From reference model and system requirements to architecture design recommendations: an expert system approach

When developing distributed systems like research infrastructures, requirement gathering and architecture design are often difficult and time consuming. The ENVRI Reference model abstracts generic patterns from environmental research infrastructures and 1 provides an ontological framework for facilitating the communication between infrastructure developers and domain scientists; however, deriving application patterns from specific design requirements are still challenging due to lack of user friendly tools. In this thesis we tackle this challenge by proposing an expert system based approach to bridge the gap between requirements and system architecture design, studying the interaction usability of the prototyped expert system. We investigated several dialog methods and analysed the differences between them. Later on, we identified different patterns in the participants interactions. We also investigated how to profile the expertise levels and background of the participants based on their input, which contributes to autonomous customization of the interaction interface.