SC: Using Service Discovery to Support Requirements Elicitation in the ERP Domain - Advanced Information Systems Engineering - page 23

3.4 The S 3 C Tool Environment
We developed adequate tool support based on the conceptual solution - as outlined in
the previous section. The S 3 C Tool Environment consists of a variety of applications,
services, prototypes and databases. The main technical contribution are novel S 3 C tool
which were built on top of selected SeCSE components. Figure 5 shows the S 3 C Tool
Environment including newly developed tools as well as original SeCSE components.
Fig. 5. S 3 C Tool Environment
The S 3 C Solution Explorer is an application for onsite consultants; it enables them
to document the To-Be business model in the form of use cases and to link and
document requirements. This information can be used as input to perform service
discovery requests. To do so, the use case description and the linked requirements are
compiled into an XML query document. The query document is used as input for the
EDDiE service discovery engine. The query result is a XML document including
candidate services, in order of relevance (calculated by the EDDiE service discovery
engine). With this information, the S 3 C Solution Explorer presents a ranked list of
relevant services also highlighting the matching probability for each service. The
descriptions of these candidate services provide input for further discussions with
customers and support solution selection. Figure 6 shows the S 3 C Solution Explorer
representing the Item Arrival Use Case.
The S 3 C Management Studio is used by system administrations to access the ser-
vice registry to keep the stored information up to date. Managing the service registry
includes providing and updating information about services, such as the service pro-
vider, a description and other meta-data. Accurate information about services is vital
for service discovery requests as it enables the system to identify accurate candidate
services.
The S 3 C Proxy Layer was introduced to overcome the heterogonous nature of the
SeCSE platform. Due to the involvement of different research partners in SeCSE the
provided solution is a mix of different platforms and technologies. The S 3 C Proxy
Layer is an abstraction layer that provides an interface for performing service discov-
ery and manipulating services in the service registry. The S 3 C Proxy is built using
Microsoft .NET technology and translates either in Java or XML to the SeCSE com-
ponents. All S³C tools are built upon the S 3 C Proxy Layer and have no contact with
the underlying SeCSE components.