Business engineering building blocks

In order to utilize the contemporary advanced technology, business processes need sound software support. With respect to this, one frequent cause of software project failure is the mismatch between the business requirements and the actual functionality of the delivered software application. To solve this problem, it is necessary to build software stemming out from a business process model. Aiming at aligning business process modeling and software design in a component-based way, the proposed research investigates the identification of generic business engineering building blocks and their use for building ICT applications which effectively support business processes

Using ontologies to support and critique decisions

Supporting decision making in the working environment has long being pursued by practitioners across a variety of fields, ranging from sociology and operational research to cognitive and computer scientists. A number of computer-supported systems and various technologies have been used over the years, but as we move into more global and flexible organisational structures, new technologies and challenges arise. In this paper, I argue for an ontology-based solution and present some of the early prototypes we have been developing, assess their impact on the decision making process and elaborate on the costs involved

Initiating organizational memories using ontology-based network analysis as a bootstrapping tool

An important problem for many kinds of knowledge systems is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in such systems, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavyweight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, lightweight ontology-based solution to the bootstrapping problem, in which domain-describing ontologies are analysed to uncover significant yet implicit relationships between instances. We illustrate the approach by using such an analysis to provide content automatically for the initial set-up of an organizational memory

The State of Play of the Webistes of Large Australian Companies

There has been a plethora of research on the internet and web sites especially in the area of usability. In addition, much of the research has focused on small to medium sized businesses. Little attention has been given to the purpose and content of web sites especially large organisations in an Australian setting. This study proposes a four stage model of e-commerce activity using the level of interaction as a measure to classify the web sites of 133 large Australian companies. The findings from the research suggest that many large Australian companies, whilst having a web presence, are not exploiting the available technology to conduct even a low level of e-business. Most companies are still at the early stage of e-commerce

Collaborative Product Representation for Emergent Electronic Marketplace

Griffith Sciences, School of Information and Communication TechnologyNo Full Tex

Initiating organizational memories using ontology network analysis

One of the important problems in organizational memories is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in an organizational memory, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance of the memory content. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavy-weight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve its content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, light-weight solution, drawn from the underlying ingredients of an organizational memory: ontologies. We have developed an ontology-based network analysis method which we applied to tackle the problem of identifying communities of practice in an organization. We use ontology-based network analysis as a means to provide content automatically for the initial set up of an organizational memory

Applying the UML and the Unified Process to the Design of Data Warehouses

The design, development and deployment of a data warehouse (DW) is a complex, time consuming and prone to fail task. This is mainly due to the different aspects taking part in a DW architecture such as data sources, processes responsible for Extracting, Transforming and Loading (ETL) data into the DW, the modeling of the DW itself, specifying data marts from the data warehouse or designing end user tools. In the last years, different models, methods and techniques have been proposed to provide partial solutions to cover the different aspects of a data warehouse. Nevertheless, none of these proposals addresses the whole development process of a data warehouse in an integrated and coherent manner providing the same notation for the modeling of the different parts of a DW. In this paper, we propose a data warehouse development method, based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the Unified Process (UP), which addresses the design and development of both the data warehouse back-stage and front-end. We use the extension mechanisms (stereotypes, tagged values and constraints) provided by the UML and we properly extend it in order to accurately model the different parts of a data warehouse (such as the modeling of the data sources, ETL processes or the modeling of the DW itself) by using the same notation. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal provides a seamless method for developing data warehouses. Finally, we apply our approach to a case study to show its benefit.This work has been partially supported by the METASIGN project (TIN2004-OO779) from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, by the DADASMECA project (GV05/220) from the Valencia Government, and by the DADS (PBC-05-QI 2-2) project from the Regional Science arid Technology Ministry of CastiIla-La Mancha (Spain)

Audio/visual analysis for high-speed TV advertisement detection from MPEG bitstream

Advertisement breaks dunng or between television programmes are typically flagged by senes of black-and-silent video frames, which recurrendy occur in order to audio-visually separate individual advertisement spots from one another. It is the regular prevalence of these flags that enables automatic differentiauon between what is programme content and what is advertisement break. Detection of these audio-visual depressions within broadcast television content provides a basis on which advertisement detection may be achieved. This document reports on the progress made in the development of this idea into an advertisement detector system that automatically detects the advertisement breaks direcdy from the MPEG-1 encoded bitstream of digitally captured television broadcasts