Designing Reusable Systems That Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems: Revisiting Object-oriented Principles

Richard McClatchey, Andrew Branson, Jetendr Shamdasani

2014

Abstract

In the age of the Cloud and so-called ‘big data’ systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.

References

  1. Agilium product, 2008. See http://www.agilium.com Last accessed October 2013.
  2. Branson, A et al. 2014, CRISTAL : A Practical Study in Designing Systems to Cope with Change, Journal of Information Systems, Accepted for publication.
  3. Chatrchyan S et al. 2008, The CMS Experiment at the CERN LHC. The CMS Collaboration, The Journal of Instrumentation Vol 3 361 pages IoP Publishers
  4. Estrella, F et al., 2001 Meta-Data Objects as the Basis for System Evolution. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 2118, p. 390-399 ISBN 3-540-42298-6 Springer-Verlag, 2001
  5. Estrella, F et al., 2003 Pattern Reification as the Basis for Description-Driven Systems. Journal of Software and System Modeling Volume 2 Number 2, pp 108-119 Springer-Verlag, 2003.
  6. Georgakopoulos, D et al. 1995. An Overview of Workflow Management, Journal of Distributed and Parallel Database Systems 3 (2), pp119-153.
  7. Kensing, F. and Blomberg, J. 1998. Participatory Design : Issues and Concerns. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work VoL 7 No 3-4 pp 167-185. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.
  8. Kolar., J. 2009 Business Activity Monitoring. PhD Thesis, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. Brno, Czech Republic. 2009.
  9. McClatchey, R et al, 2013 Providing Traceability for Neuroimaging Analyses. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 82 pp 882-894.
  10. OMG Meta-Object facility, MOF, 2004. http://www.omg.org/mof/ Last accessed October 2013.
  11. Roddick, J.F., 2009 Schema Versioning, Encyclopedia of Database Systems 2009: 2499-2502
  12. de Vries, D. and Roddick J.F., 2007. The case for mesodata: An empirical investigation of an evolving database system. Information & Software Technology, 49(9-10): 1061-1072.
  13. Weske, M. 2007, Business Process Management. Concepts, Languages, Architectures. Springer Publishers, 2007.
  14. Wirfs-Brock R et al. 1990 Designing Object Oriented Software. Prentice Hall.
  15. Yoder, J. and Johnson, R 2002. The Adaptive Object Model Architectural Style. Proceedings of the Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture 2002 (WICSA3 7802).
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

McClatchey R., Branson A. and Shamdasani J. (2014). Designing Reusable Systems That Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems: Revisiting Object-oriented Principles . In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-030-7, pages 109-116. DOI: 10.5220/0004869801090116


in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase14,
author={Richard McClatchey and Andrew Branson and Jetendr Shamdasani},
title={Designing Reusable Systems That Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems: Revisiting Object-oriented Principles},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2014},
pages={109-116},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004869801090116},
isbn={978-989-758-030-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Designing Reusable Systems That Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems: Revisiting Object-oriented Principles
SN - 978-989-758-030-7
AU - McClatchey R.
AU - Branson A.
AU - Shamdasani J.
PY - 2014
SP - 109
EP - 116
DO - 10.5220/0004869801090116