Information Systems Architecture

Abstract

The Department of Information Science is one of six departments that make up the Division of Commerce at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in spatial information processing, connectionist-based information systems, software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, distributed information systems, multimedia information systems and information systems security are particularly well supported.The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the department as a whole. The accuracy of the information presented in this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. CopyrightCopyright remains with the authors. Permission to copy for research or teaching purposes is granted on the condition that the authors and the Series are given due acknowledgment. Reproduction in any form for purposes other than research or teaching is forbidden unless prior written permission has been obtained from the authors. CorrespondenceThis paper represents work to date and may not necessarily form the basis for the authors' final conclusions relating to this topic. It is likely, however, that the paper will appear in some form in a journal or in conference proceedings in the near future. The authors would be pleased to receive correspondence in connection with any of the issues raised in this paper, or for subsequent publication details. Please write directly to the authors at the address provided below. (Details of final journal/conference publication venues for these papers are also provided on the Department's publications web pages: http://divcom.otago.ac.nz:800/COM/INFOSCI/Publctns/home.htm). Any other correspondence concerning the Series should be sent to the DPS Coordinator. Department of Information Science AbstractThis paper describes an architecture for building distributed information systems from existing information resources, based on distributed object and software agent technologies. This architecture is being developed as part of the New Zealand Distributed Information Systems (NZDIS) project.An agent-based architecture is used: information sources are encapsulated as information agents that accept messages in an agent communication language (the FIPA ACL). A user agent assists users to browse ontologies appropriate to their domain of interest and to construct queries based on terms from one or more ontologies. One or more query processing agents are then responsible for discovering (from a resource broker agent) which data source agents are relevant to the query, decomposing the query into subqueries suitable for those agents (including the translation of the query into the specific ontologies implemented by those agents), executing the subqueries and translating and combini...

E-CARe

“…The three horizontal modules correspond to a classical three-tier architecture (Kurbel, 2008) consisting of a presentation module used to communicate with users, a business module coordinating the system functions and a data management module processing data from the underlying level. The two lateral modules in the framework, context and communication, contain the two logical principles of a ubiquitous IS: awareness and reactivity to context and distribution and communication with the environment.…”

“…This phase integrates ubiquitous specifications and technical models (Figure 5). The technical track in the Symphony process produces material and software architectures that are conform to a 5-tier architecture (Kurbel, 2008). However, Figure 13.…”