University of Toronto, CANADA

Organization Modelling Environment

OME is a general,goal-oriented and/or agent-oriented modeling and analysis tool. It provides users with a graphical interface to develop models, and supports access to a powerful knowledge base that allows for sophisticated computer-aided analysis. This tool is intended to provide software developers with a clear link between the requirements, specification and architectural design phases of deveopment. Attention is also being placed on this use of this tool in business process reengineering.

The OME tool currently supports the i*,  NFR  modelling. Each modelling framework is defined as a "framework" in OME.
A new framework for GRL is being defined and will be available shortly.These frameworks provide goal-oriented and/or agent-oriented approach to modeling, and provide a significant advantage in modeling "quality factors" concerns and tradeoffs over more traditional tools and techniques (such as "work-flow" models).

By enabling users to access the underlying knowledge base that stores the semantics of the frameworks, as well as providing a Java based API for custom analysis tools, users of OME will have the luxury of extending the tool to include other modeling frameworks.

(NOTE: A Power-User Tutorial demonstrating extending OME to include something fairly simple (perhaps E-R) will be developed to assist users interested in using this feature).

OME is being developed at the Knowledge Management Lab at the University of Toronto as a part of the "Agent-Oriented Approach to System Architecture: Models and Analysis Tools" project funded by Communication and Information Technology Ontario with support from Mitel Corporation. A more thorough description of this project can be found here.

Project Status

Development on version 3 of OME (called OME3) began in the summer of 1998. OME3 is being written in Java 1.2 with the Techne implementation of Telos as the underlying knowledge base.

Currently OME3 supports the development of models using the i* framework. The Strategic Dependency (SD) and Strategic Rationale (SR) models that comprise i* have been combined into one model. Actors in an SD model can be expanded, and their internal, intentional relationships (what SR models) can be explored and modeled.

Future plans for OME include providing computer-aided analysis support for i* models (July 2000).

OME Version 2

The OME2 Download Page has the last release of OME version 2 available for download. Development of OME2 ceased in April 1998. This version supports SD and SR modeling (separately), as well as a number of tools for discovering insurance, ensurance and enforcement of dependencies, as well as methods for propagating workability, viability and believability of dependicies in the SD model. It also provides a compact "tree view" of SD and SR models that has not yet been implemented in OME3.

Contact Information

Members of the OME team:

Eric Yu: Supervisor, Researcher eric@cs.toronto.edu

Yijun Yu: Researcher, Developer yijun@cs.toronto.edu


            Last updated: May 3rd, 2000