General Course Description and Objectives

The main focus of the course is on information system modeling and integration of different dimensions of enterprise architecture. Service-oriented paradigm is a new way used for the semantic integrity control of various diagram types. Service orientation promotes flexibility and interoperability by minimizing requirements for shared understanding. Enterprise architectures can be changed by replacing or recomposing more specific services. Semantic integrity of static and dynamic aspects is analyzed by superimposing the internal and external views of service descriptions together. A concept of service is applied to organizational as well as technical components. It is used for bridging a communication gap among business experts and system designers. Computation independent modeling of services does not exclude the object-oriented design point of view adopted by Rational Unified Process, but rather suggests an additional pragmatic and semantic level of abstraction above it. Object-oriented models are used for graphical representation of a designer view.

The overall aim of the course is to provide insight into various information system modeling approaches. Having successfully completed this course, a student will be able

- to describe and explain different dimensions and views within enterprise architecture,

- to characterize major modeling traditions, qualities of requirements specifications and qualities of models,

- to specify static and dynamic aspects of information systems,

- to analyze integrity of various dimensions of enterprise models,

- to detect semantic inconsistency among various information system diagram types,

- to identify incoherence between internal and external views of service architectures.

The course is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part consists of lectures, studies of books and research publications. The practical part is organized in the form of individual assignment and seminar presentations. An individual assignment consists of two parts:

1) Research part: Preparation of a journal or conference publication in the area of information system modeling (this is a major requirement for converting into PhD program points). The master students may choose to prepare a report on comparison of two modeling approaches instead of preparation of a publication. A research part is presented at the seminars.

2) A system modeling and design task. It is organized in a form of a project work. Project work is documented and described in a final report. Presentation and opposition of a project work is performed during the seminars.