Identification of discontinuities, separation of concerns, and dealing with the evolutionary changes of requirements is difficult in conceptual modeling. The limited human mind allows focusing on one particular requirement at a time in isolation. One fundamental problem is that all conventional conceptual modeling techniques deal with collections of loosely linked meta-models, which are defined by different types of diagrams. Typically, system development methods project interactive, behavioral, and structural aspects of information systems’ conceptual representations into disparate views. Therefore, the semantic integrity of various architecture dimensions is difficult to achieve. The difficulties stem from the paradigmatic mismatch between static and dynamic constructs. The advantage of the conceptual modeling approach presented in this paper is flexibility. It is demonstrated by case study examples that sequential, underlying, enclosing, overriding, and overlaying interaction loops between actors provide the foundation for the composition of complex scenarios, which span across organizational and technical system boundaries. The presented semantic integration and system decomposition principles target business process modeling experts and information system designers, because they are essential for introducing evolutionary changes and managing complexity of information system conceptualizations.
This chapter presents a pragmatic-driven approach for service-oriented information system analysis and design. Its uniqueness is in exploiting a design foundation for graphical description of the semantic and pragmatic aspects of business processes that is based on the service-oriented principles. Services are viewed as dynamic subsystems. Their outputs depend not only on inputs, but on a service state as well. Intentions of business process experts are represented in terms of a set of pragmatic dependencies, which are driving the overall system engineering process. It is demonstrated how pragmatic aspects are mapped to conceptual representations, which define the semantics of business design. In contrast to the traditional system development methodologies, the main difference of the service-oriented approach is that it integrates the static and dynamic aspects into one type of diagram. Semantics of computation independent models are expressed by graphical specifications of interactions between service providers and service consumers. Semantic integrity control between static and dynamic dependencies of business processes is a one of the major benefits of service-oriented analysis and design process. It is driven by pragmatic descriptions, which are defined in terms of goals, problems and opportunities.
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