Conceptual modeling languages are purposeful artifacts, hence their design should also start from the purpose that they serve. Such purposeful design addresses the requirements engineering concern of a language specification being aligned with the goals of its users. Thereby relevance of the language is ensured, instead of developing a language for language's sake. We posit that this addresses some known issues that are due to a misalignment between a language's specification and the goals of its intended users. In this paper, we introduce vGREL, a goal-and value-oriented approach for purposeful language development. vGREL helps language engineers to start the design of conceptual modeling languages with requirements engineering exercises. To this end vGREL provides (1) a purpose driven requirements engineering process for language design; (2) a value profile for the Goaloriented Requirements Language (GRL) to enable analysis and reasoning during the process and capture its results; and leverages (3) the software tool support of GRL for decision making during language design. To illustrate vGREL, we apply it to a case study on responsibility-based access rights management. Furthermore, we present reflections on vGREL from the language engineer involved in the case study.
We propose a method, e 3 service , to reason about satisfying customer needs in the context of a wide choice of multi-supplier ICT service bundles. Our method represents customer needs, their ensuing consequences, and the services that realize those consequences in a service catalogue. This catalogue is then used by a reasoner, which elicits customer needs, computes their consequences, and automatically matches these consequences with services offered by suppliers. The e 3 service method has been implemented and tested in software to demonstrate its feasibility.
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