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C. Astl:
"Tool Support for Semantic-Model-Driven Systems Integration";
Supervisor: S. Biffl, T Moser; Institut für Softwaretechnik und Interaktive Systeme, 2008; final examination: 2008-12-03.

Integration aims at creating added value from quickly combining existing business applications into a new larger system of systems. A precondition for integration is the ability of these business applications to exchange data and to coordinate the overall system. However, most business applications were designed independently and were not designed for integration with other business applications. Thus, the integration of complex systems bears a number of challenges, e.g. different system architectures, different message protocols.
A promising approach to integrate a large number of heterogeneous systems is System Wide Information Sharing (SWIS), developed in a scientific project at the Vienna University of Technology in cooperation with Frequentis AG. SWIS uses a message-based approach and helps designing a network for safety-critical data exchange between data provider and data consumer services between several organizations and with heterogeneous requirements and/or capabilities. In SWIS, ontologies are information mapping enablers and therefore contain all relevant data and information (e.g., message type, communication mode: push or request/reply, external services, needed converters, etc.) about the applications and systems to integrate. Ontologies are a main part of the semantic web technology and are used for knowledge representation of the real world; in this project for the explicit representation of requirements and for quality assurance of the transformation models in the network design process. The SWIS approach transforms all relevant requirements of the involved systems into a correct and performing solution model (i.e., a configuration for a distributed system used for the integration).
The practical part of the thesis is the creation of tool support for the SWIS approach, more precisely a user interface for the Model Transformation Algorithm (MTA) process. The visualization concept of the SWIS approach communicates emergent properties of the integrated system. The visualization should facilitate a) product improvement by the visual feedback and b) process improvement by providing better tool support and quality assurance. The main focus of the practical work lies on building an easy-to-handle user interface both for experts and non-experts. The user interface provides some process-steps to choose all specific requirements for the calculation of the SWIS solution model. A major criterion for a good user interface is the more effective and efficient enactment of process steps compared to manual enactment.