Authors:
Sebastian Bossung
;
Hans-Werner Sehring
;
Patrick Hupe
and
Joachim W. Schmidt
Affiliation:
Hamburg University of Technology, Germany
Keyword(s):
Web information systems, module-based architecture, schema evolution, software generation, case study.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Internet Technology
;
Network Systems, Proxies and Servers
;
System Integration
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
XML and Data Management
Abstract:
Modern information systems development is a complex task for it must fulfill a large variety of application-and architecture-oriented requirements. Furthermore, such requirements often are a moving target for the developer, not only because the system has to stay open to a constantly changing application domain, but also because new requirements are added during the extremely long lifetime of such information systems. To make things worse, modern information systems are operated in a 24x7-modus which generates the pressure of highly dynamic, almost online system evolution. A main source of problems such development projects struggle with originates from the lack of a systematic subdivision of large software systems into manageable modules. As a consequence developers are traditionally involved in a complex patchwork of manual efforts to keep the various parts of the system in sync with each other and with the system’s requirements. In this paper we outline our approach to information
system development which is based on a model for Conceptual Content Management (CCM). Our CCM approach profits from the dynamic, model-driven generation of smaller modules, which can be combined automatically into the full system. The generation process uses a CCM model of the application domain(s) from which our compiler framework dynamically generates the schema-dependent parts of the system. Due to the dynamic nature of this generation process, we are able to provide adequate support for both schema evolution and personalization of such a system. We have successfully employed the CCM approach to the development of complex web information systems. We give a brief account of CCM development and present an application example.
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