Dave Lewis

D2.3 - Architectural Approaches Report

This document reviews from a WP2 perspective the whitepapers produced in the M-Zones programme at the end of June 2004 and forms part of the programme’s research quality assurance process.

The overall goal of the quality assessment process conducted collectively by WP2, 3 and 4 is to provide a mechanism for incrementally improving the quality of the research work conducted in M-Zones. This is performed by guiding the development of a set of research whitepapers towards completion for each co-released WP2, WP3 and WP4 deliverable. This guidance complements that of individual supervisors of researchers, but also through collective peer review of papers, which aims to assess and improve the quality of the resulting research.

WP2 is primarily concerned with ensuring that all research work has a clear statement of its assumptions and context, thus providing a high level architectural view of the research from a number of viewpoints, i.e. the business viewpoint, the logical/structural viewpoint, the technology viewpoint and the reuse viewpoint. These viewpoints remain unchanged from D1.2 and are included in Annex 1 for reference, with the specific assessment criteria used, which is also unchanged, included in Annex 2. Section 2 presents the overall results and observations from the assessment of the whitepaper submitted with this deliverable. As some of the white papers are continuations of work reviewed for WP2 in D2.1, only reference of relevant changes will be made to avoid repetition between deliverables. Section 3 presents a current synthesis of the work in the whitepapers on requirements and research context. This is not an attempt to define an overall view of M-Zone’s concepts, but aims to provide a concise feel of the direction in which the research, as represented by this set of white papers, is progressing, again only as a delta on the synthesis already presented in deliverable D2.3. It should not therefore be interpreted as definitive or prescriptive, but as an aid to an understanding of the project’s overall requirements and research context and to assist individual researchers within the project in identifying further potential synergies.