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.