Publications

This paper presents the principles of concept-driven engineering and the ConceptManager tool as an implementation of these principles. Concept-Driven Engineering is capable of eleminating inconsistencies and redundancy that occurr within projects, i.e. in the software-development process to increase quality, decrease time to market, and increase flexibility. This method is based on the principle of human communication: concepts that classify objects by their characteristic features. Concepts are e.g. software artefacts, models, meta-models or (sets of) words. The Concept-Manager tool supports creation and organization of concepts and integration of generators, that add a certain syntax to a concept. The evolution of concepts is enabled through version paths and the management of generators over concepts. We demonstrate the practical use of the Concept-Manager tool by organizing BPMN and UML metamodels using the same or related concepts for similar components in order to apply the same syntax of the ASM generator.

This paper investigates the the development and evolution of concepts and the management of transformers, which adds semantics to the concepts. We illustrate how concepts, their variants and transformers can be developed via cooperation.

Software engineering starts with informal descriptions of the application domain and results in software that satisfies a number of properties. The main target of software engineering is the management of the development process. In this regard, current software engineering practices do not succeed. UML diagrams are ubiquitous in software engineering, forming the cornerstones of modelling techniques. A large variety of UML diagrams is used for specifying different aspects of the application. Their integration is either done on intuition of the developers or partially based on OCL constraints. While the lack of semantics in UML is a problem, the paper deals with sets of UML diagrams for management and organisation of such diagrams and their semantics into clusters of UML diagrams.
The entire process is backed by abstract state machine (ASM) specifications. We will show an idea of an automatic transition from a set of UML diagrams, called UML diagram clusters and written as ASM Cluster to the machine-readable ASM Program. We support a precise meaning of these UML diagram clusters through the ASMD to Program specifications. The generated ASM Program specification is easy and intuitive to understand; users are able to understand what the concrete UML diagram cluster means. The consistency during the evolution process of a UML diagram cluster and between diagram clusters is supported through the ASM Contract.

Support for updates to views of database schemata is typically very limited; only those changes which can be represented entirely within the view, or changes which involve only generic changes outside of the view, are permitted. In this work, a different point of view towards the view-update problem is taken. If a proposed update cannot be performed within the view, then rather than rejecting it outright, the cooperation of other views is sought, so that in their combined environments the desired changes can be realized. This approach has not only the advantage that a wider range of updates are supported than is possible with more traditional approaches, but also that updates which require the combined access privileges of several users are supported.

mGovernment applications are usually part of greater enterprise environments. Technically, these enterprise applications are called bulk applications because they consist of a variety of complex interrelated business processes. To handle the complexity of these processes suitable modeling technique are needed. Typically, UML is used for these purposes. In this paper an alternative approach based on the website description language SiteLang is presented. This language supports use case modeling as well as interaction and workflow specification in a unified way using a single dialog type. Due to SiteLang’s simple constructs and well defined semantics the language is commonly understandable. SiteLang modeling is explained using a simple example from one of our eGovernment projects.

@INPROCEEDINGS{Schmidt05businessprocess,
author = {Peggy Schmidt},
title = {Business Process Modeling for mGovernment Applications},
booktitle = {The First European Conference on Mobile Government},
year = {2005}
}

This paper has been cited by:

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Abstract Validation of complex bulk application specifications has always been a challenge. It is usually pursued by implementing a prototype. This is particularly the case when developing complex, informationintensive web applications, e.g. eGovernment or e-learning. Valuable resources are thus invested, often just in order to realise the incorrectness of the specification. An alternative would be a specification methodology allowing for validation without causing such costs. Websites can be specified by storyboarding. A storyboard describes an information system by means of its behaviour with respect to the user and to database operations. It can be refined and transformed automatically with preserved semantics into an executable ASM. We apply operational semantics of ASM for application validation. On ASM level we can also perform stepwise refinement of the specification. The advantages of our ASM-based approach are its direct applicability and correctness. The ASM execution and validation can be performed upon a given infrastructure surrounding the application, e.g. web servers, database systems etc. The ASM serves thus as a fully functional mock-up application for the specified business process.

The usage of mobile technology for eGovernment applications is not only restricted to (hyper-) text or multimedia services like WAP, SMS, or MMS. Nowadays, due to various improvements in speech technology it is practicable to use natural speech as an input source for information systems. Typically, when using this interface technology it will coexists with other ones within an enterprise environment. While a well founded modeling of information structures is widely accepted during information system development interface applications are often designed ad hoc. Because information systems evolve this ad hoc procedure complicates the management of application versions and variations. Especially in eGovernment scenarios with changing legal conditions or political tenors a structured development and change management of multi channel interfaces can reduce costs for IT projects without reducing functionality or public acceptance. We present a methodology for a structured interface development based on the website description language SiteLang. The design of this methodology was heavily influenced by our experiences in several co-operations with German public administrations. One of these projects, the community management system SeSAM, is used as a running example within this paper.

Abstract Database modeling is still a job of an artisan. Due to this approach database schemata evolve by growth without any evolution plan. Finally, they cannot be examined, surveyed, consistently extended or analyzed. Querying and maintenance become very difficult. Distribution of database fragments becomes a performance bottleneck. Currently, databases evolve to huge databases. Their development must be performed with the highest care.
This paper aims in developing an approach to systematic schema composition based on components. The approach is based on the internal skeletal meta-structures inside the schema. We develop a theory of database components which can be composed to schemata following a architecture skeleton of the entire database.