COMPONENT BASED INFORMATION SYSTEM

RE-ENGINEERING APPROACH

Abdelaziz Khadraoui, Michel Léonard

MATIS Geneva Team - Database Laboratory, CUI - University of Geneva

Uni-Dufour, rue du Général Dufour 24, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland

Key

words: Information System, Component, Renovation, Inva

riant Concepts, Re-Engineering.

Abstract: This paper presents a concept called Component based Information Systems Re-Engineering (CISRE),

which lays down the foundation of a new re-engineering approach. CISRE covers all the facets of

Information Systems (IS) at three levels: system, collaboration and organization. This approach contains

two main phases respectively: the comprehension phase and the renovation phase, which are not disjointed.

The main goal of this approach is to converge into a new IS, within a rapid evolving environment. Thus, the

new IS will be achieved on stable concepts based on invariants.

1 INTRODUCTION

Information Systems (IS) are recognized as a

strategic asset of most mediums and large

enterprises, and of public organizations. These IS

could be found in many economic sectors and social

activities. Most of the time, these organizations have

a very important legacy and strategic applications

those are essential to deal with their main business

activities. Some of them are relatively new while the

others are older. This inheritance is often built

gradually and based on the heterogeneous

technologies, it is also developed for specific needs,

at different periods and by different teams.

Consequently, it leads to IS with their components

and architectural layers. Those components and

layers are not always able to communicate with

others. In most of cases, these systems became non-

adaptive to new requirements after many evolutions.

In other words, these organizations should

constantly undertake changes in their human and

technical environments according to the functional

needs.

Facing this increasing evolution, a lot of

ganizations are brought to rebuild the pre-existing

IS and take into account the data-processing support

the new activities related to the various changes.

In fact, the interests to IS rebuilding are mainly

expl

ned regarding to their complexity, because of

the following particular factors: (i) the defective

character of the design and the development of the

applications, particularly at the analysis phase of

user's needs; (ii) the inability of the systems to

evolve; and (iii) the insufficiency in documentation.

In this paper, we present a new approach of IS Re-

engi

neeri

ng focused on the concept of Information

System Component (ISC). The goal is to develop

information systems that can support future

improvements in an easy way.

2 OUR APPROACH OF

INFORMATION SYSTEMS

RE-ENGINEERING

As illustrated in figure 1, our approach of IS Re-

engineering composes of two main phases. The first

phase consists of comprehension of the legacy

information system (LIS). This step aims to produce

the basis for the renovation. The second phase

consists of defining the process of renovation of LIS.

The activities of comprehension and renovation are

related.

625

Khadraoui A. and Léonard M. (2004).

COMPONENT BASED INFORMATION SYSTEM RE-ENGINEERING APPROACH.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 625-628

DOI: 10.5220/0002657306250628

 SciTePress

In the schema of figure 1, the forward engineering

concerns to the classical process of developing

system. It starts from the specifications of the pre-

existed information systems and moves down

towards implementation and deployment (Bisbal,

and al, 1999).

2.1 The process of comprehension

The process of comprehension basically involves in

the analysis of the IS. The purpose of the IS analysis

is to identify: (i) activities of the organizations; (ii)

roles and responsibilities; and (iii) the static space,

the dynamic space, and the integrity rules space of

LIS.

As mentioned below, several sources of information

are needed to carry out this analysis. In fact, the

analysis of the pre-existed IS (figure 2) involves in

the three following facets of an IS (De Michelis, and

al., 1998):

1. The organizational facet that is concerned

with work management from a formal

organizational perspective. This facet

addresses global organizational concerns,

including organizational objectives and

business goals, policies, regulations, as well

as resulting workflow or project plans.

2. The group collaboration facet that

concerned with the actors (people) dealing

with a common process. These are related

to organizational roles or responsibilities

working on common business processes;

3. The systems facet

that is concerned with

computerized systems that support business

activities.

Figure 1: our approach of IS Re-engineering

Figure 2: IS analysis

The results of comprehension process are mainly

summarized as following:

 To extract the most stable part of LIS;

 To capture the knowledge of the data

semantics. This process is useful: (i) if we

want to use our current database to supply

data to other IS; and (ii) if we want to

replace the current IS, we need to acquire a

deep knowledge of the data. Their potential

migration requires a deep understanding of

the meaning of the data, their format and

structure, as well as how they are stored in

the database.

On the other hand, the process of comprehension

LIS also deals with the strategy to be adopted to

extract the static space, the dynamic space, and the

integrity rules space of LIS.

To capture the knowledge of the data semantics,

databases must be reverse engineered but we need to

rely the possible information sources, such as:

program sources, data, data dictionaries, reports,

screens and documentations.

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The analysis of the data description language (DDL)

code of the database for instance gives precise

information, which is easy to analyze. The procedure

source code analysis gives also precise information

but in contrary, it is quite difficult in terms of

analysis cost. Documentation, if up-to-date and

carefully written, can be useful and easy enough to

analyze. When the documentation is obsolete and /or

not structured, its analysis can take time end, even

worse, lead to false assumptions (Henrard, 2003).

The extraction of the dynamic and integrity rules

spaces is the most difficult process because most of

the implicit structure and constraints are buried into

the source code of programs that is often the most

reliable place where such constraints can be found

(Henrard, 2003). Analyzing source codes of

programs requires sophisticated techniques

pertaining to the program-understanding domain.

Therefore, these techniques that seem to be adequate

for small systems become useless for medium or

large one. For these reasons, in order to extract the

three spaces as mentioned above, we need to analyze

other sources of information. The process of

extraction, applied in the case of an institutional IS,

is then facilitated by the development of a cognitive

space.

2.2 The process of Renovation

At the level of renovation, the issue is to know how

models, tools, analysis and design methods could

help to create new Information Systems supporting

evolution. The renovation implies that the IS

development has focused on the concept of ISC that

focuses on the interaction with the organizational

environment and the overlaps among IS

components.

Figure 3 shows the renovation process:

ISC (Information System Component) describes a

generic situation in the IS development. In (Léonard,

2003; Le Dinh and Léonard, 2002; Turki, and al.,

2003), ISC are defined as a particular IS.

All fundamental aspects of an Information System

such as the static, the dynamic and the integrity rules

constitute the content of an ISC as described in the

following:

 Static space: where the data structure of

the ISC is defined using the concept of

hyperclass with its set of classes and

hypermethods,

 Dynamic space: where the behavior of the

different elements of the ISC is expressed.

The bipartite nets are implemented to

specify the dynamic space including the

object life cycles of the hyperclass classes

(Khadraoui, 2002),

 Integrity rules space: where rules

governing the behavior of the elements of

the ISC are specified. Integrity rules (IRs)

of an IS represent most often the business

rules of an organization. An IR is a logical

condition defined over classes, which could

be formally described and verified by

transactions or methods.

Another level in our approach of Re-engineering,

applied in the case of an institutional IS, consists in

the development of a cognitive space extracted from

the legal texts underlying the activities of an

organization (Visentin, 2003; Léonard, 2003b). The

legal texts describe in a precise way the field, the

rules and procedures of the organization activities.

The laws represent a knowledge source of a part of

the domain that we want to model. The concepts

related to the laws are in general stable, and

therefore, do not evolve so much. The result of this

level is to identify the most significant concepts

called the invariant concepts, which form the core

of the new IS. The cognitive space allows to clarify

the links between laws and IS, and in particular

between amendments of laws and evolution of IS.

3 CONCLUSION

In this paper we presented, in short, our approach

dedicated to IS re-engineering. This approach aims

to accompany the evolution of the IS and to

capitalize the existing regarding the business,

informational and processing point of views.

Figure 3: the renovation process

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627

Additionally to this, it concerns the ability to take

into account the new evolution situations. The

originality of the presented approach is the fact that

it is based on the IS component concepts and IS

components recovering. These components have to

be expressed regarding to an efficient and unique

semantic for a group of actors within the

organization. In the other side, we introduced the use

of the cognitive space, applied in the case of an

institutional IS, which allows the expression of the

links between the "legal texts" and the IS. Finally,

the exploitation of such space allows the

identification invariants concepts that constitute the

core of the new IS.

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