About Me

Rolf Kluge is a research associate and a cotutelle PhD student at the Information Systems Institute, University of Leipzig (Germany) and at the Department of Computing, Macquarie University Sydney (Australia). His PhD supervisors are Prof. Bogdan Franczyk at Leipzig and Prof. Leszek Maciaszek at Sydney.

In March 2009 he joined the Macquarie University as a PhD student by the joint doctoral supervision program Cotutelle.

Since October 2006 Rolf is a research associate in the Logistics-Service-Bus (LSB) project at the University of Leipzig. The project is supportet by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany). LSB has the objective to foster the logistics region of Central Germany by a Service-oriented IT plattform. (www.lsb-plattform.de)

Rolf Kluge studied at University of Leipzig and received in 2006 his Diploma degree in Business Information Systems at (Dipl. Wirtsch. Inf.) with a specialization in Information Management and Business Administration, Controlling and Management Accounting. His diploma thesis "User Authentication within an interoperable Environment of Java 2 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Windows .NET, regarding to the IT-Infrastructure at DaimlerChrysler AG" was written in cooperation with the DaimlerChrysler AG in Stuttgart/Germany in 2006.

During study, Rolf founded the company Kluge & Schmidt GbR for developing and distributing internet shop solution for multi-level marketing. Further, Rolf Kluge was employed as working student at the Microsoft Deutschland GmbH (Microsoft Germany) for two years. He attended the student programming competition Microsoft Imagine Cup twice. In 2004 his team got the second best price of Germany. In 2005 Rolf Kluge and his team won the first price in Germany and got 4th best at the worldwide Imagine Cup in Yokohama/Japan out of 30 nations. The project SmartRunner is still running and available at www.smartrunner.de.

Web: http://www.iwi.uni-leipzig.de/uber-das-institut/team/rolf-kluge
Web: http://web.science.mq.edu.au/~rkluge/
Blog: http://rolfkluge.blogspot.com/

My Research

The follwing text provides an abstract about my research topic ...

Companies require information systems (IS). Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products provide standardized software solutions. However, despite the fact that there are usually many COTS solutions for almost all types of tasks available on the market, the process of selecting the most suitable one is not an easy task. The process is poorly understood, only insufficiently structured, and performed in an inefficient and ineffective way. This doctoral thesis aims to improve the COTS selection process. By using a service-oriented approach, the functionality of a COTS solution as well as the requirements will be formalized and aligned in a semi-automatic way. This will support the selection process of COTS components that fit business cases in an appropriate way.

Business Requirements are specified in text documents (by a Requirements Engineering process). The functionality of COTS solutions is hidden in source code and database models, but is exposed through graphical user interfaces and manuals. Both are barely formalized and can’t be automatically processed or aligned (cf. (1) Figure 1 ). According to the service-oriented paradigm a COTS solution and a company can be understood as service provider and service consumer, respectively (cf. (2) Figure 1). The provided functionality of the COTS solution can be seen as a service and expressed in terms of service capabilities (cf. (3) Figure 1). The correspondent requirements are the achievable goal and will be expressed in terms of capability goals (cf. (4) Figure 1). Both capability goals and service capabilities can be formalized. Capabilities are expressed in terms of functional and non-functional properties using a specific terminology. Consequently, the formal description of goals and services can be compared by a matching process (cf. (5) Figure 1).

This work is related to semantic Requirements Engineering [7], COTS-aware Requirement Engineering [2, 3, 5, 6, 14], COTS formalization efforts [9, 10, 12, 16] and Semantic Web Service [1, 4, 8, 11, 13, 15]. The central research agenda centers on using service-oriented concepts for solving COTS selection issues. The doctoral thesis will provide two methodologies, one for describing Business Requirements in terms of capability goals and another one for describing COTS component in terms of service capabilities. Further, the matching processes will be examined in detail.

Figure 1: Overall picture

References:

[1] AKKIRAJU, R., et al., “Web Service Semantics - WSDL-S, W3C Member Submission”; http://www.w3.org/Submission/WSDL-S/; (2009-05-18).
[2] ALVES, C. and FINKELSTEIN, A., “Challenges in COTS decision-making: a goal-driven requirements engineering perspective” Book Challenges in COTS decision-making: a goal-driven requirements engineering perspective, Series Challenges in COTS decision-making: a goal-driven requirements engineering perspective, ed., Editor ed.^eds., ACM, 2002, S.
[3] ALVES, C. and FINKELSTEIN, A., “Negotiating Requirements for COTS-based Systems” Proc. Eighth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ, 2002.
[4] BATTLE, S., et al., “Semantic Web Services Framework (SWSF) Overview”; http://www.daml.org/services/swsf/1.0/overview/; (2009-05-18).
[5] CARNEY, D., “Requirements and COTS-Based Systems: A Thorny Question Indeed” The COTS Spot, vol. 2, no. 2, 1999.
[6] CHUNG, L. and COOPER, K., “A Knowledge-Based COTS-Aware Requirements Engineering Approach” Proc. 14th international concerence on Software engineering and knowledge engineering, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2002.
[7] KAIYA, H. and SAEKI, M., “Ontology Based Requirements Analysis: Lightweight Semantic Processing Approach” Fifth International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC'05), 2005, S. 223-230; DOI http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/QSIC.2005.46
[8] KELLER, U., et al., WSMO Web Service Discovery - WSML Working Draft (D5.1v0.1), 2004.
[9] MAGRO, D. and GOY, A., “The business knowledge for customer relationship management: an ontological perspective” Proc. 1st international workshop on Ontology-supported business intelligence, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008.
[10] MAGRO, D. and GOY, A., “Towards a first ontology for customer relationship management” Proc. 5th international conference on Soft computing as transdisciplinary science and technology, 2008, S. p. 637-643
[11] MARTIN, D., et al., “OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services, W3C Member Submission”; http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/; (letzter Zugriff am 2009-05-18).
[12] OBERNDORF, T., et al., An Activity Framework for COTS-Based Systems, 2000.
[13] PREIST, C., “A conceptual architecture for semantic web services” Proc. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2004.
[14] ROLLAND, C., “Requirements engineering for COTS based systems” Information and Software Technology, vol. 41, no. 14, 1999, S. 985-990.
[15] ROMAN, D., et al., Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), 2006.
[16] VAN DAMME, C., et al., “Building an employee-driven CRM ontology” Proc. ADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (MCCSIS): E-society, 2007, S. pp.330-334.