The development of the Semantic Web, with machine-readable content, has the potential to revolutionize the World Wide Web and its uses. A Semantic Web Primer provides an introduction and guide to this continuously evolving field, describing its key ideas, languages, and technologies.
This comprehensive introduction to modeling business-information systems focuses on business processes. It describes and demonstrates the formal modeling of processes in terms of Petri nets, using a well-established theory for capturing and analyzing models with concurrency. The precise semantics of this formal method offers a distinct advantage for modeling processes over the industrial modeling languages found in other books on the subject.
Much of the difficulty in creating information technology systems that truly meet people's needs lies in the problem of pinning down system requirements. This book offers a new approach to the requirements challenge, based on modeling and analyzing the relationships among stakeholders. Although the importance of the system-environment relationship has long been recognized in the requirements engineering field, most requirements modeling techniques express the relationship in mechanistic and behavioral terms.
Distributed business component computing—the assembling of business components into electronic business processes, which interact via the Internet—caters to a new breed of enterprise systems that are flexible, relatively easy to maintain and upgrade to accommodate new business processes, and relatively simple to integrate with other enterprise systems. Companies with unwieldy, large, and heterogeneous inherited information systems—known as legacy systems—find it extremely difficult to align their old systems with novel business processes.
This text is a guide to the foundations of method engineering, a developing field concerned with the definition of techniques for designing software systems. The approach is based on metamodeling, the construction of a model about a collection of other models. The book applies the metamodeling approach in five case studies, each describing a solution to a problem in a specific domain. Suitable for classroom use, the book is also useful as a reference for practitioners.
Service-Oriented Applications and Architectures (SOAs) have captured the interest of industry as a way to support business-to-business interaction, and the SOA market grew by $4.9 billion in 2005. SOAs and in particular service-oriented computing (SOC) represent a promising approach in the development of adaptive distributed systems. With SOC, applications can open themselves to services offered by third parties and accessed through standard, well-defined interfaces.
Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) promises a world of cooperating services loosely connected, creating dynamic business processes and agile applications that span organizations and platforms. As a computing paradigm, it utilizes services as fundamental elements to support rapid, low-cost development of distributed applications in heterogeneous environments. Realizing the SOC promise requires the design of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) that enable the development of simpler and cheaper distributed applications.
The development of the Semantic Web, with machine-readable content, has the potential to revolutionize the World Wide Web and its uses. A Semantic Web Primer provides an introduction and guide to this still emerging field, describing its key ideas, languages, and technologies.
Until recently, information systems have been designed around different business functions, such as accounts payable and inventory control. Object-oriented modeling, in contrast, structures systems around the data—the objects—that make up the various business functions. Because information about a particular function is limited to one place—to the object—the system is shielded from the effects of change. Object-oriented modeling also promotes better understanding of requirements, clear designs, and more easily maintainable systems.
