We describe an approach to the coordination of application systems based on the modelling and maintenance of inter-system dependencies expressed as data constraints together with update propagation rules. These dependencies are speciied by a Coordination Model which comprises a Coordination Interface for each application system together with a global Coordination View. A Coordination Interface ...

Ontologies are key enablers for sharing precise and machine-understandable semantics among different applications and parties. Yet, for ontologies to meet these expectations, their quality must be of a good standard. The quality of an ontology is strongly based on the design method employed. This paper addresses the design problems related to the modelling of ontologies, with specific concentra...

The goal of this article is to map between Object Role Modeling (ORM) and Ontology Web Language 2 (OWL 2 DL). This mapping allows one to graphically develop his/her ontology using the ORM notation, while the ORM is automatically translated into OWL 2 DL. We map the most commonly used rules of ORM into OWL 2 DL which have the ability of decidability. DogmaModeler is extended to perform automatic...

Although Entity-Relationship (ER) modelling techniques are commonly used for information modelling, Object-Role Modelling (ORM) techniques are becoming increasingly popular, partly because they include detailed design procedures providing guidelines for the modeller. As with the ER approach, a number of different ORM techniques exist. In this paper, we propose an integration of two theoreticall...

For conceptual information analysis, the object-role modeling (ORM) approach is arguably more suitable than entity-relationship modeling and the class modeling technique within the Unified Modeling Language. Although ORM has been used for three decades and now has industrial modeling tool support, it has no official, standard meta-model. Because of its extensive capability for expressing busine...

In information systems modeling, the business domain being modeled often exhibits subtyping aspects that can prove challenging to implement in either relational databases or object-oriented code. In practice, some of these aspects are often handled incorrectly. This paper examines a number of subtyping issues that require special attention (e.g. derivation options, subtype rigidity, subtype mig...

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a flexible approach to access control, which has generated great interest in the security community. The principal motivation behind RBAC is to simplify the complexity of administrative tasks. Several formal models of RBAC have been introduced. However, there are a few works specifying RBAC in a way which system developers or software engineers can easily und...

With the continued use of data bases in engineering applications and the continued proliferation of engineering data, the importance of proper database design needs increasing attention. This paper presents a new data-modeling methodology called NIAM. NIAM is a graphical modeling language used to design conceptual schemas that can be mapped onto any data-base model, e.g., the relational and hie...

XML is rapidly becoming the standard method for sending information across the Internet. XML Schema, since its elevation to W3C Recommendation on the 2 May 2001, is fast becoming the preferred means of describing structured XML data. However, until recently, there has been no effective means of graphically designing XML Schemas without exposing designers to low-level implementation issues. Bird...

Process roles are used to structure complex engineering processes in single systems development for many years. Typically, each role has specific responsibilities from which certain information demands originate. In the engineering of variable software, role-specific information demands affect variability information. To control the access to the variability information, we suggest using the co...