Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

An Integrated Architecture for Ad Hoc Grids

Extensive research has been conducted by the grid community to enable large-scale collaborations in pre-configured environments. grid collaborations can vary in scale and motivation resulting in a coarse classification of grids: national grid, project grid, enterprise grid, and volunteer grid. Despite the differences in scope and scale, all the traditional grids in practice share some common assumptions. They support mutually collaborative communities, adopt a centralized control for membership, and assume a well-defined non-changing collaboration. To support grid applications that do not confirm to these assumptions, we propose the concept of ad hoc grids. In the context of this research, we propose a novel architecture for ad hoc grids that integrates a suite of component frameworks. Specifically, our architecture combines the community management framework, security framework, abstraction framework, quality of service framework, and reputation framework. The overarching objective of our integrated architecture is to support a variety of grid applications in a self-controlled fashion with the help of a self-organizing ad hoc community. We introduce mechanisms in our architecture that successfully isolates malicious elements from the community, inherently improving the quality of grid services and extracting deterministic quality assurances from the underlying infrastructure. We also emphasize on the technology-independence of our architecture, thereby offering the requisite platform for technology interoperability. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is verified with a high-quality ad hoc grid implementation. Additionally, we have analyzed the performance and behavior of ad hoc grids with respect to several control parameters

The SEMAINE API : a component integration framework for a naturally interacting and emotionally competent embodied conversational agent

The present thesis addresses the topic area of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) with capabilities for natural interaction with a human user and emotional competence with respect to the perception and generation of emotional expressivity. The focus is on the technological underpinnings that facilitate the implementation of a real-time system with these capabilities, built from re-usable components. The thesis comprises three main contributions. First, it describes a new component integration framework, the SEMAINE API, which makes it easy to build emotion-oriented systems from components which interact with one another using standard and pre-standard XML representations. Second, it presents a prepare-and-trigger system architecture which substantially speeds up the time to animation for system utterances that can be pre-planned. Third, it reports on the W3C Emotion Markup Language, an upcoming web standard for representing emotions in technological systems. We assess critical aspects of system performance, showing that the framework provides a good basis for implementing real-time interactive ECA systems, and illustrate by means of three examples that the SEMAINE API makes it is easy to build new emotion-oriented systems from new and existing components.Die vorliegende Dissertation behandelt das Thema der virtuellen Agenten mit Fähigkeiten zur natürlichen Benutzer-Interaktion sowie emotionaler Kompetenz bzgl. der Wahrnehmung und Generierung emotionalen Ausdrucks. Der Schwerpunkt der Arbeit liegt auf den technologischen Grundlagen für die Implementierung eines echtzeitfähigen Systems mit diesen Fähigkeiten, das aus wiederverwendbaren Komponenten erstellt werden kann. Die Arbeit umfasst drei Kernaspekte. Zum Einen beschreibt sie ein neues Framework zur Komponenten-Integration, die SEMAINE API: Diese erleichtert die Erstellung von Emotions-orientierten Systemen aus Komponenten, die untereinander mittels Standard- oder Prä-Standard-Repräsentationen kommunizieren. Zweitens wird eine Systemarchitektur vorgestellt, welche Vorbereitung und Auslösung von Systemverhalten entkoppelt und so zu einer substanziellen Beschleunigung der Generierungszeit führt, wenn Systemäußerungen im Voraus geplant werden können. Drittens beschreibt die Arbeit die W3C Emotion Markup Language, einen werdenden Web-Standard zur Repräsentation von Emotionen in technologischen Systemen. Es werden kritische Aspekte der Systemperformanz untersucht, wodurch gezeigt wird, dass das Framework eine gute Basis für die Implementierung echtzeitfähiger interaktiver Agentensysteme darstellt. Anhand von drei Beispielen wird illustriert, dass mit der SEMAINE API leicht neue Emotions-orientierte Systeme aus neuen und existierenden Komponenten erstellt werden können

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Incorporating an Element of Negotiation into a Service-Oriented Broker Application

The Software as a Service (SaaS) model is a service-based model in which a desired service is assembled, delivered and consumed on demand. The IBHIS broker is a ‘proof of concept’ demonstration of SaaS which is based on services that deliver data. IBHIS has addressed a number of challenges for several aspects of servicebased software, especially the concept of a ‘broker service’ and service negotiation that is only used in establishing end-user access authorizations. This thesis investigates and develops an extended form of service-based broker, called CAPTAIN (Care Planning Through Auction-based Information Negotiation). It extends the concepts and role of the broker as used in IBHIS, and in particular, it extends the service negotiation function in order to demonstrate a full range of service characteristics. CAPTAIN uses the idea of the integrated care plan from healthcare to provide a case study. A care planner acting on behalf of a patient uses the broker to negotiate with providers to produce the integrated care plan for the patient with the broker and the providers agreeing on the terms and conditions relating to the supply of the services. We have developed a ‘proof of concept’ service-oriented broker architecture for CAPTAIN that includes planning, negotiation and service-based software models to provide a flexible care planning system. The CAPTAIN application has been evaluated that focuses on three features: functions, data access and negotiation. The CAPTAIN broker performs as planned, to produce the integrated care plan. The providers’ data sources are accessed to read and write data records during and after service negotiation. The negotiation model permits the broker to interact with the providers to produce an adaptable plan, based on the client’s needs. The primary outcome is an extendable service-oriented broker architecture that can enable more scalable and flexible distributed information management by adding interaction with the data sources

A study of EU data protection regulation and appropriate security for digital services and platforms

A law often has more than one purpose, more than one intention, and more than one interpretation. A meticulously formulated and context agnostic law text will still, when faced with a field propelled by intense innovation, eventually become obsolete. The European Data Protection Directive is a good example of such legislation. It may be argued that the technological modifications brought on by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are nominal in comparison to the previous Directive, but from a business perspective the changes are significant and important. The Directive’s lack of direct economic incentive for companies to protect personal data has changed with the Regulation, as companies may now have to pay severe fines for violating the legislation. The objective of the thesis is to establish the notion of trust as a key design goal for information systems handling personal data. This includes interpreting the EU legislation on data protection and using the interpretation as a foundation for further investigation. This interpretation is connected to the areas of analytics, security, and privacy concerns for intelligent service development. Finally, the centralised platform business model and its challenges is examined, and three main resolution themes for regulating platform privacy are proposed. The aims of the proposed resolutions are to create a more trustful relationship between providers and data subjects, while also improving the conditions for competition and thus providing data subjects with service alternatives. The thesis contributes new insights into the evolving privacy practices in the digital society at an important time of transition from the service driven business models to the platform business models. Firstly, privacy-related regulation and state of the art analytics development are examined to understand their implications for intelligent services that are based on automated processing and profiling. The ability to choose between providers of intelligent services is identified as the core challenge. Secondly, the thesis examines what is meant by appropriate security for systems that handle personal data, something the GDPR requires that organisations use without however specifying what can be considered appropriate. We propose a method for active network security in web software that is developed through the use of analytics for detection and by inserting data generators into a software installation. The active network security method is proposed as a framework for achieving compliance with the GDPR requirements for services and platforms to use appropriate security. Thirdly, the platform business model is considered from the privacy point of view and the implication of “processing silos” for intelligent services. The centralised platform model is considered problematic from both the data subject and from the competition standpoint. A resolution is offered for enabling user-initiated open data flow to counter the centralised “processing silos”, and thereby to facilitate the introduction of decentralised platforms. The thesis provides an interdisciplinary analysis considering the legal study (lex lata) and additionally the resolution (lex ferenda) is defined through argumentativist legal dogmatics and (de lege ferenda) of how the legal framework ought to be adapted to fit the described environment. User-friendly Legal Science is applied as a theory framework to provide a holistic approach to answering the research questions. The User-friendly Legal Science theory has its roots in design science and offers a way towards achieving interdisciplinary research in the fields of information systems and legal science

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security