We show how an alternative approach to document-oriented specification can ease the system design process. By identifying the modeling concepts needed for a complete system specification in an underlying conceptual model a specification can be interpreted as one single well-formed information complex avoiding inconsistencies as found in document oriented approaches. Besides a more intuitive dev...

According to ongoing scholarly work in the information systems discipline, Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) are top-priorities gaining a great deal of attention in both industry and academia. Both approaches aim at convergence in order to bring business-oriented and technologyoriented stakeholders closer together and enable business system engineering in...

Integration of concurrently acting humans and systems is a great challenge which is characterized by the great diversity of involved actors, activities, and artifacts. Based on the process modeling idea , several integration approaches follow a process-oriented and model-based integration strategy. In this paper, we focus on the application of this model-based integration approach to engineerin...

Graphical models are used to depict relevant aspects of real-world domains intended to be supported by an information system. Various approaches for modeling exist and approaches such as object-oriented and process-oriented modeling methods are in widespread use. These modeling methods differ in their expressive power as well as in their complexity of use, thereby leading to an important invest...

Various object-oriented metrics have been proposed as a way of capturing features of object-oriented software such as encapsulation (information hiding), abstraction and inheritance. A major criticism of past object-oriented metrics is that little attention has been paid to theoretical validation or empirical evaluation of those metrics. By theoretical validation we refer to the process of ensu...

The two informal ‘mental landscapes’ that provide the intuitive substratum for stateoriented and event-oriented formal specifications are discussed, and abstractly characterised as networks of constraints. The structuring facilities offered by the two approaches are contrasted. A technique is introduced for expanding an event-oriented specification consisting of a fixed pattern of interacting p...

We describe how prototype systems can be efficiently created from agent-oriented domain and design models. We first propose a conceptual space that accommodates model transformations described by the Model-Driven Architecture. We then explain agent-oriented domain models and platformindependent design models and show how the first can be transformed into the latter. We also demonstrate how desi...

...............................................................................................ii Research Grants ...................................................................................iii Acknowledgements..................................................................................v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 COMPONENT CERTIFICATION WITH REUSE.....................................

Collection types such as sets, bags and arrays have been used as data structures in both traditional and object oriented programming. Although sets were used as record components in early database work, this practice was largely discontinued with the widespread adoption of relational databases. Object-relational and object databases once again allow database designers to embed collections as da...

In today's competitive environment, enterprise business has to adapt the changes driven by the market in order to achieve targeted goals. Information systems are used to manage the enterprise business, and thus adaptation at information system level is very important. It raises the need for architectures and mechanisms that support such adaptation at finer granularity (process activity level). ...