What is KOMET?

Figure 1: A typical KOMET Application
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KOMET is a platform that helps to couple virtually any software product with another one to form a seamingly single application. In scenarios where one application's results serve as input of another one, these information can - with help of a sophisticated semantic data description - be retrieved and transferred fully automatically without any human interception.

A KOMET application consists of three independent parts, which are communicating with each other by means of a specialised formal language (KometML, see below): Id does not really matter if the solvers are newly created computer programs or these are lecacy applications. In the second case, small helper programs (wrappers) have to be programmed, which handle the communication between the lecacy application and the DSS Kernal and vice versa (see figure 1).

Figure 2: The KOMET Architecture
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The technical foundation is served by the KOMET Architecture, its schematic sketch is shown in figure 2. One can easily recognise the similarities of both multi tiered architectures in the field of computer science and the subsystems introduced into the field of decision support systems by Sprague (1980).

The DSS Kernel's main task is the mediation between the subsystems and to response to the solvers' as well as the planning component's requests. Both requests and responses are coded in KometML, an XML dialect.

Figure 3: The development process model
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The KOMET Architecture is named according to the underlying Component (Komponente in German) Oriented Method which is the basis of the complete software development process. The process model itself, a waterfall model, was adapted to fit the component oriented techniques (figure 3).

Both the planning component and the solvers are software components and as such are fully compliant with the characteristics mentioned by Szypersky (1999) and Griffel (1998).



Martin Döllerer - last modified: 01.01.1970 at 01:00