Concern-Oriented and Ontology-Based Analysis of Information Systems

To manage the complexity of the development of an Information System (IS) a systematic partitioning of its models is needed. In particular, the system conceptual domain construction requires a structured approach. Our research on conceptual modelling in software engineering conducted us to propose a concern-oriented analysis approach aimed to construct the domain model of an information system as a composition of multi-facetted views. The method uses the concerns of various stakeholders of an IS for partitioning the system conceptual domain in stakeholder-oriented sub-domains. For each concern a high level description includes both the problem associated with it and the role of the stakeholder who manifests the concern. Mental representations descriptions of stakeholders’ beliefs and knowledge related to each concern are identified and on their basis a domain ontology is created. We propose the creation of UML ontological models based on this ontology. Such a model is constructed from the IS ontology preserving the semantics of involved concepts. Then facets of the future IS are created by composing UML ontological models of the stakeholder’s beliefs and knowledge. We applied this in the case of an IS that provides the registration of a new trading company using the services provided by the public administration institutions.