Authors:
Nicholas Poul Schultz-Møller
1
;
Christian Hølmer
2
and
Michael R. Hansen
3
Affiliations:
1
Imperial College London, United Kingdom
;
2
Upsido, Denmark
;
3
Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Keyword(s):
Enterprise Resource Planning systems, REA, domain specific language, Web-applications.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Engineering Information System
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Management Information Systems
Abstract:
We present an approach to the construction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, which is based
on the Resources, Events and Agents (REA) ontology. Though this framework deals with processes involving exchange and flow of resources, the conceptual models have high-level graphical representations describing what the major entities are rather than how they engage in computations. We show how to develop a declarative, domain-specific language on the basis of REA, and for this language we have developed a tool which automatically can generate running web-applications. A main contribution is a proof-of-concept result showing that business-domain experts can, using a declarative, REA-based domain-specific language, generate their own applications without worrying about implementation details. In order to have a well-defined domain-specific language, a formal model of REA has been developed using the specification language Object-Z. This formalization led to clarifications as well
as the introduction of new concepts. The compiler for our language is written in Objective CAML and as implementation platform we used Ruby on Rails. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of whole construction of a running application on the basis of a REA specification.
(More)