Reusability and requirements engineering in intelligent systems

The area of intelligent systems is one of the most important and successful. Some definitions state that in some way, intelligent systems are a form of information system. This was successfully introduced from the research domain of artificial intelligence in information systems practice. According to some references, the hardest single part of building any system, either information, software or intelligent, is deciding what to build. No other part of conceptual work is so difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements. The authors propose reusability to support and influence requirements engineering. Reusability is actually a very simple activity that is not even listed in most dictionaries. In the software environment, requirements, design models, algorithms, test documents and many other products of the software process can be reused. However, our approach is not concentrated on software reusability, but rather on database and intelligent systems reusability which are not so often reused, but they are the main goal of the MetaBase project (T. Welzer et al., 1998). MetaBase is an object oriented repository which provides a structure for archiving reusable database components of several applications not only medical information systems. All possible conceptual models are classified according to business domain and functional domain of their application domains. The structure of the repository allows not only storage of reusable database components of several applications but also classifying and comparing components from different applications (T. Welzer et al., 1998)