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M. Sinderen

University of Twente, Computer Science, Faculty Member

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Marten van Sinderen

University of Twente

Marten J. Van Sinderen

University of Twente

Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos

Universiteit Leiden

Ege University

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)

Luís Ferreira Pires

University of Twente

Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo

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Papers by M. Sinderen

Towards conceptual foundations for context-aware applications

by Marten J. Van Sinderen, João Paulo Almeida, Marten van Sinderen, and M. Sinderen

In this paper we aim at defining conceptual foundations for context-aware applications. We argue ... more In this paper we aim at defining conceptual foundations for context-aware applications. We argue that the concepts of entity and context should be separated in conceptual models for context-aware applications. Further, we propose a novel approach that characterizes context as either intrinsic or relational. The concepts we propose in this paper have been inspired by and aligned with conceptual theories from the fields of philosophy and cognitive sciences. Since we concentrate on conceptual modeling, understandability and clarity are given precedence over properties such as efficiency and tractability.

GSO: Designing a well-founded service ontology to support dynamic service discovery and composition

by Renata Guizzardi, Luís Ferreira Pires, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos, and M. Sinderen

A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and out... more A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and outputs of user requests with the input and output requirements of registered service descriptions. This approach can be extended by using pre-conditions, effects and semantic annotations (meta-data) in an attempt to increase discovery accuracy. While on one hand these additions help improve discovery accuracy, on the other hand complexity is added as service users need to add more information elements to their service requests. In this paper we present an approach that aims at facilitating the representation of service requests by service users, without loss of accuracy. We introduce a Goal-Based Service Framework (GSF) that uses the concept of goal as an abstraction to represent service requests. This paper presents the core concepts and relations of the Goal-Based Service Ontology (GSO), which is a fundamental component of the GSF, and discusses how the framework supports semantic service discovery and composition. GSO provides a set of primitives and relations between goals, tasks and services. These primitives allow a user to represent its goals, and a supporting platform to discover or compose services that fulÀl them.

Design and Implementation of a Framework for Monitoring Distributed Component Interactions

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

This paper presents a framework for monitoring component interactions. It is part of a larger com... more This paper presents a framework for monitoring component interactions. It is part of a larger component framework built on top of the CORBA distributed processing environment that supports development and testing of distributed software applications. The proposed framework considers an OMG IDL specification as a contract for distributed interactions and allows precise monitoring of interaction activities between application components. The developer is not burdened with monitoring issues because all the necessary code instrumentation is done automatically. The tester is given the opportunity to use monitoring facilities for observing interactions between distributed component applications. This paper explains the monitoring framework and reasons about its expressive power, accuracy and applicability. The approach is validated in a platform for design, development and deployment of on-line services.

ICE-B 2014-Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on e-Business, Vienna, Austria, 28-30 August, 2014

Technical Report: Reconfiguration Service for Publish/Subscribe Middleware

APL: an effective design language

IEE Proceedings E Computers and Digital Techniques, 1986

ABSTRACT The paper describes the use of APL (a programming language) for the specification of a h... more ABSTRACT The paper describes the use of APL (a programming language) for the specification of a hardware architecture, the description of an initial implementation algorithm, its verification and controlled transformation to a logic design. Because of its power of expression, APL can be used effectively in each of these design domains. The APL interpreter turns any description into an executable prototype. Such a prototype is a powerful tool in the management and execution of a design; it clarifies design choices and assures the logical correctness of the product. This computer-aided-design process, which is illustrated by the design of the front end of a logic analyser, is useful for a variety of design situations, such as LSI/VLSI and computer design.

Trust Management Support for Context-Aware Service Platforms

Lecture Notes in Social Networks, 2014

High quality context information retrieved from trustworthy context providers allows a more relia... more High quality context information retrieved from trustworthy context providers allows a more reliable context-aware service adaption but also implies a higher risk for the service users in case of privacy violations. In this chapter we present a trust management model that support users and providers of context-aware services in managing the trade-off between privacy protection and context-based service adaptation. We applied our trust management model in two trust-based selection mechanisms. The first trust-based selection mechanism support users of context-aware services in selecting trustworthy service providers to interact with. This mechanism supports the users in the selection process, taking into account the users' goals, trust beliefs, and the trust dependencies between the service users and the entities that collaborate in the context-aware service provisioning. The second trust-based selection mechanism supports context-aware service providers in selecting trustworthy context providers taking into account the trustworthiness of the context providers to provide context information about a specific user and quality level. To conclude this chapter we present the evaluation of the technical feasibility of our trust management model in trust-based selection mechanisms through a prototype implementation.

Endurability and Profitability analysis of Collaborative Networks

A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of autonomous actors (e.g. enterpris... more A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of autonomous actors (e.g. enterprises, organizations and people) that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals. A collaborative network starts with a contract and then the collaboration partners conduct business as described in the contract. Before engaging in such a collaboration, partners need to reach an agreement regarding their responsibilities in the collaboration and develop a shared understanding regarding the endurability and the profitability of the collaboration. Here in this paper, we aim at analysing the endurability of collaborative networks based on the trust relations between collaboration partners and also introducing a new approach to do profitability analysis for collaborative networks. Therefore, we enrich the value models of business collaborations with information about trust, endurability and profitability.

An engineering approach to ODP systems design

On interoperability and conformance assessment in service composition

1 This work is part of the Freeband A-MUSE project (http://a-muse.freeband.nl), which is sponsore... more

Web service architectures-semantics and context-awareness issues in web services platforms

Dynamic Homecare Service Provisioning: A Field Test and Its Results

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Care-giver Tailoring of IT-based Healthcare Services for Elderly at Home: A Field Test and its Results

Proceedings of the ICTs for improving Patients Rehabilitation Research Techniques, 2013

ABSTRACT One of the biggest drivers behind IT-based homecare solutions is the increasing aging po... more ABSTRACT One of the biggest drivers behind IT-based homecare solutions is the increasing aging population. We are specifically interested in &quot;service tailoring&quot; for the homecare domain, where healthcare professionals (care-givers) do the tailoring of services to support elderly (care-receivers). Our goal is that, using our approach, care-givers can create or modify services with less IT skills, time and/or effort, and care-receivers get services that are better suited for their specific and personal needs. As a proof of concept, we developed a software prototype of our approach. The prototype was subsequently used in a real-world field test at a care institution in the Netherlands to validate the approach. The validation focused on the usability aspects of the approach in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, learnability and satisfaction. This paper describes the design of the field test and reflects on the outcome of the validation experiments.

Assumption-based risk identification method (ARM) in dynamic service provisioning

2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2013

ABSTRACT In this paper we consider service-oriented applications composed of component services p... more ABSTRACT In this paper we consider service-oriented applications composed of component services provided by different, economically independent service providers. As in all composite applications, the component services are composed and configured to meet requirements for the composite application. However, in a field experiment of composite service-oriented applications wef found that, although the services as actually delivered by the service providers meet their requirements, there is still a mismatch across service providers due to unstated assumptions, and that this mismatch causes an incorrect composite application to be delivered to end-users. Identifying and analyzing these initially unstated assumptions turns requirements engineering for service-oriented applications into risk analysis. In this paper, we describe a field experiment with an experimental service-oriented homecare system, in which unexpected behavior of the system turned up unstated assumptions about the contributing service providers. We then present an assumptions-driven risk identification method that can help identifying these risks, and we show how we applied this method in the second iteration of the field experiment. The method adapts some techniques from problem frame diagrams to identify relevant assumptions on service providers. The method is informal, and takes the “view from nowhere” in that it does not result in a specification of the component services, but for every component service delivers a set of assumptions that the service must satisfy in order to contribute to the overall system requirements. We end the paper with a discussion of generalizability of this method.

Quality-constrained routing in publish/subscribe systems

Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Middleware for pervasive and ad-hoc computing - MPAC '05, 2005

Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not give... more Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not given explicit destination addresses, but destinations are determined by matching the subscription declared by subscribers. For a dynamic computing environment with applications that have quality demands, this is not sufficient. Routing decision should, in such environments, not only depend on the subscription predicate, but should also take the quality-constraints of applications and characteristics of network paths into account. We identified three abstraction levels of these quality constraints: functional, middleware and network. The main contribution of the paper is the concept of the integration of these constraints into the pub/sub routing. This is done by extending the syntax of pub/sub system and applying four generic, proposed by us, guidelines. The added values of quality-constrained routing concept are: message delivery satisfying quality demands of applications, improvement of system scalability and more optimise use of the network resources. We discuss the use case that shows the practical value of our concept.

Trust and Business Webs

2011 IEEE 15th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2011

ABSTRACT A business web is a collection of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer nee... more ABSTRACT A business web is a collection of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer need. A model that shows the creation, distribution, and consumption of goods or services of economic value in a business web is called value model. The goal of a value model is to help the stakeholders build a shared understanding of the business case and assess the potential profitability of collaboration in the business web. The participating stakeholders in a business web are assumed to act trustfully in the collaboration and therefore trust is left entirely outside the picture. However the assumption that stakeholders act trustfully is often not useful in practice (since there are malicious actors). In this paper we consider business webs from a trust perspective and introduce an approach for measuring the trustworthiness of the stakeholders participating in a business web.

Transparent dynamic reconfiguration for CORBA

Proceedings 3rd International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications, 2001

Distributed systems with high availability requirements have to support some form of dynamic reco... more Distributed systems with high availability requirements have to support some form of dynamic reconfiguration. This means that they must provide the ability to be maintained or upgraded without being taken off-line. Building a distributed system that allows dynamic reconfiguration is very intrusive to the overall design of the system, and generally requires special skills from both the client and server side application developers. There is an opportunity to provide support for dynamic reconfiguration at the object middleware level of distributed systems, and create a dynamic reconfiguration transparency to application developers. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Reconfiguration Service for CORBA that allows the reconfiguration of a running system with maximum transparency for both client and server side developers. We describe the architecture, a prototype implementation, and some preliminary test results.

The application of TINA in the Mesh project

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998

This paper discusses the application of TINA concepts, architectures and related design paradigms... more This paper discusses the application of TINA concepts, architectures and related design paradigms in the MESH project. MESH adopted TINA as a means to facilitate the design and implementation of a flexible platform for developing and providing interactive multimedia services. This paper reports on the activity in which the TINA specifications have been studied and implementation options for the TINA components have been selected. This paper also discusses the role and position of protocols and objects in this context.

A State Synchronization Mechanism for Orchestrated Processes

2012 IEEE 16th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2012

ABSTRACT Two orchestrated processes interacting with each other have to maintain their own states... more ABSTRACT Two orchestrated processes interacting with each other have to maintain their own states. Messages are used to synchronize states between orchestrated processes. Server crash and network failure may result in loss of messages and therefore result in a state change performed by only one party. Thus, the states of the parties are no longer synchronized, resulting in state inconsistencies and in worst case deadlocks. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for guaranteed state synchronization of orchestrated processes with system and network failures. Our mechanism is based on interaction patterns and process transformations. The basic idea is to redesign the original processes into their state synchronization-enabled counterparts via process transformations that can be automated. The transformation mechanism is formalized based on Colored Petri Nets. We present the formal proof of the correctness of our mechanism and give the overhead analysis to illustrate its practicability.

Extending Profiles with Stereotypes for Composite Concepts

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

This paper proposes an extension of the UML 2.0 profiling mechanism. This extension facilitates a... more This paper proposes an extension of the UML 2.0 profiling mechanism. This extension facilitates a language designer to introduce composite concepts as separate conceptual and notational elements in a modelling language. Composite concepts are compositions of existing concepts. To facilitate the introduction of composite concepts, the notion of stereotype is extended. This extension defines how a composite concept can be

Towards conceptual foundations for context-aware applications

by Marten J. Van Sinderen, João Paulo Almeida, Marten van Sinderen, and M. Sinderen

In this paper we aim at defining conceptual foundations for context-aware applications. We argue ... more In this paper we aim at defining conceptual foundations for context-aware applications. We argue that the concepts of entity and context should be separated in conceptual models for context-aware applications. Further, we propose a novel approach that characterizes context as either intrinsic or relational. The concepts we propose in this paper have been inspired by and aligned with conceptual theories from the fields of philosophy and cognitive sciences. Since we concentrate on conceptual modeling, understandability and clarity are given precedence over properties such as efficiency and tractability.

GSO: Designing a well-founded service ontology to support dynamic service discovery and composition

by Renata Guizzardi, Luís Ferreira Pires, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos, and M. Sinderen

A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and out... more A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and outputs of user requests with the input and output requirements of registered service descriptions. This approach can be extended by using pre-conditions, effects and semantic annotations (meta-data) in an attempt to increase discovery accuracy. While on one hand these additions help improve discovery accuracy, on the other hand complexity is added as service users need to add more information elements to their service requests. In this paper we present an approach that aims at facilitating the representation of service requests by service users, without loss of accuracy. We introduce a Goal-Based Service Framework (GSF) that uses the concept of goal as an abstraction to represent service requests. This paper presents the core concepts and relations of the Goal-Based Service Ontology (GSO), which is a fundamental component of the GSF, and discusses how the framework supports semantic service discovery and composition. GSO provides a set of primitives and relations between goals, tasks and services. These primitives allow a user to represent its goals, and a supporting platform to discover or compose services that fulÀl them.

Design and Implementation of a Framework for Monitoring Distributed Component Interactions

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

This paper presents a framework for monitoring component interactions. It is part of a larger com... more This paper presents a framework for monitoring component interactions. It is part of a larger component framework built on top of the CORBA distributed processing environment that supports development and testing of distributed software applications. The proposed framework considers an OMG IDL specification as a contract for distributed interactions and allows precise monitoring of interaction activities between application components. The developer is not burdened with monitoring issues because all the necessary code instrumentation is done automatically. The tester is given the opportunity to use monitoring facilities for observing interactions between distributed component applications. This paper explains the monitoring framework and reasons about its expressive power, accuracy and applicability. The approach is validated in a platform for design, development and deployment of on-line services.

ICE-B 2014-Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on e-Business, Vienna, Austria, 28-30 August, 2014

Technical Report: Reconfiguration Service for Publish/Subscribe Middleware

APL: an effective design language

IEE Proceedings E Computers and Digital Techniques, 1986

ABSTRACT The paper describes the use of APL (a programming language) for the specification of a h... more ABSTRACT The paper describes the use of APL (a programming language) for the specification of a hardware architecture, the description of an initial implementation algorithm, its verification and controlled transformation to a logic design. Because of its power of expression, APL can be used effectively in each of these design domains. The APL interpreter turns any description into an executable prototype. Such a prototype is a powerful tool in the management and execution of a design; it clarifies design choices and assures the logical correctness of the product. This computer-aided-design process, which is illustrated by the design of the front end of a logic analyser, is useful for a variety of design situations, such as LSI/VLSI and computer design.

Trust Management Support for Context-Aware Service Platforms

Lecture Notes in Social Networks, 2014

High quality context information retrieved from trustworthy context providers allows a more relia... more High quality context information retrieved from trustworthy context providers allows a more reliable context-aware service adaption but also implies a higher risk for the service users in case of privacy violations. In this chapter we present a trust management model that support users and providers of context-aware services in managing the trade-off between privacy protection and context-based service adaptation. We applied our trust management model in two trust-based selection mechanisms. The first trust-based selection mechanism support users of context-aware services in selecting trustworthy service providers to interact with. This mechanism supports the users in the selection process, taking into account the users' goals, trust beliefs, and the trust dependencies between the service users and the entities that collaborate in the context-aware service provisioning. The second trust-based selection mechanism supports context-aware service providers in selecting trustworthy context providers taking into account the trustworthiness of the context providers to provide context information about a specific user and quality level. To conclude this chapter we present the evaluation of the technical feasibility of our trust management model in trust-based selection mechanisms through a prototype implementation.

Endurability and Profitability analysis of Collaborative Networks

A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of autonomous actors (e.g. enterpris... more A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of autonomous actors (e.g. enterprises, organizations and people) that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals. A collaborative network starts with a contract and then the collaboration partners conduct business as described in the contract. Before engaging in such a collaboration, partners need to reach an agreement regarding their responsibilities in the collaboration and develop a shared understanding regarding the endurability and the profitability of the collaboration. Here in this paper, we aim at analysing the endurability of collaborative networks based on the trust relations between collaboration partners and also introducing a new approach to do profitability analysis for collaborative networks. Therefore, we enrich the value models of business collaborations with information about trust, endurability and profitability.

An engineering approach to ODP systems design

On interoperability and conformance assessment in service composition

1 This work is part of the Freeband A-MUSE project (http://a-muse.freeband.nl), which is sponsore... more

Web service architectures-semantics and context-awareness issues in web services platforms

Dynamic Homecare Service Provisioning: A Field Test and Its Results

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Care-giver Tailoring of IT-based Healthcare Services for Elderly at Home: A Field Test and its Results

Proceedings of the ICTs for improving Patients Rehabilitation Research Techniques, 2013

ABSTRACT One of the biggest drivers behind IT-based homecare solutions is the increasing aging po... more ABSTRACT One of the biggest drivers behind IT-based homecare solutions is the increasing aging population. We are specifically interested in &quot;service tailoring&quot; for the homecare domain, where healthcare professionals (care-givers) do the tailoring of services to support elderly (care-receivers). Our goal is that, using our approach, care-givers can create or modify services with less IT skills, time and/or effort, and care-receivers get services that are better suited for their specific and personal needs. As a proof of concept, we developed a software prototype of our approach. The prototype was subsequently used in a real-world field test at a care institution in the Netherlands to validate the approach. The validation focused on the usability aspects of the approach in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, learnability and satisfaction. This paper describes the design of the field test and reflects on the outcome of the validation experiments.

Assumption-based risk identification method (ARM) in dynamic service provisioning

2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2013

ABSTRACT In this paper we consider service-oriented applications composed of component services p... more ABSTRACT In this paper we consider service-oriented applications composed of component services provided by different, economically independent service providers. As in all composite applications, the component services are composed and configured to meet requirements for the composite application. However, in a field experiment of composite service-oriented applications wef found that, although the services as actually delivered by the service providers meet their requirements, there is still a mismatch across service providers due to unstated assumptions, and that this mismatch causes an incorrect composite application to be delivered to end-users. Identifying and analyzing these initially unstated assumptions turns requirements engineering for service-oriented applications into risk analysis. In this paper, we describe a field experiment with an experimental service-oriented homecare system, in which unexpected behavior of the system turned up unstated assumptions about the contributing service providers. We then present an assumptions-driven risk identification method that can help identifying these risks, and we show how we applied this method in the second iteration of the field experiment. The method adapts some techniques from problem frame diagrams to identify relevant assumptions on service providers. The method is informal, and takes the “view from nowhere” in that it does not result in a specification of the component services, but for every component service delivers a set of assumptions that the service must satisfy in order to contribute to the overall system requirements. We end the paper with a discussion of generalizability of this method.

Quality-constrained routing in publish/subscribe systems

Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Middleware for pervasive and ad-hoc computing - MPAC '05, 2005

Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not give... more Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not given explicit destination addresses, but destinations are determined by matching the subscription declared by subscribers. For a dynamic computing environment with applications that have quality demands, this is not sufficient. Routing decision should, in such environments, not only depend on the subscription predicate, but should also take the quality-constraints of applications and characteristics of network paths into account. We identified three abstraction levels of these quality constraints: functional, middleware and network. The main contribution of the paper is the concept of the integration of these constraints into the pub/sub routing. This is done by extending the syntax of pub/sub system and applying four generic, proposed by us, guidelines. The added values of quality-constrained routing concept are: message delivery satisfying quality demands of applications, improvement of system scalability and more optimise use of the network resources. We discuss the use case that shows the practical value of our concept.

Trust and Business Webs

2011 IEEE 15th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2011

ABSTRACT A business web is a collection of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer nee... more ABSTRACT A business web is a collection of enterprises designed to jointly satisfy a consumer need. A model that shows the creation, distribution, and consumption of goods or services of economic value in a business web is called value model. The goal of a value model is to help the stakeholders build a shared understanding of the business case and assess the potential profitability of collaboration in the business web. The participating stakeholders in a business web are assumed to act trustfully in the collaboration and therefore trust is left entirely outside the picture. However the assumption that stakeholders act trustfully is often not useful in practice (since there are malicious actors). In this paper we consider business webs from a trust perspective and introduce an approach for measuring the trustworthiness of the stakeholders participating in a business web.

Transparent dynamic reconfiguration for CORBA

Proceedings 3rd International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications, 2001

Distributed systems with high availability requirements have to support some form of dynamic reco... more Distributed systems with high availability requirements have to support some form of dynamic reconfiguration. This means that they must provide the ability to be maintained or upgraded without being taken off-line. Building a distributed system that allows dynamic reconfiguration is very intrusive to the overall design of the system, and generally requires special skills from both the client and server side application developers. There is an opportunity to provide support for dynamic reconfiguration at the object middleware level of distributed systems, and create a dynamic reconfiguration transparency to application developers. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Reconfiguration Service for CORBA that allows the reconfiguration of a running system with maximum transparency for both client and server side developers. We describe the architecture, a prototype implementation, and some preliminary test results.

The application of TINA in the Mesh project

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998

This paper discusses the application of TINA concepts, architectures and related design paradigms... more This paper discusses the application of TINA concepts, architectures and related design paradigms in the MESH project. MESH adopted TINA as a means to facilitate the design and implementation of a flexible platform for developing and providing interactive multimedia services. This paper reports on the activity in which the TINA specifications have been studied and implementation options for the TINA components have been selected. This paper also discusses the role and position of protocols and objects in this context.

A State Synchronization Mechanism for Orchestrated Processes

2012 IEEE 16th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2012

ABSTRACT Two orchestrated processes interacting with each other have to maintain their own states... more ABSTRACT Two orchestrated processes interacting with each other have to maintain their own states. Messages are used to synchronize states between orchestrated processes. Server crash and network failure may result in loss of messages and therefore result in a state change performed by only one party. Thus, the states of the parties are no longer synchronized, resulting in state inconsistencies and in worst case deadlocks. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for guaranteed state synchronization of orchestrated processes with system and network failures. Our mechanism is based on interaction patterns and process transformations. The basic idea is to redesign the original processes into their state synchronization-enabled counterparts via process transformations that can be automated. The transformation mechanism is formalized based on Colored Petri Nets. We present the formal proof of the correctness of our mechanism and give the overhead analysis to illustrate its practicability.

Extending Profiles with Stereotypes for Composite Concepts

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

This paper proposes an extension of the UML 2.0 profiling mechanism. This extension facilitates a... more This paper proposes an extension of the UML 2.0 profiling mechanism. This extension facilitates a language designer to introduce composite concepts as separate conceptual and notational elements in a modelling language. Composite concepts are compositions of existing concepts. To facilitate the introduction of composite concepts, the notion of stereotype is extended. This extension defines how a composite concept can be