Report - URN Focus Group Meeting
Wednesday May 1st, 2002, 14:00-16:00
SITE Hall (5-084), University of Ottawa
List of attendees
- D. Amyot (U. Ottawa), Rapporteur Q18/17
- F. Bordeleau (Carleton U.)
- D. Cameron (Nortel Networks)
- L.M. Cysneiros (U. Toronto), by phone
- T. Gray (Mitel Networks), by phone
- L. Logrippo (U. Ottawa)
- D. Petriu (Carleton U.)
- J. Sincennes (U. Ottawa)
- E. Yu (U. Toronto), by phone
Invited:
- T. Lethbridge (U. Ottawa)
- R.L. Probert (U. Ottawa)
The agenda proposed by D. Amyot was approved with one modification: Report by L. Logrippo on UCM activities at U. Ottawa.
D. Amyot reported on the presentations, activities, and decisions discussed at the first SG17 meeting in Geneva, Feb-March 2002. His report and all related documents and other information can be found online at http://www.usecasemaps.org/urn/urn-meetings.shtml
- The first SG 17 meeting (and especially the URN meetings) suffered from a lack of participation. The November 2002 meeting will likely be less problematic as a few sessions will involve all questions.
- The URN Focus Group has been renewed. A report on its previous activities has been produced.
- A presentation on URN and Time/Performance was done in a joint Q.18 and Q.23 meeting. Several opportunities for aligning URN with Q.23 concerns have been identified.
- The presentation on the UCM Path Traversal Mechanism led to he conclusion that a trace language for expressing traversed paths, although a good idea for tool support, should not be standardized at this point.
- A Liaison Statement sent to all other ITU-T study groups during the Geneva meeting will likely result in comments on URN (and the Z.150 document).
- The past Language Workshop (March 2nd) and the next one (November 23rd, 2002) were discussed. All are invited to contribute.
- The SG17 Language Strategy and the Language Coordination Project were also briefly presented and discuss. A tutorial on URN should be produced before July.
Prof. R.L. Probert mentions his interest in connecting URN to TTCN for testing. D. Cameron shares this interest as well, especially for performance-oriented tests.
E. Yu and L.M. Cysneiros reported on recent developments at U. of Toronto:
- They focused on the agent-oriented side of URN. They have developed a health-care example using i*.
- They also have recent results on an elicitation methodology to get requirements from a work group, which involves the gathering of vocabulary and the production of and reasoning about GRL-like models.
- New results on abstract role concepts, in an e-commerce context. It was suggested to them to take a look at an IETF standard (e.g. MIDCOM) as an example.
- Propagation rules and evaluation: a new algorithm written by J. Mylopoulos and an Italian group, which is fully automated and does not require user intervention, is now available and will be studied. However, this algorithm does not take into consideration GRL concepts such as actors.
- The latest version of the OME tool for GRL is 3.10. Support for catalogues is not yet public.
- A common case study (health-care domain) will be proposed to the agent-oriented community at the next AOIS workshop.
D. Petriu reported on recent work done at Carleton U. on UCMs and performance:
- Integration of LQN generation to UCMNav, improved algorithms, case studies.
- Version 2.0 of UCMNav completed (thanks to A. Miga and D. Petriu)
- UCMNav documentation is being updated.
- Future work involves UCM2LQN using UCM scenario definitions, reporting of the results to UCM model, bookstore e-commerce example, library of performance-related completions, and improved LQN solver.
L. Logrippo reported on recent work at U. of Ottawa on UCMs and patterns and LOTOS:
- One M.Sc. student is finishing her work on a translator from UCMs to LOTOS (and then to MSCs). This approach has been used in the past on multiple wireless communication systems. A paper will be written soon.
- An invited paper based on R. Andrade’s recent thesis will be presented in Brazil this month.
D. Amyot presented recent updates:
- URN Web page restructured and updated. D. Amyot will maintain it.
- New URN mailing list (thanks to J. Sincennes and K. White for the Majordomo server)
- ITU-T SG17 to add new bullet on Focus Groups, with info on URN’s and link to the other “public” site.
- UCM Web Page currently redesigned and updated. Hopefully available within a couple of weeks, together with the most recent UCMNav.
D. Amyot recalled the items of the action plan approved at the Geneva meeting. See http://www.usecasemaps.org/urn/urn-plan.shtml for more details.
D. Amyot presented an overview of the current Z.150 document. Several potential improvements were quickly suggested. D. Cameron identified the need for a more generic relationship for the generation of performance models and traces in section 9.4. Appendix III also needs major updates. The need for compliance tests for URN was discussed. One way to make sure that a URN requirement stated in Z.150 is testable (and not too vague) is to create a test for it. L. Logrippo suggested that we identified the requirements that will be postponed to the next ITU-T study period.
Many papers related URN have been or will be presented at various conferences: TOOLS (Petriu/Woodside, May), CFIP (Amyot/Mussbacher, May), ICSE (Petriu/Woodside, May), AOIS/CAiSE (3 papers by Liu, Yu, Cysneiros, and others, May), SBRC (Andrade/Logrippo, May), SAM (Amyot/Mussbacher, June), WOSP (2 papers by Woodside/Petriu/Seddiqui).
L.M. Cysneiros will give a requirements engineering tutorial with J.C.S. Leite and they will mention URN.
F. Bordeleau will report on his trip to the ICSE scenario workshop as well as on the possibility of a Dagstuhl seminar (in Germany, http://www.dagstuhl.de/) later this year.
The funding status of URN-related project was briefly discussed. Many projects come to an end, and hopefully many of the new proposed projects will get funded. The URN Focus Group does not receive any funding from ITU-T.
Next meeting in Ottawa during the week of June 10th (exact time to be determined).
There will be a meeting after SAM’2002 at the University of Wales on June 26th and 27th.