Process Artifacts Defined as an Aspectual Service to System Models

Abstract

Process artifacts identified from a process description often implicitly bias and cross-cut the definition of generic services from various tools that assist/automate process activities. The resulting toolsupport is tightly coupled with the process definition it supports, leading to poor adaptability when the required artifacts or process activities evolve/change. This issue is of further concern while providing toolsupport for assisting knowledge-intensive process activities through an interactive exploration of related knowledge-bases. Therefore, our focus is on early separation of process related cross-cutting concerns from generic tool-support services for creating, browsing, accessing, querying, inferencing, and visualizing associated knowledge-bases. We discuss our approach in the context of designing tool support for a system security Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process automation based on service-oriented and aspect-oriented design paradigms.