Formal Reference Model Research Articles

A knowledge representation of the beginning of the innovation process: The Front End of Innovation Integrative Ontology (FEI2O)

The initial phase of the innovation process is widely accepted as an important driver of positive results for new products and for the success of businesses. The Front End of Innovation (FEI) is a multidisciplinary area that includes a variety of activities, such as ideation, opportunity identification and analysis, feasibility analysis, global trends analysis, concept definition, customer and competitor analysis, and even business model development. Due to the number and variety of FEI responsibilities, this phase entails a considerable level of complexity and decision making. This fact is reflected in the literature, where one finds a variety of FEI approaches and proposals, seldom overlapping and offering no clear consensual guidance. This work aimed at overcoming this gap by proposing an Ontology for the Front End of Innovation as a comprehensive knowledge representation of the FEI, the so-called Front End of Innovation Integrative Ontology (FEI2O). The ontology balanced the differences and addressed the shortcomings of the main FEI Reference Models and included contributions from the field. This research builds on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. It combines the qualitative methods of interviewing and focus group discussion to collect the views of domain experts, used to refine the artefact and later to evaluate the final ontology. Quantitative analysis of data was carried out using the Attribute Agreement approach. The FEI2O explicitly provides a description of a domain regarding concepts, properties and relations of concepts. The main benefit of the FEI2O is to provide a comprehensive formal reference model and a common vocabulary.

Specification of Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in Request for Proposal (RFP)

Software Requirement Analysis is one of the most important and critical activity of software development, that affects the development cost and success of end product. This paper proposes to add both formal and informal specifications of NFR to Request for Proposal document. It ought the developers to focus on each NFR right from the beginning of development process. In this paper NFRs are specified informally by extended use case and formally by proposed extension to Formal Reference Model. The paper claims that the proposed add-ons related to NFRs are qualitative one and can be considered as standard add-ons in RFP documents to deal with NFRs. It shall act as important step during early planning system for designing and implementing proposed software. The complete procedure is illustrated using a general case of cafeteria ordering framework.

Алгоритмизация эталонных моделей защищенности корпоративных автоматизированных систем на базе формальных моделей безопасности

The paper considers the process of algorithmization of reference security models implemented on the basis of the existing formal security models. Main approaches to practical implementation of reference security models in a key of identifying potential areas for improvement are studied. The paper describes the analysis of constraints of models for synthesis based on their formal reference model amenable to implementation in a software algorithm for subsequent practical security analysis of real systems. On the basis of a formalized model graph is built which combines multiple information security vulnerabilities and attack methods of realization of the consequences for the security systems on the basis of which controllable models of real systems can be created. An algorithm of the semi-automatic analysis of the security of corporate automated systems is developed.

Validating archetypes for the Multiple Sclerosis Functional Composite.

BackgroundNumerous information models for electronic health records, such as openEHR archetypes are available. The quality of such clinical models is important to guarantee standardised semantics and to facilitate their interoperability. However, validation aspects are not regarded sufficiently yet. The objective of this report is to investigate the feasibility of archetype development and its community-based validation process, presuming that this review process is a practical way to ensure high-quality information models amending the formal reference model definitions.MethodsA standard archetype development approach was applied on a case set of three clinical tests for multiple sclerosis assessment: After an analysis of the tests, the obtained data elements were organised and structured. The appropriate archetype class was selected and the data elements were implemented in an iterative refinement process. Clinical and information modelling experts validated the models in a structured review process.ResultsFour new archetypes were developed and publicly deployed in the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager, an online platform provided by the openEHR Foundation. Afterwards, these four archetypes were validated by domain experts in a team review. The review was a formalised process, organised in the Clinical Knowledge Manager. Both, development and review process turned out to be time-consuming tasks, mostly due to difficult selection processes between alternative modelling approaches. The archetype review was a straightforward team process with the goal to validate archetypes pragmatically.ConclusionsThe quality of medical information models is crucial to guarantee standardised semantic representation in order to improve interoperability. The validation process is a practical way to better harmonise models that diverge due to necessary flexibility left open by the underlying formal reference model definitions.This case study provides evidence that both community- and tool-enabled review processes, structured in the Clinical Knowledge Manager, ensure archetype quality. It offers a pragmatic but feasible way to reduce variation in the representation of clinical information models towards a more unified and interoperable model.

FORMS

The challenges of pervasive and mobile computing environments, which are highly dynamic and unpredictable, have motivated the development of self-adaptive software systems. Although noteworthy successes have been achieved on many fronts, the construction of such systems remains significantly more challenging than traditional systems. We argue this is partially because researchers and practitioners have been struggling with the lack of a precise vocabulary for describing and reasoning about the key architectural characteristics of self-adaptive systems. Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that existing frameworks and guidelines do not provide an encompassing perspective of the different types of concerns in this setting. In this article, we present a comprehensive reference model, entitled FOrmal Reference Model for Self-adaptation (FORMS), that targets both issues. FORMS provides rigor in the manner such systems can be described and reasoned about. It consists of a small number of formally specified modeling elements that correspond to the key concerns in the design of self-adaptive software systems, and a set of relationships that guide their composition. We demonstrate FORMS's ability to precisely describe and reason about the architectural characteristics of distributed self-adaptive software systems through its application to several existing systems. FORMS's expressive power gives it a potential for documenting reusable architectural solutions (e.g., architectural patterns) to commonly encountered problems in this area.

TYPING AND TRANSFORMATIONAL EFFECTS IN COMPLEX INFORMATION SUPPLY

The amount of information available to us via the Web has increased enormously over the last few years. Even more, it seems that we are more and more dependent on this Web information in our day to day lives. Often we retrieve this information by querying the Web: data resources found on the web may provide the information that we are looking for. This implies that the Web may be seen as an information market: authors supply information and searchers may find it. In this article we present a formal reference model for the syntactic aspects of the information market. We explore the information landscape using a modeling approach. An important part of this model is a (syntactic) framework for transformations, which allows us to deal with the heterogeneity of the data resources found on the Web. Last but not least, we attempt to give an outline how our model may lead to a better understanding of how information is supplied via the Web. For this we use an example from the field of information retrieval.

Reference models for digital libraries: actors and roles

This article summarizes the discussions of the DELOS/NSF Working Group that reviewed current research and existing practice to better understand the ways in which actors and their roles are perceived within the digital library community. Definitions given to new roles depend too often on the narrow, subjective perspective of a local context. The current situation makes it difficult to understand objectively the key actor/role issues that arise in individual cases and also to perform comparative analysis between different cases. This work brings to light several issues that warrant further research and underscores the community's need for formal and objective reference models for the description of actors and their roles in digital libraries.

A structured methodology for the design and implementation of control and supervision systems for robotic applications

The adoption of a structured development methodology, based on a design cycle and on formal reference models, is a key issue to manage, possibly in a step-by-step fashion, the design of industrial control and supervision systems, as there are in modern robotic applications. In the present work, a development technique is illustrated, which extends some of the most relevant solutions and methods used to effectively deal with the design of complex control systems and integrates them into a structured methodology with analysis and simulation facilities. The main discriminating features of the presented framework are: the object-oriented approach, compliance with international standards for control software specification, hybrid dynamic models and automatic code generation. The development and implementation of a robot mission for a six degree-of-freedom manipulator is illustrated to highlight the benefits and advantages of the proposed methodology.