Title: A Study on Goals Specification for Systems-of-Information Systems: Design Principles and Conceptual Model

Authors: Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto, Flavio E. A. Horita, Everton Cavalcante, Adair Rohling, Daniel Santos, Jamal El-Hachem, Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

Conference: Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems (SBSI), Caxias do Sul, Brazil

Abstract: Software-intensive information systems can be aggregated to form Systems-of-Information Systems (SoIS). SoIS provide novel functionalities and achieve high-level goals, also known as missions. As SoIS often support critical domains, they need to be precisely specified, otherwise failures and malfunction could cause huge losses and threats for users. We conducted an exploratory study to evaluate how the state-of-the-art language for missions specification (namely, mKAOS) have supported goal specification for SoIS. This has been carried out in the context of a Space SoIS. Results indicate a lack of support for specificities of SoIS goals, such as the need of representing interdependency and sequence between activities and support for prediction of dynamic reconfiguration. Furthermore, this paper also contribute by providing a set of principles and a corresponding conceptual model to be followed by future languages designed to cope with SoIS features.