Research Outcomes

The project has made significant advancements in five specific areas:

• Integration and refinement of the MEASUR methods, which aid users, analysts and specialists in the whole lifecycle of information systems development. The three methods are comprised of:

  i) Problem Articulation Method: for analysing complex and ill-defined problems,

  ii) Semantic Analysis Method: to model the business domain and information requirements with explicit representation of the meaning and relationships between the semantic models and business activities, and

  iii) Norm Analysis Method: for capturing business knowledge and incorporating them into IT systems to produce dynamically adaptable IT solutions

• Extensions of the MEASUR suite of techniques for systematic transformation of the specification to a design and implementation of enterprise IT solution.

• Formalisation of the systems design techniques based on the Semantic Normal Form (SNF) as the underlying mechanism (the SNF defines a canonical metadata structure encapsulating all necessary properties of an information item stored in the information system).
  

• Development of two prototypes: i) the PAM prototype, based on the Problem Articulation Method, is a project planning and resource management tool designed to aid the planning and management of complex enterprise projects. ii) The Semantic Modelling tool, based on the Semantic Analysis Method, supports the analysis and production of a semantic model including ontological dependency diagrams and the capture of Norms.
  

• Validation: Using the prototype tools to verify the acceptability effectiveness and correctness of the methods