Comments on: Further thoughts on MBD http://gentalk.biz/blog/2010/01/further-thoughts-on-mbd/ A blog about CA Gen Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:28:48 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: estefan euler http://gentalk.biz/blog/2010/01/further-thoughts-on-mbd/comment-page-1/#comment-2771 estefan euler Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:13:59 +0000 http://gentalk.biz/blog/?p=1024#comment-2771 Another comment to my own comment, since I forgot to write. CA Gen of course can be a main role player in the tool chain mentioned above (tool integration). Some part of the resulting solution can be written in CA Gen pseudo code. The most successful approach regarding CA Gen would be the enhancements to the tool. Those enhancements are external models and generated code which seamlessly enhances CA Gen applications. Through model transformation and conversion the CA Gen functionality can be used as run time component. The ISP’s and BAA’s can be done outside for example using UML2 and be brought into CA Gen. Another comment to my own comment, since I forgot to write. CA Gen of course can be a main role player in the tool chain mentioned above (tool integration). Some part of the resulting solution can be written in CA Gen pseudo code. The most successful approach regarding CA Gen would be the enhancements to the tool. Those enhancements are external models and generated code which seamlessly enhances CA Gen applications. Through model transformation and conversion the CA Gen functionality can be used as run time component. The ISP’s and BAA’s can be done outside for example using UML2 and be brought into CA Gen.

]]> By: estefan euler http://gentalk.biz/blog/2010/01/further-thoughts-on-mbd/comment-page-1/#comment-2770 estefan euler Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:46:38 +0000 http://gentalk.biz/blog/?p=1024#comment-2770 According to me the practical solution to your article relies behind tool integration and semantic reasoning. The ontology over a domain may capture the three mentioned issues namely ‘AAA’, ‘Open World’ and ‘Non-unique Naming’. The EMF infrastructure may be the one, which is more suitable to use for the development of a related software. The generic nature of model based development in the eclipse environment enables the developers to adopt the metamodel(s) if necessary and the generators in eclipse can be adopted accordingly. As an example the SWT generation which has the nature of a rich client can easily be replaced with a struts based application for a browser environment. The modern tools do not have rigid meta-models but generic infrastructures. The versioning and on-the fly changes in schemas can be done easily. EMF offers all necessary technologies for that. According to me the practical solution to your article relies behind tool integration and semantic reasoning. The ontology over a domain may capture the three mentioned issues namely ‘AAA’, ‘Open World’ and ‘Non-unique Naming’. The EMF infrastructure may be the one, which is more suitable to use for the development of a related software. The generic nature of model based development in the eclipse environment enables the developers to adopt the metamodel(s) if necessary and the generators in eclipse can be adopted accordingly. As an example the SWT generation which has the nature of a rich client can easily be replaced with a struts based application for a browser environment. The modern tools do not have rigid meta-models but generic infrastructures. The versioning and on-the fly changes in schemas can be done easily. EMF offers all necessary technologies for that.

]]> By: DannySaro http://gentalk.biz/blog/2010/01/further-thoughts-on-mbd/comment-page-1/#comment-2767 DannySaro Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:28:20 +0000 http://gentalk.biz/blog/?p=1024#comment-2767 Estefan, I do get your points and as I said I do not doubt that ModelCVS can offer valid solutions in transforming the formalised "understanding" of a business subject matter expert or a business system analist into the Information Strategy Planning (ISP) and Business Area Analysis (BAA) part of the CA Gen model. (BTW if the user community would agree on a more contemporary meaning of some of the ISP and BAA model objects and we add some naming standards and some other agreements then we could very well call it a Service Strategy Planning which would be more in line with what businesses want these days) My point was more that it is not as much a technical as it is a human issue. It seems to me that it is not the fashion anymore to capture requirements, business processes, business rules, etc... in a formalised way. The Semantic Web technologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL) were indeed created to put some semantic meaning behind the often unstructured text in HTML pages. Following are some of the fundamental concepts they are based on (I somewhat freely quote these concepts from the book "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist"): 1) "The AAA slogan: Anyone can say Anything about Any topic" - for me this is relevant to the above mentioned human issue in two ways. First, the business subject matter expert and the business analist don't want to be constrained by a "method" which tells them what kind of information to enter in what document section or tool panel. There is the (misguided?) feeling that this limits their creativity in coming up with a solution to the business problem they need to solve. Secondly, it is also relevant to the fact of real life that the "semantics" captured in one tool can not cater for all the different kind of businesses out there, all of them will have something specific to say about something. 2) "The Open World/Closed World" assumption, the semantic web technologies assume an "open world" meaning that there can always be more information out there then what we know right now - relevance for me again two-fold, first it goes back to all these different kinds of businesses out there, one rigid ISP and BAA metamodel can not cater for all the specific things. Secondly, also in time there is an evolution of the kind of information that needs to be captured, and again one rigid ISP and BAA metamodel doesn't cut it. The CA Gen metamodel is very rigid, very "Closed World", right now it can only be extended with every major version of the product. For UML one can use the UML Profiles to cater for flexibility in the semantics one wants to capture. To my knowledge the semantic web technologies offer even more flexibility, new concepts can be introduced which are new concepts in their own rights, not just stereotyped existing concepts. These new concepts can also have newly defined associations to whatever existing concept already existing in the metamodel. And this "metamodel extension" can basically happen during the actual capture of the information because the metamodel can be defined in the same document as the actual model which one describes. When an analist starts making a bulleted list in his analysis document to start describing some specifics of his organisation's business he might have identified a new concept with each bullit point being an instance of this new type of information. (I realize that a big part of the challenge would be to get the analist to realize that he identified a new concept). 3) "Nonunique naming" solution - a classical issue, not just for different HTML pages which describe the same thing but give it a different name. I think we have all come across this issue that business subject matter experts name things differently then what IT names them. The semantic web technologies allow to define "equivalence" between different named concepts in diffferent documents. (I guess that same effect is achieved by the metamodel mapping in ModelCVS). I believe that a solution which would allow business subject matter experts and business analysts to describe the requirements, business processes, business rules , etc... with support for the "AAA", "Open World" and "Nonunique Naming" concept would potentially solve the human issue. And it would give us a starting point for a "semi-automatic transformation" of that information into the ISP and BAA part of the CA Gen model. We would have closed CA Gen's full lifecycle model-based development loop again. What does that solution look like? I don't know yet! (I might have some ideas though). It will be challenging, that's for sure, so I welcome any thought, suggestion, comment that anyone has to offer. Cheers, Danny Estefan,

I do get your points and as I said I do not doubt that ModelCVS can offer valid solutions in transforming the formalised “understanding” of a business subject matter expert or a business system analist into the Information Strategy Planning (ISP) and Business Area Analysis (BAA) part of the CA Gen model. (BTW if the user community would agree on a more contemporary meaning of some of the ISP and BAA model objects and we add some naming standards and some other agreements then we could very well call it a Service Strategy Planning which would be more in line with what businesses want these days)
My point was more that it is not as much a technical as it is a human issue. It seems to me that it is not the fashion anymore to capture requirements, business processes, business rules, etc… in a formalised way.
The Semantic Web technologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL) were indeed created to put some semantic meaning behind the often unstructured text in HTML pages. Following are some of the fundamental concepts they are based on (I somewhat freely quote these concepts from the book “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”):

1) “The AAA slogan: Anyone can say Anything about Any topic” – for me this is relevant to the above mentioned human issue in two ways. First, the business subject matter expert and the business analist don’t want to be constrained by a “method” which tells them what kind of information to enter in what document section or tool panel. There is the (misguided?) feeling that this limits their creativity in coming up with a solution to the business problem they need to solve. Secondly, it is also relevant to the fact of real life that the “semantics” captured in one tool can not cater for all the different kind of businesses out there, all of them will have something specific to say about something.

2) “The Open World/Closed World” assumption, the semantic web technologies assume an “open world” meaning that there can always be more information out there then what we know right now – relevance for me again two-fold, first it goes back to all these different kinds of businesses out there, one rigid ISP and BAA metamodel can not cater for all the specific things. Secondly, also in time there is an evolution of the kind of information that needs to be captured, and again one rigid ISP and BAA metamodel doesn’t cut it. The CA Gen metamodel is very rigid, very “Closed World”, right now it can only be extended with every major version of the product. For UML one can use the UML Profiles to cater for flexibility in the semantics one wants to capture. To my knowledge the semantic web technologies offer even more flexibility, new concepts can be introduced which are new concepts in their own rights, not just stereotyped existing concepts. These new concepts can also have newly defined associations to whatever existing concept already existing in the metamodel. And this “metamodel extension” can basically happen during the actual capture of the information because the metamodel can be defined in the same document as the actual model which one describes. When an analist starts making a bulleted list in his analysis document to start describing some specifics of his organisation’s business he might have identified a new concept with each bullit point being an instance of this new type of information. (I realize that a big part of the challenge would be to get the analist to realize that he identified a new concept).

3) “Nonunique naming” solution – a classical issue, not just for different HTML pages which describe the same thing but give it a different name. I think we have all come across this issue that business subject matter experts name things differently then what IT names them. The semantic web technologies allow to define “equivalence” between different named concepts in diffferent documents. (I guess that same effect is achieved by the metamodel mapping in ModelCVS).

I believe that a solution which would allow business subject matter experts and business analysts to describe the requirements, business processes, business rules , etc… with support for the “AAA”, “Open World” and “Nonunique Naming” concept would potentially solve the human issue. And it would give us a starting point for a “semi-automatic transformation” of that information into the ISP and BAA part of the CA Gen model. We would have closed CA Gen’s full lifecycle model-based development loop again.
What does that solution look like? I don’t know yet! (I might have some ideas though). It will be challenging, that’s for sure, so I welcome any thought, suggestion, comment that anyone has to offer.

Cheers,

Danny

]]> By: estefan euler http://gentalk.biz/blog/2010/01/further-thoughts-on-mbd/comment-page-1/#comment-2701 estefan euler Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:05:12 +0000 http://gentalk.biz/blog/?p=1024#comment-2701 ModelCVS, Ontologies, Meta-Models, .. and co. As I wrote in some of my articles, the crucial point in the systems analysis is the ability of capturing the correct meaning of the analyzed system. I call this behavior of the tool ‘the understanding’. This behavior is important if the computer program (tool) has to make any decisions depending on the meaning of the scanned source text. This can be an unstructured text. An unstructured text may depend on a formal grammar or not. The difference here is similar to the difference between natural languages and the formal languages. Natural languages have many ‘name spaces’, which are context dependent. In the formal languages this name space is given by the the grammar of the language. In natural languages the namespace must be identified correctly to capture the real meaning of the used token or series of tokens. In the name space of food ‘hot dog’ is a sausage sandwich but in the namespace of animals ‘hot dog’ has another meaning. In the literature there are techniques to analyze the meanings in a correct way. Those are partly stochastic techniques, which are applied to identify the namespace to which the analyzed code belongs. Depending on the environmental information and some other criteria the namespace may be deducted and the real meaning of the analyzed text can be identified. But those types of analysis always have a certain possibility of confusion. If the language is formal, there is no way of confusion during the analysis, since the sequence and dependencies of the language tokens and artifacts are described in a mathematical formal way. Now the rules of a formal language can also be mapped to a meta-model. A meta-model contains the rules which apply to its related model. What is the next layer over a meta-model. It is an ontology. A meta-model is still specific. For example CA Gen has a meta-model, eclipse has also a meta-model. Each other tool has also a meta-model. The question is, whether those meta-models are the same? Even if the tools cover the same domains, the meta-models are mostly different. But ie. the ontology of model based development tools is normally unique. This ontology covers all the artifacts of all tool’s meta-models. ModelCVS is based on the idea of a semi-automatic transformation generation based on ‘lifting’ the tools meta-models to their model based tool ontology. The idea is some sort of automatic plug-and-play connection among tools. The tools specific meta-models should be mapped (lifted) to the related ontology and the identification of corresponding meta-model components of different model based development tools should be accomplished during this mapping process to the same classes of the MBD tools ontology. The next step would then be the generation of the transformation scripts which have been deducted from the meta-model classes mapped to a certain part of the ontology. The ModelCVS transformation framework is based on an ontology deducted grammar alignment model, which automatically generates the target language from the equivalent grammar artifacts of the source language. This includes the alignment of language structure and then the code transformation. In another future article I am going to write detailed about this transformation. Now coming back to Danny’s proposal of scanning CA Gen model related unstructured texts into ontologies. Here the ontology of model based development tools or ontology of process models can be used, finally the related model instances will contain the related information and those will be modeled maybe in a modern language like UML and will be brought finally into CA Gen. That’s what ModelCVS ProgGen is already doing. The usage of ontologies are arisen with the need for stronger results in web queries. Instead of looking for a restaurant for a dinner, people can include the types of food they want to get etc.. and semantic web, how the technology is called, makes it possible and delivers the needed information from the big pool of internet. This kind of information mining can be used in various other areas and also in systems modernization as we do. ModelCVS, Ontologies, Meta-Models, .. and co.
As I wrote in some of my articles, the crucial point in the systems analysis is the ability of capturing the correct meaning of the analyzed system. I call this behavior of the tool ‘the understanding’. This behavior is important if the computer program (tool) has to make any decisions depending on the meaning of the scanned source text.
This can be an unstructured text. An unstructured text may depend on a formal grammar or not. The difference here is similar to the difference between natural languages and the formal languages. Natural languages have many ‘name spaces’, which are context dependent. In the formal languages this name space is given by the the grammar of the language. In natural languages the namespace must be identified correctly to capture the real meaning of the used token or series of tokens. In the name space of food ‘hot dog’ is a sausage sandwich but in the namespace of animals ‘hot dog’ has another meaning.
In the literature there are techniques to analyze the meanings in a correct way. Those are partly stochastic techniques, which are applied to identify the namespace to which the analyzed code belongs. Depending on the environmental information and some other criteria the namespace may be deducted and the real meaning of the analyzed text can be identified. But those types of analysis always have a certain possibility of confusion. If the language is formal, there is no way of confusion during the analysis, since the sequence and dependencies of the language tokens and artifacts are described in a mathematical formal way.
Now the rules of a formal language can also be mapped to a meta-model. A meta-model contains the rules which apply to its related model. What is the next layer over a meta-model. It is an ontology. A meta-model is still specific. For example CA Gen has a meta-model, eclipse has also a meta-model. Each other tool has also a meta-model. The question is, whether those meta-models are the same? Even if the tools cover the same domains, the meta-models are mostly different. But ie. the ontology of model based development tools is normally unique. This ontology covers all the artifacts of all tool’s meta-models.
ModelCVS is based on the idea of a semi-automatic transformation generation based on ‘lifting’ the tools meta-models to their model based tool ontology. The idea is some sort of automatic plug-and-play connection among tools. The tools specific meta-models should be mapped (lifted) to the related ontology and the identification of corresponding meta-model components of different model based development tools should be accomplished during this mapping process to the same classes of the MBD tools ontology. The next step would then be the generation of the transformation scripts which have been deducted from the meta-model classes mapped to a certain part of the ontology. The ModelCVS transformation framework is based on an ontology deducted grammar alignment model, which automatically generates the target language from the equivalent grammar artifacts of the source language. This includes the alignment of language structure and then the code transformation. In another future article I am going to write detailed about this transformation.
Now coming back to Danny’s proposal of scanning CA Gen model related unstructured texts into ontologies. Here the ontology of model based development tools or ontology of process models can be used, finally the related model instances will contain the related information and those will be modeled maybe in a modern language like UML and will be brought finally into CA Gen. That’s what ModelCVS ProgGen is already doing. The usage of ontologies are arisen with the need for stronger results in web queries. Instead of looking for a restaurant for a dinner, people can include the types of food they want to get etc.. and semantic web, how the technology is called, makes it possible and delivers the needed information from the big pool of internet. This kind of information mining can be used in various other areas and also in systems modernization as we do.

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