A Meta-Model Integration for Supporting Knowledge Discovery in Specific Domains: A Case Study in Healthcare.

Knowledge management is one of the key priorities of many organizations. They face different challenges in the implementation of knowledge management processes, including the transformation of tacit knowledge-experience, skills, insights, intuition, judgment and know-how-into explicit knowledge. Furthermore, the increasing number of information sources and services in some domains, such as healthcare, increase the amount of information available. Therefore, there is a need to transform that information in knowledge. In this context, learning ecosystems emerge as solutions to support knowledge management in a different context. On the other hand, the dashboards enable the generation of knowledge through the exploitation of the data provided from different sources. The model-driven development of these solutions is possible through two meta-models developed in previous works. Even though those meta-models solve several problems, the learning ecosystem meta-model has a lack of decision-making support. In this context, this work provides two main contributions to face this issue. First, the definition of a holistic meta-model to support decision-making processes in ecosystems focused on knowledge management, also called learning ecosystems. The second contribution of this work is an instantiation of the presented holistic meta-model in the healthcare domain.

Taking advantage of the software product line paradigm to generate customized user interfaces for decision-making processes: a case study on university employability.

University employment and, specifically, employability has gained relevance since research in these fields can lead to improvement in the quality of life of individual citizens. However, empirical research is still insufficient to make significant decisions, and relying on powerful tools to explore data and reach insights on these fields is paramount. Information dashboards play a key role in analyzing and visually exploring data about a specific topic or domain, but end users can present several necessities that differ from each other, regarding the displayed information itself, design features and even functionalities. By applying a domain engineering approach (within the software product line paradigm), it is possible to produce customized dashboards to fit into particular requirements, by the identification of commonalities and singularities of every product that could be part of the product line. Software product lines increase productivity, maintainability and traceability regarding the evolution of the requirements, among other benefits. To validate this approach, a case study of its application in the context of the Spanish Observatory for University Employability and Employment system has been developed, where users (Spanish universities and administrators) can control their own dashboards to reach insights about the employability of their graduates. These dashboards have been automatically generated through a domain specific language, which provides the syntax to specify the requirements of each user. The domain language fuels a template-based code generator, allowing the generation of the dashboards' source code. Applying domain engineering to the dashboards' domain improves the development and maintainability of these complex software products given the variety of requirements that users might have regarding their graphical interfaces.