Motonari Tanabu

A step toward foundation of class diagram algebra for enterprise service systems

An enterprise service system is large and complex and manages big and complicated data. A large set of partial data models are used during designing an information system for a large enterprise because each service application consisting of an enterprise service system uses only a part of big and complicated data in most cases. The skill of modelers makes fluctuation and discrepancy among data models. It is necessary how to keep consistency among data models. There are several diagram methods to support data modeling. The Unified Modeling Language is a popular standard modeling language. A class diagram is describing a static view of data model. There are two kinds of inconsistency among data models described in class diagrams. One is inconsistency within a data model described in a class diagram. The other is inconsistency depending on operations for class diagrams. We present syntax of a class diagram describing a data model for syntactical foundation for class diagram algebra. Then we introduce syntactical merger, remain, complement and intersection operations on class diagrams. Consolidation and restoration conditions keep consistency of class diagrams syntactically during results of those operations.

A syntactical foundation of class diagram algebra for enterprise service systems

An enterprise service system is large and complex and manages big and complicated data. A large set of partial data models is used in designing an enterprise service system because each service application consisting of an enterprise service system uses only a part of big and complicated data in most cases. These partial data models provide several complementary views on the system to be developed. This however leads to a need for compositional models that are able to produce a single integrated model. These data models are often described by a class diagram of Unified Modeling Language because it is a very popular modeling language and describing a static view of a system. In this paper, we propose syntactical foundation of algebra on a family of well-formed class diagrams with composition operations — merge, difference, complement and intersection operations. We then show that the algebraic properties as associativity, commutativity and involutivity of this foundation are desired for model management to develop an enterprise service system.

Decision support service framework for Japanese floricultural wholesale markets

The floricultural industry in Japan is facing a serious problem of decreasing consumption, and seeking for an effecive way to create a seasonal trend of flowers which could capture the heart of consumers. On the other hand, all major Japanese floricultural wholesale (B2B) markets have adopted powerful information systems such as modem auction and dispatching systems, therefore, providing high quality knowledge based service for both flower suppliers and retailers has become the source of competitiveness. Seeking the needs of consumer to make a new trend and support suppliers and retailers to make their decision is a new challenge for floricuhural wholesale markets. The aim of this research is to propose a decision support service framework in floricultural wholesale markets which is based on knowledge discovery. The decision support service helps retailers to have their own seasonal purchasing model according to the role model (model made by trend creators), so that retailers could make their purchasing plan more adaptive to the seasonal consumer needs. In this paper, the problems in Japanese floriculture wholesale markets is discussed from the point of view of knowledge discovery and decision support, and a conceptual model of a decision support service is introduced.