Faculty of Economic Sciences, Communication and IT Information Systems

ion. Publication 6, “Pragmatic-Driven Approach for Service-Oriented Analysis and Design” (2008) emphasises the importance of computation-neutral modelling and bridging between the pragmatic and semantic aspects of business processes and data. The research on the relativity of semantic roles (Publication 1) has also contributed to the development of a pragmatic-driven, service-oriented analysis and design method. It contributed to the presentation of a meta-model to show different possibilities of concept interpretation in the service-oriented modelling method. Pragmatic aspects of services can be defined in terms of goals, problems and opportunities, which are relative notions. Whether a situation is desirable or undesirable depends on the designer’s goals. Information systems analysis and design can be regarded as the process of eliminating the problematic part of specification and complementing it by desirable service architecture. The semantic specification of a problem should be considered as part of a specification of the actual situation. On the other hand, opportunities and goals represent what is desirable in a new system. Goals can be used to specify the desirable changes that are represented at the semantic level in terms of interaction loops between actors. Opportunities may describe various alternatives for solving a specific problem and reaching a goal. If the designer would like to use a specific opportunity, then its semantic fragments must be integrated into the new specification. A system reengineering activity should always produce a solution that satisfies a designer goal. In the pragmatic-driven approach, the opportunities are expressed by using the negative and positive influence dependencies with respect to designer’s problems and goals. The desired situation of services, which are expressed in terms of goals, cannot be clarified without taking into consideration existing problems. This study on service-oriented analysis and design is focused on pragmatic descriptions of stakeholders, which can be interpreted as a driving force of the overall system engineering process. The intentions of stakeholders are graphically described using a set of pragmatic dependencies. It was demonstrated that pragmatic entities such as goals, can be used for the semantic completeness control of service-oriented diagrams. Change management and the evolution of business process fragments can be supported by using operations of semantic difference, union and intersection on goals, problems and opportunities. Pragmatic dependencies were used for the analysis of actor intentions, which enable the identification of possible contradictions between desirable and undesirable situations. It was demonstrated that goal hierarchies can be used to identify business process boundaries and enable reasoning about semantic completeness of service architectures. In the presented approach, the semantic fragments of computation-neutral specifications are defined using service interaction