RE-USING EXPERIENCE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS

DEVELOPMENT

Paulo Tom

Department of Computing, Polytecnic of Viseu, Viseu, Portugal

Ernesto Costa

Department of Computing, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

ıs Amaral

Department of Information Systems, University of Minho, Guimar

aes, Portugal

Keywords:

Information Systems Development, Case-Based Reasoning, Model development.

Abstract:

Information Systems Development (ISD) is an important organization activity that generally involves the de-

velopment of models. This paper describes a framework, supported by Case-Based-Reasoning (CBR) method,

that enables the use of experience in model development in the context of ISD process.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the ISD process IT professionals develop mod-

els, like data and functional models, that express

their conceptualization of some organizational as-

pects. The quality and development time of these

models depends on the IT professionals experience.

For example, several authors (Batra and Davis, 1992;

Chaiyasut and Shanks, 1994; Venable, 1996) consider

that expert data modellers perform better than novice

data modellers. Besides that, in classical ISD domain

bibliography (Kendall and Kendall, 1992; Downs

et al., 1992) practical examples are used to illustrate

how techniques/modelling tools can be applied.

The use of domain-speciﬁc knowledge within a

KB-Case tool, and the ability to reason with and

make use of this knowledge during a design session

improves the efﬁciency of a tool (Lloyd-Williams,

1994b). This kind of knowledge is used by some

tools, for example (Tauzovich, 1990; Lloyd-Williams,

1994a), although these tools are oriented for speciﬁc

types of models and based on rules. The CBR method

has better performance in design tasks than rule-based

systems (Watson, 1997).

This paper shows a framework, based on the CBR

method, that enables the use of acquired experience

to develop models in the ISD. The proposed frame-

work is not oriented for a speciﬁc software tool, nor

for a speciﬁc modelling language and not even to a

speciﬁc model type. In section 2 we brieﬂy review

the main ISD concepts needed to understand our con-

tribution that is described in section 4. In section 3 we

review some CBR concepts. Finally, in section 4 we

show results of the ISMT (a software tool developed

to support the framework) application to a set of data

models.

2 INFORMATION SYSTEMS

DEVELOPMENT

ISD is the fundamental process performed when en-

gaging IT to achieve a speciﬁc purpose in a spe-

ciﬁc context (Fitzgerald et al., 2002). According to

Fitzgerald et al. (Fitzgerald et al., 2002) ISD involves

much more than simply the deployment of technol-

ogy. The ISD generally involves several types of pro-

cess. There is not a generally accepted process model.

However the activities such as planning, analyzing,

design and implementation are part of the ISD pro-

cess. Each of these activities has a speciﬁc purpose

and is generally implemented by making use of meth-

ods, techniques, modelling tools and software tools.

It must be noted that concepts like method, tech-

357

Tomé P., Costa E. and Amaral L. (2007).

RE-USING EXPERIENCE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT.

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - SE, pages 357-362

DOI: 10.5220/0001343803570362

 SciTePress

nique and modelling tool are not used with the same

meaning in the ISD bibliography. In this paper, we

consider the following:

• methods - deﬁne what must to be done;

• techniques - deﬁne how it will be done;

• modelling tools - are the means used to im-

plement techniques.

But despite this problem, it could be said that in

the last few decades several authors have proposed

methods, techniques and modelling tools that con-

tribute to a better ISD process. Although some au-

thors criticize the use of methods (Baskerville et al.,

1992; Wastell, 1996), it is a fact that IT profession-

als make use of them. These methods and tools can

be proprietary methods or created/adapted by the IT

professional.

To support the application of techniques and mod-

elling tools, some have authors proposed software

tools, generally called CASE tools, which aim to

improve the ISD processes. The ﬁrst CASE tools

were mainly design tools. In the nineties the ﬁrst

knowledge-based CASE (KB-CASE) tools were pro-

posed. Generally, these tools are oriented for speciﬁc

ISD processes, for example conceptual database mod-

elling (Welzer et al., 1998) and are based on rules.

In CASE tools two types of modelling tools could

be used: graphical and textual. Textual tools ex-

press models through text descriptions. While graph-

ical tools deﬁne models through graphics construc-

tors. There are a lot of graphical and textual tools de-

scribed in ISD bibliography. For example, for deﬁn-

ing the data aspect, there is IDEF1X (FIPS, 1993),

Peter Chen notation (Chen, 1976) and UML class di-

agram (UML, 2006) graphical tools. The the BSP

(IBM, 1984) method uses several textual tools.

3 THE CBR METHOD

CBR is a method (Watson, 1999) that tries to solve

new problems based on solutions to similar previ-

ous ones (Kolodner, 1993; Aamodt and Plaza, 1994).

CBR is based on two crucial aspects: the cases and

the process model.

The case is formed by the problem and the solu-

tion (Kolodner, 1993). The objective and the charac-

teristics of the situation are described by the problem.

The solution consists of the solution itself, the solu-

tion evaluation and reasonings. The identiﬁcation of

cases types constitutes the major step forward in the

development of the CBR system. The set of cases of

the CBR system is called case memory. An important

issue related to cases is the indexing. The index is

a label associated to the case that will allow it to be

remembered.

The process model, called the CBR cycle, begins

with the problem description and ends with the so-

lution. The CBR cycle has two principal models:

4Rs proposed by Aamod & Plaza (Aamodt and Plaza,

1994) and the one proposed by Kolodner (Kolodner,

1993). The CBR cycles generally involve the follow-

ing activities:

• case search to ﬁnd similar cases;

• similarity evaluation to measure the level of

similarity between the problem that must be

resolved and the stored ones;

• adaptation to adjust one or several solutions

to the current problem;

• case retain to store the new resolved prob-

lem.

The case search is based on the problem descrip-

tion. The similarity evaluation is based on similar-

ity functions (Althoff et al., 1995). Consequently, the

new solution is built by adapting old solutions to the

needs of the current problem. The last task of the

CBR cycle is the inclusion of the case in the cases

memory. Given the fact that a new case is added to

the system, it could be said the CBR systems have the

ability to learn.

It is important to mention, that there are a lot of

domains where the CBR methodology has been used

(Kolodner, 1993; Watson, 1996; Mntaras and Plaza,

1997). The CBR application areas consist of, for

example, software development, architectural design,

meal planning and legal reasoning systems.

The problem presented in this paper could be clas-

siﬁed as belonging to the design class of the classi-

ﬁcation schema proposed by Althoff (Althoff et al.,

1995). The development of models is a design task

because the model conception is carried out without

any guidelines. There are several CBR systems that

share this property. These are mainly found in the

software development environments where it is pos-

sible to reuse software code. The Rebuilder project

(Rebuilder, 2006) is an example of this. This project

aims to use the CBR methodology in the development

of UML diagrams (Gomes et al., 2003). The Experi-

ence Factory (Althoff et al., 1999) proposes a struc-

ture and a software application that aims to reuse ex-

perience in the context of software development pro-

cesses. Krampe and Lusti (Krampe and Lusti, 1997)

applied CBR in the IS design. The emphasis of this

work was on the use of design speciﬁcations. Their

focus is also on software development process.

Regarding these works, it is important to say that

ISMT is not concerned with the software development

ICSOFT 2007 - International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

358

process (i.e code writing). It is meant to help the de-

velopment of data models. However, the use of UML

diagrams could be an aspect that it has in common

with the Rebuilder project. We may consider ISMT

as a tool that contributes to a good Knowledge Man-

agement (KM). The KM leads to rational allocation of

organisational knowledge assets (Althoff and Weber,

2005), and this tool allows us a to maintain a ”experi-

ence base” platform that facilitate ISD projects.

4 THE USE OF EXPERIENCE IN

ISD

The use of experience in ISD increase the quality of

IS and reduces the costs of development. This section

shows a framework that will enable the use of experi-

ence in model developments.

The proposed framework is formed by four main

modules: a Model repository, a Conversation mod-

ule, a Knowledge management module and an Inter-

face module. The Model repository stores models.

The Conversion module deals with the conversion be-

tween notations. The Knowledge management mod-

ule is responsible for the management of the informa-

tion about developed models. The Interface module

implements the interface mechanisms with the soft-

ware modelling tools.

The Model Repository is implemented by the Case

memory of the CBR system. As previously men-

tioned, the Case memory stores cases and general

knowledge domain used by the CBR system. Before

describing the knowledge domain, it is important to

state that it was our intention to implement a system

independent of application domain and also indepen-

dent of the type of modelling tool. Because of this,

the following description is not oriented to a speciﬁc

modelling tool.

One part of the knowledge domain is the system

vocabulary (Richter, 1995). The observation of the IT

professionals modelling activity, leads us to conclude

that we should consider two kinds of cases: models

and constructors. The case model is naturally imple-

mented because the IT professionals major goal is the

development of models. But as it is not always possi-

ble to get an entire model, it is useful to extract indi-

vidual constructors.

It was also stated in section 2 that IT profession-

als develop textual or graphic models. As we consid-

ered it important to build an independent system tool,

three types of constructors were implemented: nodes,

arcs and attributes. It could be considered that tex-

tual models are only composed of nodes. For each

constructor type a case is deﬁned.

To deﬁne a case we followed Kolodner’s

(Kolodner, 1993) suggestion, where a case consists

of: problem, solution. For the solution part we con-

sidered the XML code that describes the construc-

tor. The problem characteristics were derived from

the formulation of graphic and textual tools through

attribute grammar (Wilhelm and Maurer, 1996). It is

important to note that attribute grammars were used

because some of the modelling tools enable the cap-

ture of semantic aspects. Besides that, it also enables

the description of the structure of the aspect under

analysis. After this step, the system vocabulary is de-

ﬁned as shown in tables 1 and 2.

The set of characteristics listed above, are synthe-

sized and inherited attributes of the formalized mod-

elling tools. For example, Number of nodes and Node

keywords are synthesized attributes. While the Mod-

elling tool, Type of IS and Modelled aspect node char-

acteristics are inherited attributes. It is important to

say that Node properties, Attribute properties and Arc

properties intend to store the speciﬁc information of

each constructor.

ISMT was developed under some of the baselines

generally accepted to CBR tools, namely the 4Rs cy-

cle of Aamodt and Plaza (Aamodt and Plaza, 1994)

and some of aspects mentioned by Mantaras et al

(Mantaras et al., 2006) were implemented. Besides

that, it was our aim to develop a tool that could be

case type independent. As shown in tables 1 and 2,

the ISMT tool supports several objectives.

The ISMT structure is illustrated in ﬁgure 1. The

ISMT has two main components: the client and the

server. The user uses a browser and a software

modelling tool (like Visio, PowerDesigner or ER-

win). The communication between client and server

is done through the http protocol. The ISMT was im-

plemented with ASPX (Microsoft, 2002) and Oracle

technologies.

The ISMT user can do two main types of tasks:

modelling tasks or conﬁguring new modelling tools.

As already mentioned, the modelling task is the main

aim of IT professionals. The conﬁguration of new

modelling tools is the creation of knowledge domain.

This task will be detailed below.

When the user does the modelling task he intends

to build a model of an organizational aspect. The de-

velopment of the model begins with the deﬁnition of

the IS type, modelling tool and the software mod-

elling tool. After that, the user dialogues with the

server to get help in its model development, which

could be the entire model or a speciﬁc element, i.e, a

model constructor.

The server component has seven elements: Mod-

If is a graphic model.

RE-USING EXPERIENCE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

359

Table 1: Case Description.

Case

type

Description

Model • Problem:

Objective: Model deﬁnition

Characteristics:

Type of IS:

Modelling tool:

Modelled aspect:

Number of nodes:

Nodes keywords:

Number of arcs

Number of arcs by nodes

• Solution:

Solution: Model XML description

Nodes • Problem:

Objective: Node deﬁnition

Characteristics:

Type of IS:

Modelling tool:

Modelled aspect:

Node properties:

Keywords:

Number of attributes:

Attributes keywords:

Arcs with

• Solution:

Solution: Node XML description

elling Manager, XML parser, CBR engine, Mod-

elling tool manager, Case Memory, Tools Library and

Knowledge manager.

The Modelling Manager is responsible for all

communication with the user during the modelling

task. This element has two major functionalities: to

accept complete models and process user requests

(model or constructor). The complete models are

transmitted to the XML parser. The user requests

are communicated to the CBR engine and after its re-

sponse the related http code is generated and passed

to the browser.

The XML parser treats model ﬁles using the pars-

ing rules of the Tools library. In the starting up phase

complete models are transmitted to the XML parser

to develop the initial Case memory.

The Case Memory component stores cases and

all knowledge domain. This component is imple-

mented through Oracle technology. Two Oracle re-

sources were used: data tables and stored proce-

Table 2: Case Description (Cont.).

Case

type

Description

Attribute • Problem:

Objective: Attribute deﬁnition

Characteristics:

Modelling tool:

Keywords:

Belong to:

Attribute properties:

• Solution:

Solution: Attribute XML description

Arc • Problem:

Objective: Arc deﬁnition

Characteristics:

Type of IS:

Modelling tool:

Modelled aspect:

Keywords:

Arc properties:

Arc attribute keywords:

Links:

• Solution:

Solution: Relationship XML description

CBR Engine

XML

parser

Modeling

Manager

Server

Modeling

Tool

Manager

Case

memory

Knowledge Manager

Browser

Modeling

Tool

Client

Tools

Library

Figure 1: ISMT Structure.

dures/functions. Data tables were used to store the do-

main knowledge, while stored procedures/functions

ICSOFT 2007 - International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

360

were used to implement the system functionalities.

The Case memory is structured through frames

(Minsky, 1974; Minsky, 1975). Richter’s (Richter,

1995) concept of container is implemented in Case

memory to store all types of knowledge. Every frame

has a ﬂag that speciﬁes which type of knowledge it

stores.

As mentioned the Cases are structured according

to the frame mechanism. The data is stored in each

frame case according to the approach attribute/value.

The composed attributes are split into a new frame.

Besides the cases, the Case memory has knowl-

edge related to the metric and adaptation rules. The

metric is stored on the frame that describes the

domain knowledge according to attribute value ap-

proach. The procedures names that implement the

adaptation rules are also stored in the mentioned

frames. These procedures are implemented using

stored procedure of the Oracle engine.

The CBR engine implements the 4Rs cycle

(Aamodt and Plaza, 1994). The Recall phase begins

with a request to the Modelling manager which spec-

iﬁes a set of problem characteristics. The recall is im-

plemented based on non-structured case memory. The

adaptation is done according to a set of pre-deﬁned

rules. The case evaluation and ﬁnal adaptation is done

by the system user.

The Modelling tool manager is responsible for the

management of the domain knowledge. Every time

that a new modelling tool is created, it is through this

module that the domain knowledge is speciﬁed. Us-

ing this module it is possible to deﬁne: the vocabulary,

the weights and the adaptation rules.

Finally, the Knowledge manager intends to man-

age all the stored knowledge related to cases.

5 RESULTS AND CONCLUDING

REMARKS

The system was tested with ﬁfteen IS data mod-

els. The data models belong to different organiza-

tions/domains. Each data model has a different num-

ber of entities, attributes and relationship as described

in rows 1, 2 and 3 of table 3, respectively.

The ISMT was used with two strategies. In the

ﬁrst strategy the system was launched separately for

each data model (no models in memory). In the sec-

ond strategy the data models are introduced sequen-

tially from M

to M

As we can see in table 4 when the models are

launched sequentially the percentage of adapted cases

increases signiﬁcantly. For instance the cases rela-

tionship in almost all situations is derived by adapting

Table 3: Situation 1 Results.

Total

entities

Total

attrib.

Total

relat.

Adapted

entities

Adapted

attrib.

Adapted

relat.

4 6 4 0 66.7 75

24 86 32 0 24.4 96.9

17 113 12 5.9 39.8 91.7

13 44 10 0 52.3 90

10 48 9 10 22.9 88.9

6 60 4 0 25 50

22 102 12 9.1 34.3 91.7

16 67 13 6.3 32.8 92.3

7 22 3 28.6 45.5 66.7

8 74 7 0 28.4 85.7

4 25 3 0 32 66.7

4 22 3 0 22.7 66.7

30 130 44 10 36.2 97.7

4 13 4 0 23.1 75

4 53 3 0 58.5 66.7

cases contained in the case memory. By contrast for

entity cases the use of past cases is very low. This can

be justiﬁed by the heterogeneity of IS domains. No-

tice also that the order of data models created was not

considered an issue.

Table 4: Situation 2 Results.

Adapted

entities

Adapted

attrib.

Adapted

relat.

0% 66.7% 75%

8.3% 26.7% 100%

5.9% 48.7% 100%

7.7% 70.5% 100%

20% 43.8% 100%

0% 45% 100%

% 9.1% 41.2% 100%

12.5% 50.8% 100%

28.6% 77.3% 100%

25% 43.2% 100%

0% 60% 100%

0% 68.2% 100%

20% 48.5% 100%

25% 92.3% 100%

25% 83% 100%

We have empirically shown that the inclusion of

a CBR methodology providing a memory of past ex-

perience greatly improves the task of data modelling

within ISD. The use of adapted cases beneﬁts the user

once he/she does not need to provide that information

manually to the system. Therefore the ISD can be fo-

cus on the new elements.

RE-USING EXPERIENCE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

361

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