Business processes describe a set of tasks for accomplishing business objectives of an organization. Business applications automate business processes to improve the productivity of business users. Nowadays, the business environment changes fast due to rapid market growth and technological innovations. Business processes are continuously updated to reflect new business initiatives. Business applications are frequently evolved to add features to meet new requirements and fix defects. Quite often, business processes and business applications evolve independently without direct reference to each other. Over time, it becomes more and more challenging to maintain the consistency between a business application and the corresponding business processes. Moreover, the existing development approaches rely on software developers’ craftsmanship to design and implement business applications. Such a development paradigm is inefficient and leads to inconsistency between business processes and business applications. To facilitate the alignment between business applications and business processes, we present an approach that automatically generates software architecture and code skeletons of business applications from business processes. We identify architectural components from business processes by analyzing dependencies among tasks. To verify the achievement of quality requirements, we extend a set of existing product metrics to automatically evaluate the quality of the generated software architecture designs. Eventually, we apply refactoring strategies, such as software architectural styles or design patterns, to optimize the generated software architecture designs and resolve identified quality problems. Moreover, we also present an approach to automatically refine software architecture to design models and code skeletons of business applications. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is illustrated through case studies. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-01-30 00:06:34.77

This thesis explores the possibilities of abstraction of graphical user interface and automation of its design and development process at runtime. Emphasis is placed on possibility of remote control over computer network and accordingly on delegation of the interface creation on the human operated remote machine. The thesis analyzes contemporary approaches to and methods of interface generation. As a goal of the thesis a system for automatic user interface generation for remote applications was designed and implemented. The generation is based on specified data model.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans le domaine de l’intelligence ambiante et de l’interaction homme-machine. Elle a pour thème la génération d’interfaces homme-machine adaptées au contexte d’interaction dans les environnements ambiants. Les travaux de recherche présentés traitent des problèmes rencontrés lors de la conception d’IHM dans l'ambiant et notamment de la réutilisation de techniques d’interaction multimodales et multi-périphériques. Ce travail se divise en trois phases. La première est une étude des problématiques de l’IHM spécifiques à l’Ambiant et des architectures logicielles adaptées à ce cadre théorique. Cette étude permet d’établir les limites des approches actuelles et de proposer, dans la seconde phase, une nouvelle approche pour la conception d’IHM ambiante appelée DAME. Cette approche repose sur l’association automatique de composants logiciels qui construisent dynamiquement une IHM. Nous proposons deux modèles complémentaires qui permettent de décrire les caractéristiques ergonomiques et architecturales des composants. La conception de ces derniers est guidée par une architecture logicielle composée de plusieurs couches qui permet d’identifier les différents niveaux d’abstraction réutilisables d’un langage d’interaction. Un troisième modèle, appelé modèle comportemental, permet de spécifier des recommandations quant à l’instanciation de ces composants. Nous proposons un algorithme permettant de générer des IHM adaptées au contexte et d’évaluer la qualité de celles-ci par rapport aux recommandations du modèle comportemental. Dans la troisième phase, nous avons implémenté une plateforme réalisant la vision soutenue par DAME. Cette implémentation est confrontée aux utilisateurs finaux dans une expérience de validation qualitative. De ces travaux ressortent des résultats encourageants, ouvrant la discussion sur de nouvelles perspectives de recherche dans le cadre de l’IHM en informatique ambiante. / This thesis deals with ambient intelligence and the design of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It studies the automatic generation of user interfaces that are adapted to the interaction context in ambient environments. This problem raises design issues that are specific to ambient HCI, particularly in the reuse of multimodal and multidevice interaction techniques. The present work falls into three parts. The first part is an analysis of state-of-the-art software architectures designed to solve those issues. This analysis outlines the limits of current approaches and enables us to propose, in the second part, a new approach for the design of ambient HCI called DAME. This approach relies on the automatic and dynamic association of software components that build a user interface. We propose and define two complementary models that allow the description of ergonomic and architectural properties of the software components. The design of such components is organized in a layered architecture that identifies reusable levels of abstraction of an interaction language. A third model, called behavioural model, allows the specification of recommendations about the runtime instantiation of components. We propose an algorithm that allows the generation of context-adapted user interfaces and the evaluation of their quality according to the recommendations issued from the behavioural model. In the third part, we detail our implementation of a platform that implements the DAME approach. This implementation is used in a qualitative experiment that involves end-users. Encouraging preliminary results have been obtained and open new perspectives on multi-devices and multimodal HCI in ambient computing.

Submitted by Clebson Anjos (clebson.leandro54@gmail.com) on 2016-02-11T19:57:13Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 4682448 bytes, checksum: 9f9a7a72b4132cb9d61c8cc0c1591ea3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-02-11T19:57:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 4682448 bytes, checksum: 9f9a7a72b4132cb9d61c8cc0c1591ea3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-23 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Health informatics is a domain that presents several challenges to be overcome. Electronic Health Records (EHR) are one of its most important subdomain, in charge of storage, exhibition, and manipulation of patient clinical information, among others. EHR systems require domain flexibility, which allows modifications in the structure of documents without application recompilation or redeployment, for instance, in a web server. Current approaches in the literature propose generic models to represent domain and presentation, without ontological definitions for user interface (UI) layout and style. These, when properly organized, improve the acceptance of the system by users. This work aims to develop a framework to layout and style generation for graphical user interface of EHR documents, based on Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies and using restrictions. By centralizing and combining metadata from biomedical and documents domains, it was possible to apply layout and style to EHR documents, with the use of grids, including additional ontological definition of presentation formats for the medical field, facilitating UI development and maintenance. / A informática em saúde apresenta muitos desafios a serem superados. Um de seus principais ramos de pesquisa são os Registros Eletrônicos em Saúde (RES), responsáveis, dentre outros, pelo armazenamento, exibição e manipulação de registros clínicos do paciente. Sistemas deste tipo requerem flexibilidade do domínio da aplicação, de modo que alterações nos documentos do RES sejam realizadas em tempo de execução, sem recompilação ou reimplantação da aplicação, por exemplo, em um servidor web. Abordagens da literatura propõem modelos genéricos de representação de domínio e apresentação, sem definições ontológicas de layout e estilo de interface com o usuário (UI). Estes, quando bem organizados, melhoram a aceitação do sistema pelos usuários. Este trabalho teve como objetivo o desenvolvimento de um framework para geração de layout e estilo de interface gráfica com o usuário para documentos do RES, baseado em ontologias Web Ontology Language (OWL), com uso de restrições. Através da centralização e combinação dos metadados biomédicos e de documentos para o RES, foi possível aplicar layout e estilo para os documentos do RES, com uso de grids, com definição ontológica adicional de formatos de apresentação para a área médica, facilitando o desenvolvimento da UI para o RES a manutenção da interface gráfica da aplicação.

Das Ziel des ServFace Projektes ist es Endnutzern ohne umfangreiche IT-Kenntnisse das einfache Erstellen von servicebasierten Anwendungen zu ermöglichen. Dazu wird ein Kompositions- werkzeug mit dem Namen “ServFace Builder“ verwendet. Das Werkzeug erlaubt es Endnutzern, interaktive Anwendungen durch die Komposition von Service-Operationen zu erstellen. Dafür ist eine grafische Repräsentation der Service-Operationen durch UI-Fragmente notwendig. Die UI-Fragmente werden im ServFace-Umfeld als Frontends bezeichnet. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein Konzept zur automatischen Visualisierung dieser Frontends vorgestellt. Um das Ergebnis der Visualisierung zu verbessern, nutzt der Visualisierungsprozess neben der Service-Beschreibung weitere Informationen in Form von Annotationen und Gestaltungsempfehlungen. Konkret werden die folgenden Aspekte in dieser Arbeit beschrieben: • Visualisierung von Frontends zur Repräsentation von Service-Operationen auf Basis von Service-Beschreibungen, Annotationen, Plattformspezifikationen und Gestaltungsempfehlungen unter der Maßgabe der Gebrauchstauglichkeit und Nutzbarkeit. • Integration der Frontends in die jeweils aktuelle Instanzen des gegebenen Anwendungsmodells. • Technische Umsetzung und Evaluation der entwickelten Konzepte / The aim of the ServFace Project is to enable users with limited IT skills to easily create service-based applications. In order to do so, a tool called "ServFace Builder" has been developed. This tool allows users to build a composite application by combining several service operations. An important part of the ServFace Builder is the graphical representation of those service operations through user interfaces. This thesis describes an approach to automatically generate user interfaces for service operations. To enhance the graphical representation, the user interface generation process of the ServFace Builder comprises annotations and design recommendations next to the common service descriptions to enhance the result of the generation process. This thesis discusses: • Graphical representation of service operations on the basis of service descriptions, annotations, plattform specifications and design recommendations. • Integration of the graphical representation into the actual instance of the given application model. • Implementation and evaluation of the presented concepts.