Stefan Eicker

Entwicklung eines Data Warehouse für das Produktionscontrolling: Konzepte und Erfahrungen

Aufgabe eines Data Warehouse ist die schnelle und flexible Bereitstellung entscheidungsrelevanter Daten. Es stellt damit - je nach Interpretation - eine Weiterentwicklung der Entscheidungsunterstutzungssysteme oder eine auf Analyseaufgaben ausgerichtete Datenbank dar. Um seine Aufgabe erfullen zu konnen, mus ein Data Warehouse heterogene Datenquellen zu einer stabilen, konsistenten Datenbasis zusammenfuhren, Detaildaten fur die analytischen Auswertungen (vor-)verdichten sowie auch zeitraumbezogene Langsschnittanalysen unterstutzen. Die Entwicklung eines Warehouse unterscheidet sich deshalb in vielen Punkten von der Entwicklung eines traditionellen, transaktionsorientierten Anwendungssystems. Der folgende Beitrag diskuiert, welche Aufgaben jeweils in den verschiedenen Phasen einer Data Wareouse-Entwicklung anfallen und wie diese Aufgaben durchgefuhrt werden konnen. Die vorgestellten Konzepte und Erfahrungen sind Ergebnisse eines Kooperationsprojekts zwischen dem Institut und einem grosen Maschinenbauunternehmen.

Employee Competencies for Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) is an approach which empowers companies to react flexibly to new market situations. The main goal of BPM is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of value-adding business processes. The changes caused by globalization do not only concern organi-zation, technologies and processes, but also people. Employee competencies can be crucial competitive advantages.

A study on third party component reuse in Java enterprise open source software

Recent studies give empirical evidence that much of todays software is to a large extent built on preexisting software, such as commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source software components. In this exploratory study we want to contribute to this small but increasing body of knowledge by investigating third party component reuse in 36 Java web applications that are open source and are meant to be used in an enterprise context. Our goal is to get a better understanding on how third party components are reused in web applications and how to better support it. The results are in line with existing research in this field. 70 third party components are being reused on average. 50 percent of the 40 most reused third party components are maintained by the Apache Foundation. Further research questions based on the study results were generated and are presented at the end of this paper.

Ein Überblick über die Umsetzung des Data-Warehouse- Konzepts aus technischer Sicht

Die Realisierung eines Management-Informationssysterns durch ein Data Warehouse erfordert grundsatzlich — wie auch bei anderen cornputergestutzten betrieblichen Information ssystemen — einen Systemplanungs- und -entwicklungsprozess. 1m Rahmen des Prozesses sind die Komponenten fur die verschiedenen Ebenen der Architektur fur Management-Inforrnationssysterne zu planen, zu realisieren, zu testen und schlieslich einzufuhren.1

Internet Bill Presentment and Payment als neue Form des Electronic Billing

In einem Projekt wurde fur ein groses Telekommunikationsunternehmen die Moglichkeit untersucht, das Internet fur den Versand und die Bezahlung von Rechnungen zu nutzen. Der vorliegende Beitrag fast die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zusammen: Aufbauend auf einer Betrachtung der Grundlagen der Rechnungsstellung und bestehender Billing-Verfahren prasentiert er das Web-Billing, das E-Mail-Billing und die Bill Consolidation als Losungsansatze fur das Internet Bill Presentment and Payment (IBPP). Die Ansatze werden insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Erfullung der Anforderungen von Rechnungssteiler und Rechnungsempfanger sowie auch aus juristischer Sicht diskutiert. Aus der fur das Telekommunikationsunternehmen entwickelten Konzeption fur ein IBPP-System stellt der Beitrag die Systemarchitektur sowie das Bill Presentment der Telekommunikationsrechnung vor.

Ontology-Based Identification of Research Gaps and Immature Research Areas

Researchers often have to understand new knowledge areas, and identify research gaps and immature areas in them. They have to understand and link numerous publications to achieve this goal. This is difficult, because natural language has to be analyzed in the publications, and implicit relations between them have to be discovered. We propose to utilize the structuring possibilities of ontologies to make the relations between publications, knowledge objects (e.g., methods, tools, notations), and knowledge areas explicit. Furthermore, we use Kitchenham’s work on structured literature reviews and apply it to the ontology. We formalize relations between objects in the ontology using Codd’s relational algebra to support different kinds of literature research. These formal expressions are implemented as ontology queries. Thus, we implement an immature research area analysis and research gap identification mechanism. The ontology and its relations are implemented based on the Semantic MediaWiki+ platform.

Decision support for off-the-shelf software selection in web development projects

Reusing off-the-shelf (OTS) components (including commercial and open source software) has become a key success factor in software development projects leading to reduced costs, faster time-to-market and better software quality. This especially holds true in the field of web engineering, where software engineers are faced with a steady proliferation of new technologies and standards. But there are upfront and ongoing efforts and risks attached to the adoption of OTS components which makes decision-making very difficult. Such difficulties are for example a large and intransparent market, incompatibilities between components and architectural mismatches. In this paper, a plan towards a novel platform concept is proposed that can improve the situation for software engineers coping with the adoption of OTS components during web-based systems development. One key contribution is an empirically derived ontology to describe software artifacts on a feature level allowing a better description and identification of OTS components in the domain of web development. Another key contribution is a concept for a lean experience sharing mechanism. The goal of both contributions is to improve OTS component decision-making. The concept will be implemented as a platform prepopulated with OTS components from the domain of Java web development. A cross-case study is planned to evaluate the concept.

A Common Body of Knowledge for Engineering Secure Software and Services

The discipline of engineering secure software and services brings together researchers and practitioners from software, services, and security engineering. This interdisciplinary community is fairly new, it is still not well integrated and is therefore confronted with differing perspectives, processes, methods, tools, vocabularies, and standards. We present a Common Body of Knowledge (CBK) to overcome the aforementioned problems. We capture use cases from research and practice to derive requirements for the CBK. Our CBK collects, integrates, and structures knowledge from the different disciplines based on an ontology that allows one to semantically enrich content to be able to query the CBK. The CBK heavily relies on user participation, making use of the Semantic MediaWiki as a platform to support collaborative writing. The ontology is complemented by a conceptual framework, consisting of concepts to structure the knowledge and to provide access to it, and a means to build a common terminology. We also present organizational factors covering dissemination and quality assurance.

Communicating architectural knowledge: requirements for software architecture knowledge management tools

Architecting is a communication intensive task in which architectural knowledge is shared between the architect and the stakeholders. The software architects communicative action is often conducted face-to-face, e.g. in presentations and workshops. A software architecture documentation as a carrier of explicit architectural knowledge can also be seen as an architects communicative action. This perspective opens the door for treating a software architecture documentation as an expression of an asynchronous knowledge communication process enabling the application of principles from communication theory. In this paper this perspective is taken and specific requirements are derived for software architecture knowledge management tools with respect to the context-oriented communication model.