Information Systems: Towards a System of Information Systems

Majd Saleh and Marie-H

ene Abel

Sorbonne Universit

es, Universit

e de Technologie de Compi

egne, CNRS, UMR 7253 Heudiasyc, Compi

egne, France

Keywords:

Information Systems, Knowledge Management, System of Systems, System of Information Systems.

Abstract:

Information Systems are viewed as a set of services creating a workﬂow of information directed to speciﬁc

groups and members. This allows individuals to share ideas and their talents with other members. In such

manner, tasks can be carried out both efﬁciently and effectively. Due to the nature of Information Systems

that revolves around creating information useful to users, and in some higher forms of Information Systems

creating knowledge, management of information and/or knowledge is part of their functionalities. In this pa-

per we aim to study the placement of Information Systems as part of a System of Systems (SoS), as these

large systems poses signiﬁcant technical improvement in terms of information interoperability that overcomes

conceptual and technical barriers. Therefore, we move towards deﬁning and modeling System of Informa-

tion Systems (SoIS). This paper discovers what is currently known about Information Systems and Systems

of Systems, and proceeds towards suggesting an architecture of a System of Information Systems that inte-

grates several Information Systems and allows information to be transferred at ease between those different

components.

1 INTRODUCTION

Information Systems have begun to turn simplicity

to complexity, and to turn hard-to-use to easy-to-use.

However, effectiveness and efﬁciency on information

systems is not satisfying (An, 2010). This universal

nature of existing Information Systems has generated

a strong interest in using an existing set of systems

as the basis for a System of Systems (Simpson and

Dagli, 2008). Further interest in the System of Sys-

tems approach is stimulated by rapid development,

deployment and expansion of new and existing sys-

tems. While successful system and System of Sys-

tems production provides the basis of great potentials,

many system development activities result in failure.

The issue is that while many individual systems work

well as an independent system, they fail when incor-

porated as a component of a System of Systems. The

required System of Systems will need to connect sys-

tems that cross organizational boundaries, come from

multiple domains, and generates an overwhelming

amount of information. Users struggle to deal with

the information produced by each Information Sys-

tem independently by traversing through these sys-

tems and keeping track of the generated information

separately. A solution might be found in a System of

Systems that operates as a single entry point for sev-

eral Information Systems granting the user access to

information produced from multiple Information Sys-

tems, and providing the ability to aggregate available

services to even create an added value not possible

to maintain when those systems were operating sep-

arately. In other words, we might look at this new

system as a System of Information Systems.

Our objective from this paper is to propose an

architecture of a System of Information Systems

comprised of independent Information Systems, with

minimum changes required for the new SoIS to op-

erate successfully, and provide uniﬁed entry point to

information and services with an extra added value

not present in the separate Information Systems.

This paper is organized as follows: section 2 will

provide a use case scenario of the intended SoIS to

highlight the need of such system. Then, the notion

of System of Systems is deﬁned and a discussion of

the differences between System of Systems and Com-

posite Systems is presented to draw clear line between

these two concepts. After that, in section 4, the SoIS

architectural model is presented and then discussed by

deﬁning the concept of SoIS, describing the different

information systems involved in our SoIS, and pre-

senting an example following our architectural model

of SoIS. Later, we discuss our ﬁndings in section 5

by addressing the issue of expanding our SoIS archi-

Saleh, M. and Abel, M..

Information Systems: Towards a System of Information Systems.

In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2015) - Volume 3: KMIS, pages 193-200

ISBN: 978-989-758-158-8

193

tectural model to accept further information systems,

and compare it to existing SoS. Finally, we conclude

with section 6.

2 USE CASE SCENARIO

There is a growing need not only to use Information

Systems, but also to integrate them with other systems

that can beneﬁt from the information generated and

shared within them. Furthermore, services provided

by other systems can have positive impact on the use

of Information Systems.

To put the idea in perspective, let us take the fol-

lowing scenario; Say a journalist is investigating a

certain topic. First the journalist might visit vari-

ous Social Media Networks and search for this topic

and the people involved in it. Next, the journalist

might need to unveil the ambiguity on certain aspects

to better understand the topic, so he/she starts using

Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2015) or DBpedia (DBpedia,

2015) to search for keywords related to this topic,

or even use the archive system from other databases

to search for information. Later on, the journalist

might publish some of his/her ﬁndings on various So-

cial Media Networks to see the public reaction to the

topic under investigation. Of course, not to forget that

the journalist needs to store and keep track of the in-

formation he/she collected from different Information

Systems, and be able to access the information at all

times to reform an encompassing idea about the topic

at hand. To sum things up, we mentioned a scenario

where the user surfed several Information Systems

and collected information from those systems sepa-

rately. The user also had to work with the informa-

tion collected from separate systems collectively. The

struggle is with accessing all these different Informa-

tion Systems and keeping track of the information ob-

tained and created while doing the work required. The

problems we face here reside in the time required to

traverse between different systems and keep track, or-

ganize, and archive all the information obtained from

these systems.

3 SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS

In this section we plan to go through various deﬁni-

tions of System of Systems presented in the literature.

Then, we are going to highlight the differences be-

tween Systems of Systems and Composite Systems in

order to be clear when describing our own System of

Systems.

3.1 Deﬁnitions

The notion of System of Systems (SoS) can be viewed

as an evolution of the standard notion of systems.

Here, we aim to provide abstract and generic deﬁni-

tions of terminology involved in the domain of sys-

tems.

As mentioned by (Karcanias and Hessami, 2010)

“A system is an interconnection organization of ob-

jects which are embedded in a given environment”.

An object is deﬁned as “a general unit (abstract or

physical) deﬁned in terms of its attributes and the pos-

sible relations between them”. Furthermore, these ob-

jects are embedded in an environment. For a given

object, we deﬁne its environment as the “set of ob-

jects, signals, events, structures, which are considered

topologically external to the object, and are linked to

the object in terms of a structure, relations between

their attributes”. Brieﬂy, a system can be deﬁned as

a relationship mapped over a set of objects in an en-

compassing environment (Simpson and Dagli, 2008).

Many deﬁnitions of a SoS exist. An aggregate of

systems leads to the creation of new forms of sys-

tems which may be either described within the frame-

work of composite systems, or demonstrate additional

features which add complexity to the description and

may be referred to as System of Systems. We can

summarize the deﬁnitions mentioned in literature as

the following:

Deﬁnition (i): Systems of Systems exist when

there is a presence of a majority of the following

ﬁve characteristics: operational and managerial inde-

pendence, geographic distribution, emergent behav-

ior, and evolutionary development (Jamshidi, 2011).

Deﬁnition (ii): Systems of Systems are large-

scale concurrent and distributed systems that are com-

prised of complex systems (Jamshidi, 2011) (Carlock

and Fenton, 2001).

Deﬁnition (iii): Enterprise Systems of Systems

Engineering is focused on coupling traditional sys-

tems engineering activities with enterprise activities

of strategic planning and investment analysis (Car-

lock and Fenton, 2001).

Deﬁnition (iv): System of Systems Integration is

a method to pursue development, integration, interop-

erability, and optimization of systems to enhance per-

formance in future battleﬁeld scenarios (Carlock and

Fenton, 2001).

Deﬁnition (v): System of systems is a collec-

tion of task-oriented or dedicated systems that pool

their resources and capabilities together to obtain a

new, more complex, ’meta-system’ which offers more

functionality and performance than simply the sum of

the constituent systems (Manthorpe, 1996).

KMIS 2015 - 7th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

194

Deﬁnition (vi): System of systems is a set of dif-

ferent elements connected or related so as to perform

a unique function not performable by the elements

alone (Rechtin and Maier, 2000).

In the light of the mentioned deﬁnitions we can

describe the notion of System of Systems (SoS) as

the following; Systems of systems are large-scale in-

tegrated systems which are heterogeneous and inde-

pendently operable on their own, but are networked

together for a common goal. The goal, as mentioned

before, may be cost, performance, robustness, etc. In

other terms, A System of Systems is a super system

comprised of other elements which themselves are in-

dependent complex operational systems and interact

among themselves to achieve a common goal. Each

element of a SoS achieves well-substantiated goals

even if they are detached from the rest of the SoS.

3.2 System of Systems Versus

Composite Systems

The deﬁnitions listed in the previous section are

mostly descriptive, but they capture crucial features

of what a generic deﬁnition should involve; however,

they do not answer the question, why is this new no-

tion different than that of composite systems? The

distinctive feature of the notion of System of Systems

(SoS) is that it is considered as an evolution of the

standard notion in engineering of Composite Systems

(CoS) (Sage and Cuppan, 2001) (Karcanias, 2008).

Developing the transition from CoS to SoS we

need to identify the commonalities and differences

between the two notions. We note:

• Both CoS and SoS are compositions of simpler

objects, or systems.

• Both CoS and SoS are embedded in the environ-

ment of a larger system.

• The objects, or sub-systems in CoS do not have

their independent goal, they are not autonomous

and their behavior is subject to the rules of the

interconnection topology.

• The interconnection rule in CoS is expressed as a

graph topology.

• The subsystems in SoS may have their own goals

and some of them may be autonomous, semi-

autonomous, or organized as autonomous group-

ings of composite systems.

• There may be a connection rule expressed as a

graph topology for the information structures of

the subsystems in a SoS.

• The SoS is linked to an environment where every

subsystem enters as an agent with their indi-

vidual Operational Set, Goals.

The evolution of SoS and its ability to solve prob-

lems which cannot be addressed by the traditional

view of CoS comes from these three major factors:

• Autonomy: the systems involved in SoS are at

least partially autonomous

• Local views: no system has a full global view of

the SoS.

• Decentralization: there is no designated single

controlling system, but decision and information

gathering is distributed.

4 SYSTEM OF INFORMATION

SYSTEMS

In this section we propose a new system that com-

bines the services from different Information Sys-

tems. First, we are going to deﬁne our new system

as a System of Information Systems (SoIS). Then, we

are going to present a generic architecture of the SoIS.

Finally we propose an initial design for the SoIS that

can serve as an example of the architecture.

4.1 Deﬁnition

The notion of System of Information Systems is de-

ﬁned by (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1991) as “net-

works of agents interacting in a speciﬁc technology

area under a particular institutional infrastructure for

the purpose of creating, diffusing, and utilizing tech-

nology focused on knowledge, information, and com-

petence ﬂow.” (Breschi and Malerba, 1996) describe

SoIS as “the speciﬁc clusters of the ﬁrms, technolo-

gies, and industries involved in the generation and dif-

fusion of new technologies and in the knowledge ﬂow

that takes place among them.”

Based on the deﬁnitions provided we can summa-

rize the features of SoIS as follows:

• SoIS addresses the impact of the interrelation-

ships between different SoS.

• SoIS is concerned with the ﬂow of information

and knowledge among different information sys-

tems.

• SoIS is responsible for generating information

from the emergent SoS.

• Information interoperability is a key issue when

designing a SoIS.

Information Systems: Towards a System of Information Systems

195

Figure 1: Architectural model of the SoIS.

4.2 Architecture

In this part we are going to present the generic ar-

chitecture of the SoIS. As seen in (Fig. 1), the SoIS

will be able to connect to several Information Systems

(System A, System B etc.). These systems are work-

ing separately. Each of which has its own services

and databases. Introducing new services to these In-

formation systems can be carried out by the SoIS.

These new services follow the MEMORAe approach.

As deﬁned by (Ala Atrash, 2014), MEMORAe ap-

proach is to manage heterogeneous information re-

sources within organizations. The approach is com-

prised of a semantic model (called MEMORAe-core

2) and a web platform (called MEMORAe) which is

based on the semantic model. The model and the plat-

form make together a support to enhance the process

of resources management. The purpose behind intro-

ducing MEMORAe approach to the SoIS is to provide

the added value for other systems comprising the SoIS

by the resources management means of MEMORAe.

In general, the SoIS is represented as a group of

services and a database. The database will hold infor-

mation about the users’ account for the different In-

formation Systems comprising the SoIS. On the other

hand, the services residing in the SoIS can either be

directed to add systems to the orchestration, or emerg-

ing services created from the aggregation of different

Information Systems with the MEMORAe approach.

In addition, the two headed arrows linking the SoIS

with the Information systems represent information

path between the SoIS and the different Information

Systems.

4.3 Example

As mentioned earlier, the SoIS is composed of several

Information Systems. In this part we will take four In-

formation Systems to create a SoIS from them by fol-

lowing the architecture presented earlier in (Fig. 1).

These systems are Twitter, Semantic Hashtag, DBpe-

dia, and MEMORAe. First we will take a look at

each of these systems separately and highlight their

functionality as independent systems, before unveil-

ing their role as parts of the SoIS.

Twitter: Its characteristics are the short messages

that people can post to the system. With a maximum

of 140 characters users may transcribe immediate in-

formation. These messages are called “tweets” and

the novel expression “to tweet” stands for posting a

message on Twitter. Originally used for exchang-

ing ordinary information, Twitter is also used during

political campaigns or political debates, for business

communication (Zhao and Rosson, 2009).

In Twitter people update their activities with

friends simply sending text messages, sometimes en-

riched with photos, links and hash tags. The # sym-

bol, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It

was created organically by Twitter users as a way to

categorize messages (Potts et al., 2011). The hashtag

is used to categorize tweets and help users to search

more easily in Twitter search. Hash-tagged words that

KMIS 2015 - 7th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

196

become very popular are often trending topics.

Semantic Hashtag (Lai et al., 2013): The web

interface of this system provides an input box for

writing the text of the tweet. The user may input a

free text as in usual Twitter clients. The constraint

of 140 characters is handled by a counter. In addi-

tion to the free text, a driven process allows to in-

sert one or more semantic hashtags. For this purpose

the user inserts a meaningful keyword concerning the

text of the tweet. Such a keyword is used to discover

within a knowledge base the identiﬁers of resources

associated to the keyword itself. In this prototype

we use the knowledge base available in the DBpedia

project (Auer et al., 2007), the semantic web mirror

of Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2015). DBpedia provides a

web service called Lookup Service3. The service dis-

covers and returns DBpedia URIs from related key-

words and concerning the resources contained in the

DBpedia knowledge base.

MEMORAe: As deﬁned by (Ala Atrash, 2014),

MEMORAe approach is to manage heterogeneous in-

formation resources within organizations. The ap-

proach is comprised of a semantic model (called

MEMORAe-core 2) and a web platform (called

MEMORAe) which is based on the semantic model.

The model and the platform make together a support

to enhance the process of organizational learning.

The MEMORAe project uses the Semantic Web

standards, therefore, the ontologies occurring in the

system are written in OWL. Users registered in the

MEMORAe system can access one or more knowl-

edge bases. When a base is chosen, a user can view a

semantic map of concepts related to the selected base.

Then, a user can create and share resources around the

concepts of the map.

After being introduced to the components of our

SoIS, let us take a look at the ﬁrst draft of these Infor-

mation Systems working together as SoIS.

First we are going list down the important services

provided by each system. This list is available in (Ta-

ble. 1).

After listing down all key services from the Infor-

mation Systems under study, we can write down the

list of service we expect to have by aggregating those

systems in SoIS. The list of services available by the

SoIS is present in (Table. 2).

To better understand the functionalities of this

SoIS, we can start by explaining how the applica-

tion Semantic Hashtag works. This application allows

users to create semantic tweets. In more details, the

user may input a free text as in usual Twitter clients.

The constraint of 140 characters is handled by the ap-

plication. In addition to the free text, a driven pro-

cess allows to insert one or more semantic hashtags.

For this purpose the user inserts a meaningful key-

word concerning the text of the tweet. This keyword

is used to discover the identiﬁers of resources associ-

ated to the keyword itself. The application uses the

ontology provided by DBpedia. The semantic hash-

tag is created from the ontology URI related to the se-

lected resource and automatically inserted in the text

of the tweet (X). An added value can be achieved by

allowing the semantic hashtag to use ontologies other

than the one provided by Dbpedia. In other words,

to expand the scope of the semantic hashtag applica-

tion to knowledge base systems other than DBpedia.

In addition, we might also think of allowing the in-

formation shared by Twitter as tweets to be indexed

semantically in a knowledge base system.

The idea behind our work is as follows; we intend

to design a system that combines services from other

systems providing an added value for users. This

added value could not be obtained when the intended

systems were performing separately. There is Twitter

that allows us to share resources as tweets. Also, there

is the Semantic Hashtag system that allows users to

create tweets with semantic hashtags created using a

knowledge base available by DBpedia. We also have

MEMORAe, a web application that goes beyond sim-

ple content management system, and allows users to

index resources semantically over a map of concepts.

The scenario we propose is of a system that allows

users to create tweets with semantic hashtag from the

knowledge base available in both DBpedia and MEM-

ORAe and be able to index the tweets semantically in

MEMORAe.

The mockup design of the SoIS is shown in

(Fig. 2). In this illustration we can easily see the

simplicity in design in order to make user experience

friendly and pleasant. We can note the following fea-

tures available in this design:

• The user will be provided with login credentials

to access the SoIS interface.

• On the left panel, the user can manage the dif-

ferent accounts for the different Information Sys-

tems available in the SoIS. At this point the user

can access both his/her Twitter and MEMORAe

accounts.

• On the middle top panel we can see the module

from the Semantic Hashtag application where the

user is able to create text tweets with semantic

hashtags. These semantic hashtags can be either

generated from the knowledge base available in

DBpedia or MEMORAe. Here we note an added

value as the users of the Semantic Hashtag appli-

cation were able to generate the hashtags seman-

tically from DBpedia only.

Information Systems: Towards a System of Information Systems

197

Table 1: Available services in the Information Systems comprising the SoIS.

Twitter

(System A)

Semantic Hashtag

(System B)

MEMORAe

(System C)

DBPedia

(System D)

Available

Services

Share information as

Post on Twitter Capitalize knowledge Capitalize knowledge

Add hashtag to tweets

Use Semantic Hashtags from

DBPedia in tweets

Index resources by a

semantic map

Lookup Service

View Twitter feed

View the description of the

semantic hashtag

• On the middle bottom panel we can view Twitter

feed from the users Twitter account.

• On the right panel the user can use MEMORAe

to index and store tweets semantically. The user

can select a concept from his/her MEMORAe ac-

count and a sharing space to make this tweet avail-

able by it. Then the user can index the selected

tweet according to the selected concept and shar-

ing space. This is also an added value to the SoIS,

as users were not able to index tweets in MEMO-

RAe before.

Next we are going to present a simple scenario to

create a semantic hashtag using the knowledge base

from MEMORAe in the SoIS. We will use standard

UML sequence diagram to represent the sequence of

actions taking place to perform this service in the

SoIS. Sequence diagrams are good means to represent

interactions in such complex systems as mentioned by

(Majd Saleh, 2015). The sequence diagram is shown

in (Fig. 3).

Figure 2: Example of the SoIS.

5 DISCUSSION

In the previous section we presented the SoIS with

an example that will grant users access to various In-

formation Systems from a single interface. The ques-

tions here are: Can we add more Information Systems

Table 2: Available services in the SoIS.

System of Information Systems

(System A+B+C+D)

Available

Services

Add accounts

(Twitter and MEMORAe for starter)

Use Semantic Hashtags

from DBPedia orMEMORAe in tweets

View Twitter feed

View the description of the semantic

hashtag other resources indexed by

to this SoIS? Is it limited to these Information Sys-

tems only?

To answer those questions we can look at the func-

tionality that allows us to generate semantic hashtags

and post them on Twitter. At ﬁrst, the user was able

to create semantic hashtag from the knowledge base

provided by DBpedia. This functionality was made

available by DBpedia system through the lookup ser-

vice that allows searching its knowledge base using

keywords, therefore, returning results corresponding

to those keywords. In this SoIS we were able expand

this functionality and allow users to search MEMO-

RAes knowledge base through a similar lookup ser-

vice made available by MEMORAe. In such man-

ner, we can include other Information Systems to the

searchable knowledge base if they provide such ser-

vice. Furthermore, the SoIS provide the function-

ality of indexing tweets in MEMORAe. The nu-

merous types of resources handled by MEMORAe,

varying from documents, notes, and forum entry to

even weblinks, allows it index almost any resource we

can think of. For example, we might consider using

MEMORAe in this SoIS to index users emails from

an email system or calendar entry from his/her agenda

application. In this manner, the SoIS can grow to han-

dle new Information Systems as the need to use such

systems grows. However, we discussed the expan-

sion of the architecture presented earlier to accept new

Information Systems, but what about including other

SoS and SoIS to be part of a greater SoIS. This raises

the concern of whether to include a SoIS as a whole

in a more encompassing SoIS, or only include parts of

it as separate Information Systems. We can argue that

our architecture permit the SoIS to include services

KMIS 2015 - 7th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

198

Figure 3: Sequence diagram for creating semantic hashtage using the knowledge base from MEMORAe and DBpedia.

from many Information Systems. In such manner, we

could consider the composite SoIS as a whole to be

part of an encompassing SoIS, or only include parts

of it as separate Information Systems.

It is also worth mentioning that the new SoIS pre-

sented in this paper can be compared to other SoS in

the market. For example, we can take the Paraimpu

SoS (Paraimpu, 2015). Paraimpu is a social tool with

the aim to allow people to connect, compose and share

things, services and devices to create personalized ap-

plications on Internet (of Things). It allows the user to

create Sensors, Actuators and Connections between

them in the Paraimpu workspace. The Connection

can be conﬁgured in relation to different scenarios.

These Sensors and Actuators represent different sys-

tems coming together in Paraimpu SoS to provide

new services to users based on the connection cre-

ated between them. A scenario might be where the

user add a “Mount Washington Wind Speed Sensor”,

which, every 30 minutes, measures the wind speed

in that world location, where the biggest wind speed

was ever measured. Then, the user adds a “Twitter

Actuator”. Finally the user connects the Sensor to the

Twitter Actuator. The connection will be conﬁgured

in order to post a tweet under certain conditions based

on the Sensors readings. The design of this SoS is

simple, where you have separate panels for Sensors,

Actuators, and connections. The user can drag and

drop the components to create connections between

various systems and make beneﬁt from their interac-

tions. In a similar way, our SoIS is design with sim-

plicity in mind to give users the ability to interact with

different Information Systems and beneﬁt from their

interactions for an added value not present when those

systems were operating separately.

6 CONCLUSION

Our goal was to take current Information Systems

and move towards System of Information Systems

(SoIS) to aggregate services and exchange informa-

tion with simplicity and ease. To achieve this goal

we undertake this research to determine what is cur-

rently known about Information Systems, System of

Systems, and System of Information Systems in the

literature, and deploy this knowledge to propose an

example of a SoIS composed of various Information

Systems. First, we proposed a use case scenario to

illustrate the need of such SoIS. Then we deﬁned the

notion of SoS and highlighted the differences between

SoS and CoS to make it clear that the new system can

be considered a SoS not a CoS. After that, we moved

forward to deﬁne the notion of SoIS and describe the

various Information Systems comprising this SoIS.

Finally, we proposed an example of a SoIS.

We found potential to the SoIS to expand and

hold new Information Systems. It was also clear that

combining services from various Information Sys-

tems will result in an added value to users not present

when those systems were operating separately. The

example of the SoIS is also found to be similar in

comparison to other SoS in this ﬁeld.

The next step is to expand our work and introduce

new Information Systems to the SoIS based on the

example presented in this study and users needs. It

Information Systems: Towards a System of Information Systems

199

should also be tested in a real world experiment. The

SoIS should keep simple interface, with all the ser-

vices as far from the user as a single click, to keep the

users experience useful and friendly.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This project is done under ECOPACK project and

funded by ANR-ASTRID programme.

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