Authors:
Richard McClatchey
;
Andrew Branson
and
Jetendr Shamdasani
Affiliation:
University of the West of England, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Description-Driven Systems, Object Orientation, Reuse, System Evolution.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Architectural Design and Meta Architectures
;
Cross-Feeding between Data and Software Engineering
;
Design Thinking as a Paradigm for Software Development
;
Model-Driven Engineering
;
Paradigm Trends
;
Service-Oriented Software Engineering and Management
;
Software and Systems Development Methodologies
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Engineering Methods and Techniques
Abstract:
In the age of the Cloud and so-called ‘big data’ systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses vers
ions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.
(More)
