Showing papers by "Peter F. Linington published in 2003"

Identifying requirements for Business Contract Language: a monitoring perspective

Abstract: This paper compares two separately developed systems for monitoring activities to business contracts, describes how we integrated them and exploits the lessons learned from this process to identify a core set of requirements for a Business Contract Language (BCL). Concepts in BCL needed for contract monitoring include: the expression of coordinated concurrent actions; obliged, permitted and prohibited actions; rich timeliness expressions such as sliding windows; delegations; policy violations; contract termination/renewal conditions and reference to external data/events such as change in interest rates. The aim of BCL is to provide sufficient expressive power to describe contracts, including conditions which specify real-time processing, yet be simple enough to retain a human-oriented style for expressing contracts.

OCL 2.0: Implementing the Standard

Abstract: OCL 2.0 is the newest version of the OMGs constraint language to accompany their suit of Object Oriented modelling languages. The use of OCL as an accompanying constraint and query language for modelling with these languages is essential. As tools are built to support the modelling languages, it is also necessary to implement the OCL. This paper reports our experience of implementing OCL based on the latest version of the OMGs OCL standard, UML models and MDA [17] techniques supported by the Kent Modelling Framework (KMF) [12], developed at the University of Kent. We provide an efficient LALR grammar for parsing the language and describe an architecture that enables the language to be bridged to any other modelling framework or tool. We also provide both syntactic and semantic models, which were used as inputs for KMFStudio [12] in order to generate Java code. In addition we give feedback on problems and ambiguities discovered in the standard, with some suggested solutions.

Using policies in the checking of business to business contracts

Abstract: The mechanization of business-to-business contract enforcement requires a clear architecture and a clear and unambiguous underpinning model of the way permissions and obligations are managed within organizations. Policies need to be expressed in terms of the basic model, and the expressive power available depends, in part, on the ability to compose sets of policies derived from different sources. The models used must reflect the structure of the organizations concerned and how the behaviour of organizations is constrained by broader shared rules. We consider a contract monitoring system intended to provide automated checking of business to business contracts, sets out a suitable model and explain how it can be used to guide the representation and control of contracts in a prototype monitoring system.

A Policy-based Model-Driven Security Framework.

Abstract: The adoption of a model-driven approach to the construction of applications places the focus on business logic and takes it away from detailed middleware mechanisms. It also opens new opportunities for more detailed and more dynamic control of non-functional properties. This position statement illustrates the possibilities by considering the ways in which maintenance of security infrastructure can exploit the model-driven approach.