Design and implementation of a domain specific language for defining ECM workloads in elastic cloud environments using TOSCA

Abstract

Each year the volume of the content produced by enterprises increases by 35%-50%. Most of this information is stored by companies as unstructured data. Organizations implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to structure content and to mitigate legal risks. ECM includes strategies and tools for increasing the effectiveness of content management. Using the right ECM components is one of the factors for successful implementation of ECM. There is a gap between business customers who implement ECM strategies and ECM architects and cloud providers, who create and deploy ECM solutions. On the one side, there are no generally accepted terms, which precisely describe the ECM domain. Different developers of the ECM systems could use the same name for ECM components, which implement different functionality, or they could use different names for ECM components with similar functionality. On the other side, each customer has unique workloads for Enterprise Content Management. ECM architects have to define these workloads and deploy an ECM solution that will fulfill the customer's requirements. The goal of the Thesis is to develop a DSL for ECM domain, which will be understandable by business customers, ECM architects and cloud providers. The language should define terms and workloads that are related to the ECM domain. The business customers should be able to create a description of the requirements to ECM solution using a language that they understand. The ECM architect should be able to define the ECM related terms and associated workloads from the customer's description, design a topology, and publish it in a specialized catalog. The cloud provider should be able to map the high level topology to the exact infrastructure.