Abstract In some areas of software engineering research, there are several metamodels claiming to capture the main issues. Though it is profitable to have variety at the beginning of a research field, after some time, the diversity of metamodels becomes an obstacle, for instance to the sharing of results between research groups. To reach consensus and unification of existing metamodels, metamodel-driven software language engineering can be applied. This paper illustrates an application of software language engineering in the agent-oriented software engineering research domain. Here, we introduce a relatively generic agent-oriented metamodel whose suitability for supporting modeling language development is demonstrated by evaluating it with respect to several existing methodology-specific metamodels. First, the metamodel is constructed by a combination of bottom-up and top-down analysis and best practice. The concepts thus obtained and their relationships are then evaluated by mapping to two agent-oriented metamodels: TAO and Islander. We then refine the metamodel by extending the comparisons with the metamodels implicit or explicit within five more extant agent-oriented approaches: Adelfe, PASSI, Gaia, INGENIAS, and Tropos. The resultant FAML metamodel is a potential candidate for future standardization as an important component for engineering an agent modeling language. Abstract —In some areas of software engineering research, there are several metamodels claiming to capture the main issues. Though it is profitable to have variety at the beginning of a research field, after some time, the diversity of metamodels becomes an obstacle, for instance to the sharing of results between research groups. To reach consensus and unification of existing metamodels, metamodel-driven software language engineering can be applied. This paper illustrates an application of software language engineering in the agent-oriented software engineering research domain. Here, we introduce a relatively generic agent-oriented metamodel whose suitability for supporting modeling language development is demonstrated by evaluating it with respect to several existing methodology-specific metamodels. First, the metamodel is constructed by a combination of bottom-up and top-down analysis and best practice. The concepts thus obtained and their relationships are then evaluated by mapping to two agent-oriented metamodels: TAO and Islander. We then refine the metamodel by extending the comparisons with the metamodels implicit or explicit within five more extant agent-oriented approaches: Adelfe, PASSI, Gaia, INGENIAS, and Tropos. The resultant FAML metamodel is a potential candidate for future standardization as an important component for engineering an agent modeling language.

The adoption of agility at a large scale often requires the integration of agile and non-agile development elements for architecting a hybrid adaptive methodology. The challenge is "which elements or components (agile or non-agile) are relevant to develop the context-aware hybrid adaptive methodology reference architecture?" This paper addresses this important challenge and develops a hybrid adaptive methodology reference architecture model using a qualitative constructive empirical research approach. In this way, we have uncovered the agility, abstraction, business value, business policy, rules, legal, context and facility elements or components that have not been explicitly modelled or discussed in International Standards (IS) such as the ISO/IEC 24744 metamodel. It is anticipated that a context-aware hybrid adaptive methodology can be architected by using the proposed context-aware hybrid adaptive methodology reference architecture elements for a particular situation when using a situational method engineering approach.

300Since large, deep lakes are characterized by almost the entire spectrum of motions typical of the ocean (except for planetary Rossby waves, tides, and the permanent, deep thermocline), one can use the advantages of the relatively small size (and therefore ease of access) of these water basins to perform observational experiments covering practically the entire lake, i.e., a lake can serve as an imitation model for the ocean in the following ways: (1) revealing the factors of the formation of the water's general circulation using autonomous buoy station observations and remote sensing techniques; (2) testing the reliability of hydrodynamical models developed to model the oceanic circulation; (3) studies of the internal wave mechanism for the generation, nonlinear interactions, and determination of the effects of fronts on internal wave transformations; (4) analysis (with the lake gyre motions as an example) of the ocean synoptic gyres' kinematics; (5) studies of local effects of lakes on synoptic atmospheric formations; (6) methodological work on the substantiation and application of remote sensing techniques to study the parameters characterizing the dynamics and thermal regime of lakes and oceans.

This book explains situational method engineering and details how to apply it in software development. It features step-by-step explanations, from the basics to the customization and quality assessment of constructed methods. Includes industrial case studies.

Contemporary software engineering modelling tends to rely on general-purpose languages, such as the Unified Modeling Language. However, such languages are practice-based and seldom underpinned with a solid theory -- be it mathematical, ontological or concomitant with language use. The future of software modelling deserves research to evaluate whether a language base that is compatible with these various elements as well as being philosophically coherent offers practical advantages to software developers.

Context: Although metamodelling is generally accepted as important for our understanding of software and systems development, arguments about the validity and utility of ontological versus linguistic metamodelling continue.Objective: The paper examines the traditional, metamodel-focused construction of modelling languages in the context of language use, and particularly speech act theory. These concepts are then applied to the problems introduced by the "Orthogonal Classification Architecture" that is often called the ontological/linguistic paradox. The aim of the paper is to show how it is possible to overcome these problems.Method: The paper adopts a conceptual-analytical approach by revisiting the published arguments and developing an alternative metamodelling architecture based on language use.Results: The analysis shows that when we apply a language use perspective of meaning to traditional modelling concepts, a number of incongruities and misconceptions in the traditional approaches are revealed - issues that are not evident in previous work based primarily on set theory. Clearly differentiating between the extensional and intensional aspects of class concepts (as sets) and also between objects (in the social world) and things (in the physical world) allows for a deeper understanding to be gained of the relationship between the ontological and linguistic views promulgated in the modelling world.Conclusions: We propose that a viewpoint that integrates language use ideas into traditional modelling (and metamodelling) is vital, and stress that meaning is not inherent in the physical world; meaning, and thus socially valid objects, are constructed by use of language, which may or may not establish a one-to-one correspondence relationship between objects and physical things. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Whilst several agent-oriented modelling languages have been developed by independent research groups, it is now appropriate to consider a consolidation of these various approaches. There are arguably three things that need consolidation and future standardization: individual symbols, the underpinning metamodel, and the diagram types. Here we address only the third issue by extending an earlier analysis that resulted in recommendations for various diagram types for the modelling of a multiagent system (MAS). Here, we take each of these previously recommended diagram types and see how each is realized in a wide variety (over 20) of current agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies. We also take the opportunity to express, as exemplars, some of these diagram types using the recently published FAML notation.

International Standards have often been developed independently of one another resulting in the multiple use of similar terminology but with different semantics as well as the more obvious dependencies between pairs of standards employing the same term with the same semantics. By the application of conceptual modelling techniques based on an ontological viewpoint, we show how the ‘stovepipes’ of software engineering standards, developed under the remit of the SC7 committee of ISO, can be reconciled into a single coherent suite of standards.

The conceptual modelling community not only has no clear, general agreement on what its models model, it also has no clear picture of what the available options and their implications are. One common claim is that models represent concepts, but there is no clear articulation of what the concepts are. This creates theoretical problems; for example, it is difficult to justify the accuracy of meta-models. It also creates practical problems; practitioners building a model of the ‘concept’ of a business will rationalise their decisions differently from those modelling the business itself, making resolving disagreement difficult. In contrast, philosophy has been researching this area for millennia and has developed, at the high level, a clear picture of the semantic landscape, particularly for concepts. This presents an opportunity to provide the conceptual modelling community with a ready-made framework for its semantic options. We start exploiting this opportunity, developing here an initial framework.

By consideration of scientific paradigm shifts, in this chapter the authors evaluate possible parallels in the evolution of modelling, and particularly metamodelling and modelling language construction, as a basis for evaluating whether or not the time is ripe for a similar change of direction in model language development for software engineering. Having identified several inconsistencies and paradoxes in the current orthodoxy, they then introduce a number of ideas from outside software engineering (including language use, philosophy, and ontology engineering) that seem to solve many of these issues. Whether these new ideas, together, are sufficient to create a shift in mindset or whether they are simply the stimulus for others to create new and orthogonal ideas remains to be seen. The authors urge the modelling and metamodelling communities to search out that new orthodoxy (i.e. instigate a paradigm shift) that will, necessarily, ensure that the science will offer simpler and more satisfying solutions in the years to come.

Over the last several years, metamodels and ontologies have been developed in parallel isolation. Ontological thinking, largely from the research field of artificial intelligence, has been increasingly investigated by software engineering researchers, more familiar with the idea of a metamodel. Here, we investigate the literature on both metamodelling and ontologies in order to identify ways in which they can be made compatible and linked in such a way as to benefit both communities and create a contribution to a coherent underpinning theory for software engineering. Analysis of a large number of theoretical and semi-theoretical approaches using as a framework a multi-level modelling construct identifies strengths, weaknesses, incompatibilities and inconsistencies within the extant literature. A metamodel deals with conceptual definitions while an ontology deals with real-world descriptors of business entities and is thus better named "domain ontology". A specific kind of ontology (foundational or high-level) provides "metalevel" concepts for the domain ontologies. In other words, a foundational ontology may be used at the same abstraction level as a metamodel and a domain ontology at the same abstraction level as a (design) model, with each pair linked via an appropriate semantic mapping.

This paper promotes an ontology-based multi agent system (MAS) framework to facilitate Peer-to-Peer (P2P) service selection with multiple service properties. P2P-based service has emerged as an important new field in the distributed computing arena. It focuses on intensive service sharing, innovative applications and compositions, and, in some cases, high performance orientation. However, one of the remaining challenges for the P2P-based service composition process is how to effectively discover and select the most appropriate peers to execute the service applications when considering multiple properties of the requested services. By introducing an ontology, different ontology-based e-service profiles can be proposed to facilitate handling multiple properties and to enhance the service oriented process in order to achieve the total or partial automation of service discovery, selection and composition. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for peer selection with a preliminary mathematical model and a selection process, so as to enhance the P2P-based service coordination system and its components.

The granularity of conceptual models depends at least in part on the granularity of their underpinning metamodel. Here we investigate the theory of granularity as it can be applied to conceptual modelling and, especially, metamodelling for information systems development methodologies. With a background context of situational method engineering, this paper applies some theoretical works on granularity to the study of current metamodelling approaches. It also establishes some granularity-related best practices to take into account when adopting a metamodel, especially for its future use in developing method fragments for situational method engineering. Using these best practices will result in components of better quality and, consequently, better conceptual models and methodologies.

The situational method engineering (SME) literature is surveyed and a synoptic evaluation presented in the context of formalizing and regularizing the conceptual framework and underpinning theory. Metamodels proposed for use in SME are evaluated as well as high- level process models for method construction. Method fragments and method chunks are then described formally followed by their identification and creation (from existing methods, from scratch or from past usage). Method creation is then analyzed in terms of various processes for constructing a full methodology from the method fragments/chunks. In particular, we contrast the use of the "map" technique and of the "deontic matrix" technique. The survey is concluded with an evaluation of some ideas on method tailoring and the emerging research on quality evaluation applied to SME.

Development and acceptance of a modelling language (ML) for agent-oriented software development has many facets. To complement the “bottom-up” suggestions of icons for particular fine-scale agent-oriented concepts, here we address “top-down” the overall system-level goals and how we might depict them in diagrams. Then, having identified a suite of viewpoints, we recommend a number of diagram types that could constitute such a standard AOSE ML --recommendations based on an analysis of the theoretical literature and over twenty extant AOSE methodologies (and accompanying MLs).