Information Integrity Analysis and Design: A UML Based Approach

Abstract

Information Integrity(I*I) i.e. Accuracy, Consistency and Reliability of information is a fundamental requirement for strategic business advantage in complex and changing environment characterized by uncertainty. However, its implementation is a highly complex and costly activity. Software modeling and development techniques have by and large advocated divide and conquer as the typical approach to handle large and complex business systems. Object oriented modeling has been a major step towards building of large, flexible and evolving systems. Efforts and contributions to support flexibility have been made by database and programming language providers. The same can be witnessed if we trace down the evolution of databases and programming languages both now focusing on extensible and reusable patterns and components as main contributors to providing flexibility in otherwise statically designed software. Software patterns offer another area that has contributed significantly towards designing software with reasonable strengths and known weaknesses. Literature as well as practice has shown evidence of using design patterns, software patterns and business patterns for improved software quality. However, major focus of software and design patterns is still to meet functional and non-functional requirements of a software, whereas business patterns are largely implemented in a manual form. This paper adopts UML to define a framework built on I*I patterns that can be reused by system designers towards building systems that support I*I and its analysis. This paper is an attempt to further the knowledge area of I*I towards a way of implementing it in any size of software project thus reducing complexity as well as the cost of its implementation. Focus of the paper is not to offer a complete suite of I*I patterns but establish a guideline towards building one of such kind.