Prototype Description

DealMaker

Project Members 

Principle Investigators

Dr. William N. Robinson

Collaborators

Greg Elofson

Current members

  

Past members

S. Volkov, Kuosheng Yang.

Project Summary

 

The aim of the DealMaker project is to provide automated support in the detection, characterization, and resolution of conflicts in a variety of domains. The goal of the theoretical work is to provide a basis for automatically analyzing and resolving conflicts across a wide variety of domains including competitive, cooperative, and multi-modal domains. Working demonstrations have been developed for the digital commerce of software applets and the group development of negotiated systems requirements. 

 

Current DealMaker demonstration prototypes include:

  • Assisted Negotiation of Software Applet Contracting
  • Assisted Negotiation of Multi-Stakeholder Requirements Conflict Resolution
  • Assisted Negotiation of Multiple Stakeholder Views of Enterprise wide Databases
 

The three main components of Requirements DealMaker interact over a network interface.

  • Database Server. The database server stores CORA model and its instances. It stores and answers queries about: requirements, transformations, and domain models. The deductive database, ConceptBase, provides these functions. It provides a concurrent multi-user access to O-Telos objects. All classes, meta classes, instances, attributes, rules, constraints, and queries are uniformly represented as objects. ConceptBase provides a powerful operational modeling language based on Datalog with negation; it will terminate and produce the correct answer for any query it receives. Thus, one can formally describe the CORA model in ConceptBase, populate it with instances, and have ConceptBase answer queries about the model or instances of it.
  • User Interface Server. The user interface server provides a (World Wide Web) HTML interface to the database server. It accepts HTML forms input and produces HTML pages as output. The input forms may be: 1) simple assertions, such as requirement statements, 2) queries, or 3) operation requests. Operation requests are forms that specify an operation, and its input, to be applied to objects in the database. Conflict detection, resolution transformations, and resolution strategies are initiated by filling out an HTML form and submitting it to the user interface server. The server then translates the request into queries of the database server and then presents the stored results as another HTML page.
  • Clients. A WWW browser serves as the basic user client. Using this network interface, multiple clients can connect to the user interface server.

Project Papers

Many of Dr. Robinson's publications are available on-line at his bibliography page.

  • Elofson, G., Robinson, W.N., Creating a Custom Mass-Production Channel on the Internet, ACM, Communications of the ACM, March, 1998, pp. 56-62.
  • Robinson, W.N., Volkov, S., Supporting the Negotiation Life-Cycle, ACM, Communications of the ACM, May, 1998, pp. 95-102.
  • Robinson, W.N., Electronic Brokering for Assisted Contracting of Software Applets, IEEE, Proceedings of the 30th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, January 7-10 1997, pp. 449-458.
  • W.N. Robinson, S. Volkov, A Meta-Model for Restructuring Stakeholder Requirements, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, Boston, USA (May 17-24 1997), pp. 140 -149.

 

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