Engineering stage, as it grounds the bases for system design for their success. In particular, systematically addressing Non-Functional Requirements such as dynamicity and adaptation, that are important features of ubiquitous systems, eventually leads to higher quality designs. In this paper, a Requirements Engineering Method for the analysis of Ubiquitous Systems, called REUBI, is introduced. It is a goal-based method that represents the influence of context and adverse situations, providing an evaluation procedure to help in the decision making about objectives satisfaction. The proposal is illustrated through the analysis of a Positioning Service of a real system. Additionally, the application of the method has been evaluated by a team of software engineers for the analysis of an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) health care system.

Modelling Dynamic Group Behaviours

New technological challenges provoke continuous improvements in society, and thus, change the very conception of the world around us. Nowadays, communication and collaboration activities play an important role in the modern work organisation. The CSCW paradigm is a promising technology offering group support, but its success depends on the way in which real group organisation is captured. We propose a model to represent, describe and integrate the complex behaviour of groups in a suitable manner. After a review of the state of art, a conceptual framework to address the problem domain is presented, and a formalism is introduced by extending Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation to model foundations and peculiarities of groups.

A Communication Model to Integrate the Request-Response and the Publish-Subscribe Paradigms into Ubiquitous Systems

The Request-Response (RR) paradigm is widely used in ubiquitous systems to exchange information in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Nonetheless, there is also an emerging need for adopting the Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) paradigm in this kind of systems, due to the advantages that this paradigm offers in supporting mobility by means of asynchronous, non-blocking and one-to-many message distribution semantics for event notification. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both the RR and PubSub paradigms to support communications in ubiquitous systems and proposes an abstract communication model in order to enable their seamless integration. Thus, developers will be focused on communication semantics and the required quality properties, rather than be concerned about specific communication mechanisms. The aim is to provide developers with abstractions intended to decrease the complexity of integrating different communication paradigms commonly needed in ubiquitous systems. The proposal has been applied to implement a middleware and a real home automation system to show its applicability and benefits.

Analyzing a firm's international portfolio of technological knowledge: A declarative ontology-based OWL approach for patent documents

Patent databases contain large amounts of information about the inventions and metadata of corporate patents (such as the technological domain they belong to, their applicants, and inventors). These databases are available online but since they do not provide explicit information about the relationships between different patent metadata, it is not possible for computers to automatically process such relationships. Several patent ontologies have been proposed so far in order to provide patent knowledge bases with semantics by merging information from different databases and establishing a common vocabulary. However, previous ontology literature has paid limited attention to the representation of specific relationships among metadata and the design of reasoning procedures that would allow some information not explicitly specified in the databases or ontologies to be inferred. This article proposes a methodological approach for the definition of relationships and reasoning tasks for patent analysis by using patent ontologies, and provides a real illustration of its potential in the context of international flows of research knowledge. This declarative method is based on the formal definition of key patent analysis indicators (KPAIs). The case study analysis is relevant because global competition and the importance of multinational firms in the patent process have resulted in firms not only patenting on their domestic markets but also transferring their patents to other markets and developing patents in different countries. In this context, it is important to analyze the connections between the patenting processes and the international knowledge flows of research and development. More specifically, the paper illustrates the applicability of the proposed methodology by classifying patents into the five patterns of internationalization identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Using a CBR Approach Based on Ontologies for Recommendation and Reuse of Knowledge Sharing in Decision Making

One of the possibilities for improving decision processes, and the knowledge management across interacting organizations is to explore successful past experiences. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a problem solving strategy which is based on the reuse of past solutions (cases) to address new problems. Ontologies are a means to facilitate sharing and reuse of bodies of knowledge across organizations and applications on the basis of a well-defined and precise semantics for concepts and terms. This work presents a proposal aimed at knowledge reuse, during the decision activities by means of interwoven concepts from the knowledge management, CBR and ontologies research. This blended approach presents an ontological case construction for CBR systems as theoretical and empirical support for knowledge sharing. We obtain a formal characterization of a case by means of an ontological description of particular cases, and their interrelationships with cases stored in different case-repositories. An architecture for a distributed CBR system is proposed on the basis of a multiagent setting for semantic-based access to knowledge.

Goal-Oriented Software Architecting

Designing software architectures to meet both functional and non-functional requirements (FRs and NFRs) is difficult as it oftentimes relies on the skill and experience of the architect, and the resulting architectures are rarely derived directly from the requirements models. As a result, the relationships between the two artifacts are not explicitly captured, making it difficult to reason more precisely whether an architecture indeed meets its requirements, and if yes, why. This chapter presents a goal-oriented software architecting approach, where FRs and NFRs are treated as goals to be achieved, which are refined and used to explore achievement alternatives. The chosen alternatives and the goal model are then used to derive, using the provided mapping rules, a logical architecture, which is further mapped to a final concrete architecture by applying an architectural style and architectural patterns chosen based on the NFRs. The approach has been applied in an empirical study based on the 1992 London ambulance dispatch system.