An analysis of the Zachman framework for enterprise architecture from the GERAM perspective

This article presents an analysis of the Zachman framework for enterprise architecture and its mapping onto the Generalised Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology (GERAM) framework/ISO IS15704:2000 requirements. Aspects covered concern the ability of the Zachman framework to cover the complete scope of the GERAM metamodel, such as life cycle/life history concepts, modelling framework, enterprise entities and entity recursion, associated enterprise engineering methodologies, modelling languages and reference models.     

Cosmic topology: Twenty years after

What is the shape of the Universe? Is it finite or infinite? Is space multi-connected to create ghost images of faraway cosmic sources? After a “dark age” period, the field of cosmic topology has now become one of the major concerns in astronomy and cosmology, not only from theorists but also from observational astronomers. Here I give a personal account of the spectacular progress in the field since the beginning of the 1990s, when I started to work in it.     

Decision forest: Twenty years of research

A decision tree is a predictive model that recursively partitions the covariate’s space into subspaces such that each subspace constitutes a basis for a different prediction function. Decision trees can be used for various learning tasks including classification, regression and survival analysis. Due to their unique benefits, decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in data science. Decision forest aims to improve the predictive performance of a single decision tree by training multiple trees and combining their predictions. This paper provides an introduction to the subject by explaining how a decision forest can be created and when it is most valuable. In addition, we are reviewing some popular methods for generating the forest, fusion the individual trees’ outputs and thinning large decision forests.     

Twenty years of artificial life art

This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: ‘Propagaciones’ by Leo Nuñez; ‘Sniff’ by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; ‘Universal Whistling Machine’ by Marc Boehlen; and ‘Performative Ecologies’ by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.1 A more extensive study of the theoretical history of Artificial Life can be found in my paper ‘Artificial Life Art—A Primer’, in the Proceedings of DAC09 and also at http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny. Excerpts from that essay are included here.      

Twenty years of telecommunications research in BIT

This paper reflects on 20 years of behavioural research in telecommunications published in BIT. The past 20 years have seen major changes in telecommunications technology and applications. They have also seen the deregulation of telecommunications markets and the pervasive penetration of the working environment by networked systems. Papers published in BIT have reflected these changes. Some research topics have attracted continuing interest throughout this period, and two are reviewed briefly: the effect of network delays on users and the relative effectiveness of different media and user choices between them. In addition many new technical and theoretical developments have been reported. Two major theoretical trends have been the convergence between behavioural research in telecommunications and computing, and the rise in social-science-based research. The question whether published behavioural research has been able to influence the development of the technologies studied is considered. Finally, the paper speculates on future topics for research.     

Twenty years of telecommunications research in BIT

This paper reflects on 20 years of behavioural research in telecommunications published in BIT. The past 20 years have seen major changes in telecommunications technology and applications. They have also seen the deregulation of telecommunications markets and the pervasive penetration of the working environment by networked systems. Papers published in BIT have reflected these changes. Some research topics have attracted continuing interest throughout this period, and two are reviewed briefly: the effect of network delays on users and the relative effectiveness of different media and user choices between them. In addition many new technical and theoretical developments have been reported. Two major theoretical trends have been the convergence between behavioural research in telecommunications and computing, and the rise in social-science-based research. The question whether published behavioural research has been able to influence the development of the technologies studied is considered. Finally, the paper speculates on future topics for research.     

Enterprise architecture: agile transition and implementation

In our previous articles, we made the case for having an enterprise architecture and discussed the first phases of an architecture development process. The second article concentrated on describing the baseline architecture and defining the target architecture. We complete our discussion of the methodology by focusing on transition and implementation planning. Transition planning focuses on deriving a time-phased set of actions to achieve a given goal-in this case, implementation of the target architecture. Large organizations will remediate, renovate, or replace many systems concurrently. In doing so, they must recognize interdependencies among systems and accommodate them in activity scheduling. Implementation planning has a different time frame and a different audience. It maps resources (people, places, things, and funding) to transition planning activities     

Twenty years of document image analysis in PAMI

The contributions to document image analysis of 99 papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) are clustered, summarized, interpolated, interpreted, and evaluated     

Enterprise security pattern: A model-driven architecture instance

To secure their information assets, organizations should seek support from enterprise security architectures. Security patterns are a good way to build and test new security mechanisms, but they have some limitations related to their usability. In previous work, we defined a new type of security pattern called Enterprise Security Pattern. The main objective of these patterns is to provide an instance of model-driven architecture, which offers a solution to recurring problems that have to do with information systems security. In recent years, the hiring of Software as a Service (SaaS) from cloud providers has become very popular. There seem to be many advantages of using these services, but organizations need to be aware of a variety of threats, as well as being prepared to handle them. In another work undertaken previously, we defined an enterprise security pattern called Secure Software as a Service (Secure SaaS), which the organizations could apply to protect their information assets when using SaaS. In this paper, we present different instances of the solution models of the enterprise security pattern Secure SaaS, aiming to verify the risks that an organization would assume if each of the instances were deployed. With this approach, we intend to show how the design decisions adopted when performing the transformations between the solution models can have a direct impact on the security provided by the pattern.     

SDIF:一个面向服务架构的数据整合框架

目前面向服务架构系统中,基于XML方式的异构数据整合方案存在着数据表示杂乱,缺乏领域模型的融合,以至于需要花费大量的精力去处理系统与服务数据的转化和硬编码,很难形成可复用的方案.针对这些问题,提出了一个基于SDO的面向服务数据整合架构(SDIF),引入了Object Teams机制来构建可复用的数据整合框架以及与现有系统衔接的基础设施.     

Twenty years of publication of the International Journal of Remote Sensing

The present volume of the International Journal of Remote Sensing is volume 20. The opportunity has been taken to write something about the history and the development of the Journal over the past 20 years and to consider some aspects of its present operation. This is set in the context of the development of the subject of remote sensing (Earth observation) over the past 20 years, of the present state of the subject and of the expectations for the development of the subject over the next 10 or 20 years.     

Collaborative learning using service-oriented architecture: A framework design

Collaborative learning serves as an important part of e-learning, increasing interactivity and accessibility to various learning resources either synchronously or asynchronously among users. Distributed interactivity through Web services thus forms the focus of this paper. The paper reviews related work on service-oriented architecture (SOA), distributed infrastructure, business process management (BPM) and highlights the need to integrate SOA technologies for meaningful and interactive collaborative learning processes. The significance of the study is an SOA approach to enhance the interoperability, flexibility and reusability of e-learning content in a collaborative environment.     

Technical framework for Internetware: An architecture centric approach

Being a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges to the traditional software methods and techniques. Sponsored by the national basic research program （973）, researchers in China have developed an architecture centric technical framework for the definition, incarnation and engineering of Internetware. First of all, a software model for Internetware is defined for what to be, including that Internetware entities should be packaged as components, behaving as agents, interoperating as services, collaborating in a structured and on demand manner, etc. Secondly, a middleware for Internetware is designed and implemented for how to be, including that Internetware entities are incarnated by runtime containers, structured collaborations are enabled by runtime software architecture, Internetware can be managed in a reflective and autonomic manner, etc. Thirdly, an engineering methodology for Internetware is proposed for how to do, including the way to develop Internetware entities and their collaborations by transforming and refining a set of software architectures which cover all the phases of software lifecycle, the way to identify and organize the disordered software assets by domain modeling, etc.     

From roles to teamwork: A framework and architecture

Teamwork requires organization, strategies, and coordination. The design of a multiagent system should support these conceptual properties for constructing effective teams. The advantage of a teamwork approach is the reduction in complexity of the task through distribution of responsibilities, resulting in better utilization of resources, robust behaviors, and a greater variety of behaviors against competitors. In this article a framework for building teams of responsible agents using roles, responsibilities, and strategies is described. Its application to the domain of soccer is used to design a high-performance team of soccer agents. The architecture for these agents utilizes a reactive planning system with support for teamwork. The team of soccer agents will be tested in a series of competitions against other teams in the real-time soccer simulator proposed for Robocup-97, which provides an uncertain, resource bounded world.     

A general framework for architecture composability

Architectures depict design principles: paradigms that can be understood by all, allow thinking on a higher plane and avoiding low-level mistakes. They provide means for ensuring correctness by construction by enforcing global properties characterizing the coordination between components. An architecture can be considered as an operator A that, applied to a set of components \({\mathcal{B}}\), builds a composite component \({A(\mathcal{B})}\) meeting a characteristic property \({\Phi}\). Architecture composability is a basic and common problem faced by system designers. In this paper, we propose a formal and general framework for architecture composability based on an associative, commutative and idempotent architecture composition operator \({\oplus}\). The main result is that if two architectures A ₁ and A ₂ enforce respectively safety properties \({\Phi_{1}}\) and \({\Phi_{2}}\), the architecture \({A_{1} \oplus A_{2}}\) enforces the property \({\Phi_{1} \land \Phi_{2}}\), that is both properties are preserved by architecture composition. We also establish preservation of liveness properties by architecture composition. The presented results are illustrated by a running example and a case study.     

Reviewing Enterprise Content Management: a functional framework

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) focuses on managing all types of content being used in organizations. It is a convergence of previous approaches that focus on managing only particular types of content, as for example documents or web pages. In this paper, we present an overview of previous research by categorizing the existing literature. We show that scientific literature on ECM is limited and there is no consensus on the definition of ECM. Therefore, the literature review surfaced several ECM definitions that we merge into a more consistent and comprehensive definition of ECM. The Functional ECM Framework (FEF) provides an overview of the potential functionalities of ECM systems (ECMSs). We apply the FEF in three case studies. The FEF can serve to communicate about ECMSs, to understand them and to direct future research. It can also be the basis for a more formal reference architecture and it can be used as an assessment tool by practitioners for comparing the functionalities provided by existing ECMSs.     

微服务体系结构实现框架综述

为提高企业级应用的可伸缩性,基于微服务的软件体系结构将单体应用细化为可相互协作、配合的一组小服务,使得服务间开发自由、独立部署、易于维护,更好地满足企业发展需求。目前,微服务框架作为微服务架构的具体实现方案,已被很多大型企业成功实施并开源。论述面向服务体系结构、Web服务及微服务相关概念并作比较;给出微服务体系结构实践中的关键技术以及核心功能模块;分析对比主流微服务体系结构实施框架及其核心部件的特征和差异;探讨微服务组合面临的挑战及微服务框架中的服务组合方案,并总结全文。