Showing papers by "Santonu Sarkar published in 2010"

Accelerating technical design of business applications: a knowledge-based approach

Abstract: Technical design of a business application is an involved process which needs an experienced designer to describe an implementation of the application functionality using a set of hardware and software infrastructure elements such that the non-functional requirements are satisfied. The process is extremely knowledge intensive. For instance, it demands the designer to thoroughly understand various architecture styles, a set of technical capabilities available, how different COTS products can realize these capabilities, and how the functional modules can make use of these capabilities. In reality, such experienced designers are hard to come by. Furthermore, to optimize the budget, the project team often involves inexperienced designers to create the technical design. In order to assist an inexperienced designer to create the technical design, we have built a knowledge-based design assistant tool, called Technical Design Assistant Tool (TDAT). In this paper we describe the ontology knowledge model that describes the underlying technical design knowledge. The ontology models the notion of a architecture style, various technical capabilities, a COTS component, and capability features. We have conducted a few experiments to evaluate the usefulness of the ontology and the tool and found encouraging responses. As a part of the project we are populating the knowledge base for the popular open source and commercial software products.