List of Members
Institute Name: University Paris 1Description: The Information Systems Modelling research group of the CRI (Centre de Recheche en Informatique) has been involved in research development on topics related to IS modelling and formal specifications, as well as methodologies and computer assisted development tools for more than ten years. Apart from having a diverse knowledge in various application domains as a result of its research effort, the group is particularly experienced in the development of many business applications as well as technical systems such as telephon systems and systems involving electronic commands for trains.
The group is actively involved in numerous ESPRIT and national projects. One of its earliest accomplishments is the development of the REMORA methodology, an event-driven approach for designing information systems. This methodology integrates behavioral and temporal aspects with concepts for modelling the structural aspects of an information system. In the ESPRIT I project TODOS, which has led to the development of an integrated environment for the design of office information systems (OISs), the concepts used in the Remora methodology were adapted and enriched so as to take into account the special issues related to office design.
The group has been also involved in the development of the RUBIS system, which is an extended Relational Database Management System providing a model and a high-level specification language, a set of mechanisms allowing the automatic control of active aspects of applications, a set of prototyping mechanisms and various interfaces. On top of RUBIS, the group developed an expert design tool called ALECSI within the framework of the national project named Le Programme de Recherches CoordonŽes (PRC) Bases de donnŽes avancŽes. The tool is based on an expert system whose knowledge base includes heuristics, derived from the human experience in designing systems. It guides the analyst in abstracting from requirements expressed in natural language and setting up a refined, complete and consistent conceptual schema.
Recently, the group was involved in the ESPRIT II project BUSINESS CLASS, which delivered an object-oriented analysis tool called Analyst workbench, supporting the O* object-oriented method.
Currently, the group is working on two other ESPRIT III projects, namely, NATURE and F3. It is also involved in a national project called "MODWAY".
NATURE is a collaborative Basic Research Action (BRA) on theories underlying requirements engineering. Its goals are to develop : - a theory of knowledge representation for requirements engineering capturing subject, usage and development aspects of information systems as well as freedom in specification - a theory of domain engineering that facilitates the identification, acquisition and representation of domain knowledge as well as similarity-based matching and classification of software engineering knowledge; - a requirements engineering process theory that promotes context and decision-based control of the development process.
The Information Systems Modelling research group of CRI, University of Paris 1 is in charge of the development of the process theory, providing key concepts for modelling requirements engineering processes and their relationships. A context-based approach for process modelling has been developed, investigating the representation of links between contexts and activities among other issues.
The F3 project(F3 stands for "From Fuzzy to Formal".) concerns the definition of a methodology that integrates a selection of adequate techniques into a coherent whole and aims at improving requirements acquisition and validation. This methodology will be supported by a Requirement Engineering (RE) workbench. The contribution to the F3 project by the University of Paris 1 PanthŽon-Sorbonne is the development and experimentation of the process assistance. The approach that has been taken is to define an object-oriented model, called Evolutionary Object Model (EOM) for expressing what happens (and why) during the RE process.
MODWAY is a collaborative national project involving the CRI and ALCATEL-ISR (the computer science research branch from ALCATEL). The aim of the project is to define and implement a software environment to support Object-Oriented development processes. This environment will provide "intelligent" assistance from the analysis down to coding.
Two professors and six associate professors are working at the CRI as permanent staff along with twelve doctoral students.
Researchers associated with the project:
Prof. C Rolland Dr. G. Grosz Dr. C. Souveyet
Brief CVs of Key Researchers:
Name: Prof. C. Rolland
Nationality: French
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Colette Rolland is currently Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Paris-l PanthŽon- Sorbonne where she has worked since 1979. Her research interests lie in the areas of information modelling, databases, temporal data modelling, object-oriented analysis and design, requirements engineering, design methodologies and CASE tools. She is Director of the Centre de Recherche en Informatique and supervises a team of 10 full time assistant-professors and 12 research students that are active in these areas. She has supervised 50 PhD thesis and has an extensive experience in leading research projects and conducting cooperative projects with the industry. Her research work has been supported by fundings of the CNRS, INRIA, MRT (Ministry of Research and Technology) and by the Commission of the European Communities under the ESPRIT programme (projects TODOS and BUSINESS CLASS). Now, she involved in a national project named MODWAY and two ESPRIT projects, namely F3 and NATURE. Professor Colette Rolland is the originator of the REMORA methodology for the analysis, design and realisation of Information Systems. She is the co-author of 5 textbooks, editor of 6 books and author or co-author of over 100 invited or refereed papers. She is in the editorial board of the Journal of InformationSystems, tbe Journal of Information Systems and Software Technology, the Strategic Information Systems Journal and the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. She bas been member of over 35 programme commitees and chairperson of 9. She is in the board of AFCET, the French Computer Society, the French representative in IFIP TC8 on Information Systems and the vice-chairperson of IFIP WG8.1.
Name: Dr. G. Grosz
Nationality: French
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Dr. G. Grosz is currently an associate professor at the UniversitŽ PARIS-1 PanthŽon-Sorbonne in Computer Science. His research interests lie in the areas of requirements engineering, information systems modelling, concentrating on analysis, CASE tools and reuse at the conceptual level. He has published a number of papers in these areas. He is now involved in process modelling. He participates to the definition of a decision based process meta-model offering concepts to describe process models at various levels of granularity. This meta-model has been successfuly applied to describe various existing methdologies. He now concentrates on the definition of an enactment mechanism based on the process meta-model and its implementation in the O2 system. A tool dedicated to method engineer is also studied to be inincluded this environment. He has been a member of some programme comitees for international conferences and workshops (ER, NGCT, etc..) and is now a reviewer for the Information System Journal. Dr G. Grosz actively participates to the ESPRIT project NATURE (BRA Nˇ 5363).
Name: Dr. C. Souveyet
Nationality: French
Academic Qualifications & Experience: Dr. C. Souveyet is currently an associate professor at the UniversitŽ PARIS-1 PanthŽon-Sorbonne in Computer Science. Her research activities are concerned with (1) the verification of the conceptual specification of an information systems (IS), (2) the meta-modelling of IS and (3) the design process model. Her first research activity was related to her PhD. The purpose was to define the means of the verification of the formal specification integrated to the Rubis CASE tool. Rubis aids the designer during the information system specification using the REMORA method. It provides a prototyping facility in order to support the validation of the specifications. In addition, the verification facility provides a complementary way of checking the correctness of the specification against the conceptual model concepts. By analogy to the information system development, we used a design approach for developing the verification facility. This led to firstly define a general framework of the verification of a conceptual specification and then, apply it to specify the verification facility associated to the REMORA method. The general framework is composed of a meta-model offering a formal definition of conceptual models and the associated verification process.It can be considered as a general frame useful for the method engineer. By following the meta-modelling approach, her recent research activities converge to the study of the development process, by regarding it as a decisional process which is a research work financially supported by the "Nature" Esprit Project. In order to be able to define the way of working of a method as a decisional process, the empirical way of doing it, is to apply our decisional view during IS developments, to study and learn from these process tracks. The related research issue is to improve the general understanding of the way of working promoted by a method in order to define its full process guidance tool.
Selected Publications:
C. Rolland, C. Souveyet (1990); An Object-oriented framework for Information Systems, in the "Conference on Management of Data" COMAD'90 proceedings, New Dehli
C. Rolland (1992); A Natural Language Approach for Requirements Engineering, CAISE'92, Manchester, UK
C. Rolland, N. Prakash (1993); Modelling Decisions in the Requirements Engineering Process, , CISMOD'93, Delhi, India
G. Grosz, C. Rolland (1993); Representing Requirement Engineering Knowledge with Generic Structures, ISMIS'93 Int. Symposium on Methodologies for Information Systems, Trondheim, Norway
C. Rolland, (1994); A Contextual Approach to modeling the Requirements Engineering Process, SEKE'94, 6th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Jurmala, Latvia
M. Moreno, C. Rolland, C. Souveyet (1994); A Generic Approach to Support a Way of Working Definition, in the CAISE'94 conference proceedings,Utrecht
Contact Details:
Principal Investigator: Prof. Colette Rolland,
Address:Centre de Recherche en Informatique, University Paris 1, 17 Rue de la Sorbonne, Paris, 75231, FRANCE
Telephone number: + 33 1 40 45 27 85
Telefax number: + 33 1 45 86 76 66
EMail: rolland@univ-paris1.fr
List of Members