Informatica

The emergence of the Semantic Web have revived the interest in knowledge engineering and ontologies. Different paradigms often share challenges and solutions, and can complement and mutually improve each other. This paper presents a simple and agile integration of ontologies and programming on a small scale, and in a down-to-Earth manner by incorporating the ontology paradigm into a mainstream programming environment. The approach is based on metaprogramming, which has been used to internalize the ontology modeling paradigm into the Clojure language. The resulting DSL, Magic Potion, is implemented in Cojure and blends ontology, functional, object-oriented and concurrent paradigms, which is suitable for general-purpose domain modeling, from technology enhanced learning to business.

In the context of enterprise engineering, strategic planning, information systems engineering, and software engineering activities should be tightly integrated. Traditional, interview-based requirements gathering and elicitation techniques are suited for this aim not enough well and often lead to the violation of the strategic alignment. The vision-driven requirements engineering has been proposed to solve this problem. The paper contributes to the further development of vision-driven requirements engineering techniques. It proposes a methodical framework that defines a complete scheme to organize different level requirements and allows to flowdown requirements from business to software level preserving their business-orientation.

We propose a layered Soft IP Customisation (SIPC) model for specifying and implementing system‐level soft IP design processes such as wrapping and customisation. The SIPC model has three layers: (1) Specification Layer for specification of a customisation process using UML class diagrams, (2) Generalisation Layer for representation of a customisation process using the metaprogramming techniques, and (3) Generation Layer for generation of the customised soft IP instances from metaspecifications. UML allows us to specify customisation of soft IPs at a high level of abstraction. Metaprogramming allows us to manage variability in a domain, develop generic domain components, and describe generation of customised component instances. The usage of the SIPC model eases and accelerates reuse, adaptation and integration of the pre‐designed soft IPs into new hardware designs.

This paper presents the framework for well-understood domain analysis as a decisive stage for the successive process of domain-specific software tools building. Specific features of the well-understood domain analysis are formulated. Initial model of the tools to be built and the analysis process are described. Analysis is performed with the reusability concept in mind and as a result essential domain knowledge is extracted. The latter is defined by a term “domain knowledge template”.