Santonu Sarkar
ABSTRACT
Technical design of a business application is an involved process which needs an experienced designer to describe an implementation of the application functionality using a set of hardware and software infrastructure elements such that the non-functional requirements are satisfied. The process is extremely knowledge intensive. For instance, it demands the designer to thoroughly understand various architecture styles, a set of technical capabilities available, how different COTS products can realize these capabilities, and how the functional modules can make use of these capabilities. In reality, such experienced designers are hard to come by. Furthermore, to optimize the budget, the project team often involves inexperienced designers to create the technical design. In order to assist an inexperienced designer to create the technical design, we have built a knowledge-based design assistant tool, called Technical Design Assistant Tool (TDAT). In this paper we describe the ontology knowledge model that describes the underlying technical design knowledge. The ontology models the notion of a architecture style, various technical capabilities, a COTS component, and capability features. We have conducted a few experiments to evaluate the usefulness of the ontology and the tool and found encouraging responses. As a part of the project we are populating the knowledge base for the popular open source and commercial software products.
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Index Terms
- Accelerating technical design of business applications: a knowledge-based approach
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Reviews
Michael G. Murphy
In this paper, Sarkar and Verma introduce the technical design assistant tool (TDAT), a tool that incorporates a knowledge base elicited from experienced software application designers. It includes such important features as software architecture styles, technical capabilities, and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) options, which are integrated to build business applications. After establishing a foundation for the project, a key section addresses the issues of formal representation of relevant knowledge. Several helpful figures illustrate the structure of the TDAT model. Another section discusses the actual application of TDAT. Sarkar and Verma build on a broad range of previous work by others, and their work represents an interesting next step in tool building and knowledge engineering. The paper is well written and well organized. For whatever reason, the eight figures are not referenced in numerical order. The material reflects a conceptual model, as well as work-in-progress on the implementation of the model. Readers who are interested in knowledge-based computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools for developing business applications will benefit from this paper. Online Computing Reviews Service
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