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In the previous years Information System manage only information inside the company, today a company may search and manage information of the other companies. In this scenario the problem of communication between Information Systems is of the highest importance. Up to the present moment, several types of integration have been used but all were founded on the agreement (about data to share and the exchange format) between the interested Information Systems. Today, thanks to the new technologies, it is possible that an Information System uses data of another Information System without a previous agreement. The problem is that, often, the Information System may refer to the same data but with different names. In this paper we present a methodology that, using ontology, and thus the intrinsic semantic of each data of the Information System, allow to create a global ontology useful to enable a semantic communication between Information Systems.

Nowadays there are an increasing evolution of technological solutions providing the virtual collaboration among people geographically distributed to obtain some common goals. At the same time virtual collaborative environments are often used for learning purposes because increase the interaction among users. These systems are usually developed in a custom way according to the specic requirements without any kind of standardization in terms of denition of collaboration among involved users. Although the literature shows attempts to formally express learning processes through a standard language, there are not proposals that combine e-learning languages with typical concepts of 3D collaborative experiences. This paper propose a notation model able to design collaboration for e-learning virtual environments.

Up to some years ago, industries operating in the field of document filing systems had a great boost to their growth, driven, above all, by the need of Public Administrations and of large-scale industries to externalize their paper archives. Now document filing system companies are slowly trying to convert themselves into digital enterprises becoming, de facto, providers of services going far beyond the simple physical provision of space for rental in warehouses: services such as Substitutive Optical Scanning, document indexing, manual data input and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) are now essential. In this context these companies often encounter difficulties facing up to problems more typical of the software engineering field: small several documental production is ever more dependent on their clients’ internal business processes and integrated with their information systems. This makes the clients increasingly subject to the work of external software house to perform every, even little, modification to the implemented systems. In this paper we present a case study: the YouFile service prototype. This system supports smart document (both paper and electronic) indexing. It is based on a WebOS interface in order to benefit from the desktop metaphor, and it uses an ontological approach that defines not only the document classes but also the semantic relationships between specific characteristics of each document class. The system allows the management of the process of document indexing and retrieval in an automatic way, generating the data entry forms at run-time.

B2B infrastructures and applications are characterized by interoperability problems due to the proliferation of standards and methodologies related to business process notations and e-business vocabularies; that implies a different kind of agreements between different companies of the same supply chain. These problems are: one more methodological, aimed at choosing guidelines oriented to the integration between the business process and the definition of business messages; the other more technological, aimed at choosing an infrastructural solution more suitable for development of message exchange. In this paper we identify some open issues of B2B infrastructures and applications and we propose a possible solution.

The information has always been a valuable patrimony for the information systems that every company tries to capitalize as much as possible. With the web, the amount of information is increased and several problems arise for instance for the safety of the exchanged data but also to the semantic heterogeneity: the same information is very often represented in different ways in different information systems. In this paper we present an architecture of interchange of data both within the same information system and among different information systems founded on the ontologies in order to overcome the problem list of the heterogeneity. Ontologies, today, they seem to be the best tool useful to resolve the problem of heterogeneity, but that has not now been exploited fully.

We are interested in determining whether researchers and practitioners of the Domain-Specific Software Development (DSSD) community mean the same when they refer to core terms commonly used as part of the area’s nomenclature. In this position paper we report on an initial exercise we began at the 2006 OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling which consisted of identifying these core terms, agreeing on their meaning, and building a concept map showing how they relate to each other. We hope this exercise will serve as one of the initial seeds which will help build an evolving and multidimensional body of core definitions researchers and practitioners of our community can use as an authoritative reference.

In the last years, the requirements of the end-users are notably evolved. A good software must not have only a good functionality cover but it also must have good usability features. From this point of view, the most recent design methodologies focus on the interaction between the end-user and its user experience; in this way, the design focus there is not on the data element (represented as objects or relational entity) but on the end-user and its perception of the information anymore. According to growing needs, it is more and more frequent the requests of reengineering of existing products that, developed in many years, have a good coverage of the application domain; these existing products result completely unsuitable to the modern paradigms of interaction. In this paper, we introduce an experience of reengineering (in web perspective) of a legacy application on the environment monitoring. This experience has been performed into the industrial research project (funded by Italian Government) called “Genesis-D”1 (Global Environmental Network System of Information for Sustainable Development) that understanding the importance of the new user-centred approach wants to reengineering its own products.

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