Capturing high-level requirements of information dashboards’ components through meta-modeling

Abstract

Information dashboards are increasing their sophistication to match new necessities and adapt to the high quantities of generated data nowadays. These tools support visual analysis, knowledge generation, and thus, are crucial systems to assist decision-making processes. However, the design and development processes are complex, because several perspectives and components can be involved. Tailoring capabilities are focused on providing individualized dashboards without affecting the time-to-market through the decrease of the development processes' time. Among the methods used to configure these tools, the software product lines paradigm and model-driven development can be found. These paradigms benefit from the study of the target domain and the abstraction of features, obtaining high-level models that can be instantiated into concrete models. This paper presents a dashboard meta-model that aims to be applicable to any dashboard. Through domain engineering, different features of these tools are identified and arranged into abstract structures and relationships to gain a better understanding of the domain. The goal of the meta-model is to obtain a framework for instantiating any dashboard to adapt them to different contexts and user profiles. One of the contexts in which dashboards are gaining relevance is Learning Analytics, as learning dashboards are powerful tools for assisting teachers and students in their learning activities. To illustrate the instantiation process of the presented meta-model, a small example within this relevant context (Learning Analytics) is also provided.