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Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

The World Wide Web has undergone a rapid transition from the originally static hypertext to an ubiquitous hypermedia system. Today, the Web is not only used as a basis for distributed applications (Web applications), moreover it serves as a generic architecture for autonomous applications and services. Many research work has been done regarding the modeling and engineering process of Web applications and various platforms, frameworks and development kits exist for the efficient implementation of such systems. Concerning the modeling process, many of the published concepts try to merge traditional hypermedia modeling with techniques from the software engineering domain. Unfortunately, those concepts which capture all facets of the Web’s architecture become rather bulky and are eventually not applicable for a model‐driven Web application development. Moreover, there is a need for frameworks which address both, the modeling process and the implementation task and allow a model driven, semi‐automatic engineering process using CASE tools. This paper outlines the DaVinci Web Engineering Framework which supports the modeling as well as the semi‐automated implementation of Web applications. The DaVinci Architectural Layer specifies a persistent, hierarchical GUI model and a generic interaction scheme. This allows the elimination of the hypermedia paradigm, which turned out to be rather practical when building Web applications.

The purpose of this research is to enable dynamic customization of metadata that describes educational resources in digital repositories.

Users need to describe educational resources in digital repositories according to a user-specific metadata set. As users generally do not have the skills to customize the software application manually, this approach relies on the techniques of model-driven software engineering, which should allow customization of the software application programmatically with no need to develop or order a new software application. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed solution.

A software platform for managing educational resources described by dynamically extendable metadata is proposed. The platform enables the creation of data models that are programmatically transformed to a Web application for the management of educational resources. In this way, users can create their own models of metadata that are relevant in a particular domain.

The solution has been verified by users with technical knowledge. The appropriateness of the model should still be explored for domain experts with little technical knowledge who desire to define new metadata in their domain.

The solution can be used for digital repositories that store diverse educational resources. Each resource could be described using metadata that relates to the domain the resource belongs to.

Digital repositories standardly describe educational resources using some general metadata, which are more focused on the physical characteristics of resources rather than their semantics. The proposed solution introduces custom domain-specific semantics into the description of the resources, which improves their retrieval.

The web service choreography description language (WS‐CDL) is a specification for describing multi‐party collaboration based on web services from a global point‐of‐view. WS‐CDL is designed to be used in conjunction with the web services business process execution language (WS‐BPEL or BPEL). As WS‐CDL is a new choreography language, there has been doubt about the feasibility of a transformation to BPEL. This article aims to show how BPEL process definitions of parties involved in a choreography can be derived from the global WS‐CDL model and what the limitations of such a derivation are.

The authors implemented a prototype of the mappings as a proof of concept.

The automatic transformation leverages the quality of software components interacting in the choreography as advocated in the model driven architecture (MDA) concept. The mapping reveals that some information has to be added manually to the generated BPEL, in particular, choice conditions and private activities.

A comprehensive evaluation of WS‐CDL with respect to the interaction patterns is still missing. As a resolution to this issue, the authors propose the modelling of choreographies by the help of a more abstract language – in the sense of being more independent of underlying technology – like UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams.

The automation of the mapping offers substantial speed‐up of the engineering process. Additionally, the automatic generation of BPEL stubs minimizes the risk of inconsistent process implementations by the parties.

The core contribution is to show how BPEL process definitions for parties involved in a choreography can be derived from a global WS‐CDL model.

Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, explore and specify design decisions in the light of usability requirements and stakeholder's goals. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem.

To meet this challenge, the authors extend IDM (Interactive Dialogue Model), a dialogue‐based approach focusing on the conceptual dialogue flow with the user, codifying a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIAs.

The approach, called Rich‐IDM demonstrated some relevant features: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi‐formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.

The paper proposes a simple way to fill the gap between hypermedia design and user experience design for RIAs, which is an open issue, both from the web engineering point of view and the human‐computer interaction point of view.

The authors have described how Rich‐IDM can help designers to capture and cope with some RIA interface flaws. In this case, the benefits of the approach are directly related to the semantics of its primitives.

The authors' proposal is the first, consolidated step of a promising research avenue.

Testing business processes is crucial to assess the compliance of business process models with requirements. Automating this task optimizes testing efforts and reduces human error while also providing improvement insights for the business process modeling activity. The primary purposes of this paper are to conduct a literature review of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) testing and formal verification and to propose the Business Process Evaluation and Research Framework for Enhancement and Continuous Testing (bPERFECT) framework, which aims to guide business process testing (BPT) research and implementation. Secondary objectives include (1) eliciting the existing types of testing, (2) evaluating their impact on efficiency and (3) assessing the formal verification techniques that complement testing.

The methodology used is based on Kitchenham's (2004) original procedures for conducting systematic literature reviews.

Results of this study indicate that three distinct business process model testing types can be found in the literature: black/gray-box, regression and integration. Testing and verification approaches differ in aspects such as awareness of test data, coverage criteria and auxiliary representations used. However, most solutions pose notable hindrances, such as BPMN element limitations, that lead to limited practicality.

The databases selected in the review protocol may have excluded relevant studies on this topic. More databases and gray literature could also be considered for inclusion in this review.

Three main originality aspects are identified in this study as follows: (1) the classification of process model testing types, (2) the future trends foreseen for BPMN model testing and verification and (3) the bPERFECT framework for testing business processes.

This article proposes the concept of web clientserver event together with its associated taxonomy which yields a formal specification for such an event. The concept, in conjunction with the concept of atomic use case (reviewed in the article), is then used as a key element for a model‐driven approach to web information system development. The outcome is a new method for web information systems development that reduces the complex web‐based hypermedia navigation behaviour to a much simpler event‐driven behaviour. On the strength of that realized simplicity, the method provides (i) a set of platform‐independent models that completely characterizes the application, and (ii) a well‐defined process to map the combined model to any chosen platform‐dependent implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to present the model-driven decision support system (DSS) for small and medium manufacturing enterprises (SMMEs) that actively participates in collaborative activities and manages the planned obsolescence in production. In dealing with the complexity of such demand and supply scenario, the optimisation models are also developed to evaluate the performance of operations practices.

The model-driven DSS for SMMEs, which uses the optimisation models for managing and coordinating planned obsolescence, is developed to determine the optimal manufacturing plan and minimise operating costs. A case application with the planned obsolescence and production scenario is also provided to demonstrate the approach and practical insights of DSS.

Assessing planned obsolescence in production is a challenge for manufacturing managers. A DSS for SMMEs can enable the computerised support in decision making and understand the planned obsolescence scenarios. The causal relationship of different time-varying component obsolescence and availability in production are also examined, which may have an impact on the overall operating costs for producing manufactured products.

DSS can resolve and handle the complexity of production and planned obsolescence scenarios in manufacturing industry. The optimisation models used in the DSS excludes the variability in component wear-out life and technology cycle. In the future study, the optimisation models in DSS will be extended by taking into the uncertainty of different component wear-out life and technology cycle considerations.

This paper demonstrates the flexibility of DSS that facilitates the optimisation models for collaborative manufacturing in planned obsolescence and achieves cost effectiveness.

In the last decade, web services have become a major technology to implement loosely coupled business processes and perform application integration. Through the use of context, a new generation of web services, namely context‐aware web services (CASs), is currently emerging as an important technology for building innovative context‐aware applications. Unfortunately, CASs are still difficult to build. Issues like lack of context provisioning management approach and lack of generic approach for formalizing the development process need to be solved in the first place for easy and effective development of CASs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the techniques on developing CASs.

The paper focuses on introducing a model‐driven platform, called ContextServ, and showcasing how to use this platform to rapidly develop a context‐aware web application, Smart Adelaide Guide. ContextServ adopts a model‐driven development (MDD) approach where a Unified Modeling Language (UML)‐based modeling language – ContextUML – is used to model web services and its context‐awareness features.

The paper presents novel techniques for efficient and effective development of CASs using a MDD approach. The ContextServ platform is the only one that provides a comprehensive software toolset that supports graphical modeling and automatic model transformation of CASs.

The proposed approach has been validated in practice by developing various CASs. The experimental study demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the approach.

The paper presents a novel platform called ContextServ, which offers a set of visual editing and automation tools for easy and fast generating and deploying CASs.

This chapter focuses on techniques and technologies to aid groups in making decisions, with an emphasis on computer-based support. Many office workers regularly meet colleagues and clients in virtual meetings using videoconferencing platforms, which enable participants to carry out tasks in a manner similar to a face-to-face meeting. The development of computer-based platforms to facilitate group tasks can be traced back to the 1960s, and while they support group communication, they do not directly support group decision making. In this chapter we distinguish four technologies developed to provide support to group decisions, clustered into two main traditions. Technologies in the task-oriented tradition are mainly concerned with enabling participants to complete tasks to solve the group's decision problem via computer-supported communications. Group Decision Support Systems and social software technologies comprise the task-oriented tradition. Alternately, in the model-driven tradition, participants use computers to build and use a model that acts as a referent to communicate, mostly verbally, about the group's decision problem. System modeling and decision-modeling technologies constitute the model-driven tradition. This chapter sketches the history and guiding ideas of both traditions, and describes their associated technologies. The chapter concludes with questioning if increased availability of online tools will lead to increased use of group decision support technologies, and the differential impact of communication support versus decision support.