Human activities undertaken in organizations rely on information systems. These were first used to collect, disseminate and process information. They are now real knowledge bases. The role of information systems becomes increasingly critical in the functioning of organizations. Information systems engineering aims at providing effective solutions to design, build, use and manage (in terms of evolution and increasing complexity) information systems. Research in this area aims at anticipating methods and tools engineering information systems will need.

To understand, anticipate and align user requirements and, more broadly, stakeholders with available technical solutions (components, services, ERP systems, ...) has always been an important and difficult problem in the information system engineering field. The growing number and diversity of stakeholders on the one hand and the rapid evolution of ever-greater range of technical solutions on the other hand explain that this problem remains a major challenge. In this context, our aim is to propose methods and tools to help stakeholders and designers (i.e. technical solutions providers) to articulate their representations and processes.

To facilitate the exploitation of resources (documents, actors or services), the semantic web research community aims at making explicit the knowledge contained into resources. This knowledge is represented by ontologies which structure terms, concepts and relationships of a given domain. Ontologies are often used to extract and represent the meaning of resources. This meaning is expressed through annotations supporting semantic resources indexing in order to formalise and make their content explicit. Resource retrieval relies on the formal manipulation of these annotations and is guided by ontologies. We believe that semantic web models and languages provide a suitable unified framework to firstly characterize user requirements and technical solutions and also allow reasoning on these characteristics. The work carried on in the framework of the DESIR Color action is an example of a community of ecophysiologists, agronomists and geneticists sharing scripts to perform data analysis in order to understand plant tolerance with regards to heat and water shortages.

Specifically, modeling, capturing and analyzing relations among user requirements pieces as well as between user requirements and technical solutions is of major interest in the requirement engineering field. Thus, our aim is to provide frameworks to formalize, store, index, query and infer from those relations to improve significantly the main activities of requirements engineering (validation, negotiation and evolution).

We are currently working on an approach to support capitalization, sharing and reuse of plans to operationalize business processes by web services in collaboration with the MODALIS research team at I3S. This project focusses on image processing pipelines operationalized by web services in a community of neuroscientists.

Nowadays, there is an increasing need for flexible approaches, adaptable to different kinds of Information System or software Development. Method customization has mainly be thought of for the person in charge of building methods, i.e. the method engineer, in order to allow him/her to adapt the method to the need of its company or projects. But there is also a need for customizations dedicated to project team members (application engineers), to provide them with customized guidelines (or heuristics) which are to be followed while performing their daily task. Our purpose is not to propose a new way to built methods, as several approaches already exist on this topic, but to ease the use of existing ones by making them less rigid and allowing their adaptation to the need of the company, the project and most of all, the project team members. This work is part of a global framework for situational method engineering : Smart Environment for SituAtional Method Engineering . It has been worked out in collaboration with Jolita Ralyté and Michel Léonard (MATIS team, CUI, Genève).

In this context we propose the REUSE FRAME. It is an alternative way to organize Method Fragments in order to improve their reusability (to be applied by method users - the person who uses the methodology - to configure method or by method engineers - the person in charge of the methodology in the company - to customize methods). It aims at capturing relationships among Information System and Software Developement (ISSD) activities aspects to facilitate navigation through related Method Fragments in an alternative way to usual navigation means (decomposition relationships). In our proposal, we combine keywords and ontological based approaches in order to support Method Engineering knowledge reuse. Moreover, we provide means to combine several characteristics and capture many usage situations in a rich way. We explicitly provide means to specify requirements on a situational method. Information System and software In our approach, ISSD knowledge is described in terms of aspects, belonging to aspect families, which are successive refinements of the three main factors of ISSD: human, organizational and technical. Starting from these three basic dimensions, each company may populate the Reuse Frame with its own relevant aspects, but we also propose a content. See the REUSE FRAME pages.

In the past, we also proposed JECKO, a context-driven approach to analysis and design, where a software context is defined in order to customize the analysis and design process. This approach has been developed in collaboration with Violaine de Rivieres, Amadeus sas, Sophia Antipolis, France.