Introduction

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Model-driven software engineering is the automatic production of software artefacts from abstract models of structure and functionality. Data quality engineering is an issue that exists independently of data representation and technology and arises wherever data are stored for incorporation into business processes. The goal of the ALIGNED project was to change this by collecting quantitative evidence of the benefits of deploying model-driven technology in enterprise information processing systems. The objective of the ALIGNED project was to align semantics-based model-driven software engineering with full life cycle Linked Data engineering to produce powerful and flexible service engineering systems and enable rapid development cycles based on reuse and extension of heterogeneous data sources. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.