Semantic issues in model-driven management of information system interoperability

The MISE Project (Mediation Information System Engineering) aims at providing collaborating organizations with a Mediation Information System (MIS) in charge of supporting interoperability of a collaborative network. MISE proposes an overall MIS design method according to a model-­‐driven approach, based on model transformations. This MIS is in charge of managing (i) information, (ii) functions and (iii) processes among the information systems (IS) of partner organizations involved in the network. Semantic issues are accompanying this triple objective: How to deal with information reconciliation? How to ensure the matching between business functions and technical services? How to identify workflows among business processes? This article aims first, at presenting the MISE approach, second at defining the semantic gaps along the MISE approach and third at describing some past, current and future research works that deal with these issues. Finally and as a conclusion, the very “design-­‐ oriented” previous considerations are confronted with “run-­‐time” requirements. KEYWORDS: interoperability; semantic reconciliation; model-­‐driven engineering; information system 1 Introduction Organisations (including enterprises, associations, institutions, etc.) are strongly dependent from their ability to successfully manage collaborations and to assume the involved interoperability functions: exchange of information, coordination of functions and orchestration of processes. Furthermore, inside such an organisation, Information Systems (IS) and computed systems are assuming both the roles of interface (external and internal exchanges) and functional engine (driving processes and business activities). Therefore, considering that crucial position of IS and computed systems, the previously listed interoperability functions must be supported by these IS. The issue is to ensure that the IS of the partners involved in the collaboration will be able to work altogether (thanks to these interoperability functions) in order to constitute a coherent and homogeneous set of IS (the IS of the collaborative situation). The MISE project (Mediation Information System Engineering), presented in (Benaben, 2008) and (Benaben, 2010), aims at defining a model-­‐driven design approach of a MIS (Mediation Information System), in charge of interoperability functions. This MIS could be considered as a third party, based on Service-­‐Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles, allowing existing IS to work fluently altogether, according to a common behaviour, without any special effort. This goal is fully compliant with the definition of interoperability given in (Konstantas, 2005) and (Pingaud, 2009) and the interoperability framework given in (Panetto, 2008). The MIS design framework defined in MISE, dealing with business requirements in order to deploy a technical mediation solution, should necessarily succeed in the business-­‐to-­‐technical alignment: the abstract solution (proposed at the business level) must be precisely implemented by the concrete solution (deployed at the technical level). To reach this goal, the semantic attributes must be appropriately defined at the abstract level and rigorously taken into account at the concrete level. Following the previous considerations, the main objective of this article is to present and discuss the semantic issues embedded into the MISE project, according to two horizontal levels: abstract (business) and concrete (technology) among three vertical layers: informational (information vs. data), functional (activity vs. service) and behavioural (process vs. workflow). Semantic reconciliation is the core of this article. The second section of this article introduces the MISE project and the associated general principles. The third section identifies semantics issues inherent in that approach. The fourth section presents the current state of the art concerning that kind of semantic problems and the way they can be treated. The fifth section presents specific solutions that have been applied during the first iteration of MISE project (and especially in a French funded project based on MISE results: ISyCri – Interoperability of Systems in Crisis situations). The sixth section concerns the second iteration of MISE and outlines the current research works dealing with these semantic issues. The seventh section concludes this article by enlarging the semantic consideration to non-­‐functional requirements and run-­‐time (while the current article mainly focuses on functional considerations an design-­‐time). 2. Overview of the MISE project The following global presentation of the MISE project will be based on three main parts: (i) overall big picture of the design approach, (ii) model transformation principles and (iii) detailed presentation of each step of the design approach. 2.1 Overall big picture of the design approach This design approach might be seen as a dive into abstraction layers. Consequently it is based on model-­‐driven engineering and on the associated model transformation concepts (OMG, 2003). The general principle is therefore structured according to two steps between three levels: 1. The first step concerns the transition from the “characterization of the situation” level to the “collaborative process models” level. By gathering a structured knowledge concerning the considered collaboration (partners, roles, goals, abilities, etc.) a specific ontology is instantiated to draw a global characterization of the collaborative situation, as described in (Mu, 2011). Then, by applying deduction rules on this knowledge, collaborative processes models are deduced, as described in (Touzi, 2009). 2. The second step concerns the transition from the “collaborative process models” level to the “MIS deployment” level. The knowledge embedded in these collaborative processes models is semantically analysed in order to apply model transformation mechanisms dedicated to match business components (such as business activities from the “collaborative process models” level) with technical components (such as web-­‐services from the “MIS deployment” level). The obtained service-­‐oriented MIS structure, as described in (Benaben, 2010) and (Rajsiri, 2009) can be deployed on the technological target platform, which is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB is a middleware able to efficiently carry message between connected services and, by extension, potentially able to orchestrate workflows between connected services (if a workflow engine is plugged in order to exploit the communication facilities of the ESB). It is crucial to notice that in the previously mentioned research works, that semantic reconciliation was either manual, either based on specificities of the studied field (see section 5 on crisis management area). This article aims, first at studying how that semantic reconciliation between business models (results from BPM approach) and technical models (deployment files required for workflow orchestration) could be automatized, and second at presenting some research results concerning that issue. The first step is considered as the abstract level while the second one is dedicated to the concrete level. Figure 1 illustrates this global MDE design approach.