This paper presents a first attempt to realize a methodological framework supporting the most relevant phases of the design of a value-added service. A value-added service is defined as a functionality of an adaptive and multi-channel information system obtained by composing services offered by different providers. The framework has been developed as part of the MAIS project. The MAIS framework focuses on the following phases of service life cycle: requirements analysis, design, deployment, run time use and negotiation. In the first phase, the designer elicits, validates and negotiates service requirements according to social and business goals. The design phase is in charge of modelling services with an enhanced version of UML, augmented with new features developed within the MAIS project. The deployment phase considers the network infrastructure and, in particular, provides an approach to implement and coordinate the execution of services from different providers. In the run time use and negotiation phase, the MAIS methodology provides support to the optimal selection and quality renegotiation of services and to the dynamic evaluation of management costs. The paper describes the MAIS methodological tools available for different phases of service life cycle and discusses the main guidelines driving the implementation of a service management architecture, called reflective architecture, that complies with the MAIS methodological approach.
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The success of a software system strongly depends on the ability of turning a precise domain analysis into a concrete architecture. Even if the domain model relies on sound ontological bases, there is often a wide semantic gap between the conceptual model and the concrete components that should reify it. To fill the semantic gap, relevant domain concepts should be engineered by identifying the corresponding architectural abstractions, which can be realized by concrete software components. Space plays a crucial role in many application domains, but surprisingly, related architectural abstractions have not emerged yet. This paper proposes space-related abstractions derived from the application of classical software engineering principles; in particular, the information hiding principle that leads to an operational definition of space. Basic abstractions are refined to deal with architectural aspects. As the underlying software engineering principles are close to principles that underlie the definition of space ontologies, the conjecture is that the proposed space architectural abstractions might be the basis for a formalization in ontological terms.
The wide diffusion of mobile devices and the increasing availability of wireless networks claim applications able to adapt their behaviour with respect to the running context. This paper presents Dynamic Adaptive Navigation (DAN), a novel approach that may be exploited to build adaptive information systems. DAN provides the user with different navigation modalities. The observation of QoS features concerning the users, the devices, and the network drive the selection of the actual navigation modality that is intended as the best available. The navigation modalities are modelled via graphs describing the synthesis/expansion process that must be performed on the information.Applications to be adaptive, either implicitly or explicitly, rely on reflection. Since DAN may be used to build adaptive applications, it should rely on reflective mechanisms too. DAN exploits the ones provided by the MAIS (Multichannel Adaptive Information System) architecture. Indeed, MAIS provides via reflective classes the visibility of the QoS-related aspects of the underlying system objects, being them devices or users.Finally, to verify the usefulness of the ideas, DAN approach has been chosen to develop a new version of PDBudget, a system that supports the academic administration in analysing and evaluating the didactic workload for each lecturer at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
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