Descriptive business process models at run-time

Today's competitive markets require organisations to react proactively to changes in their environment if financial and legal consequences are to be avoided. Since business processes are elementary parts of modern organisations they are also required to efficiently adapt to these changes in quick and flexible ways. This requirement demands a more dynamic handling of business processes, i.e. treating business processes as run-time artefacts rather than design-time artefacts. One general approach to address this problem is provided by the community of [email protected], which promotes methodologies concerned with self-adaptive systems where models reflect the system's current state at any point in time and allow immediate reasoning and adaptation mechanisms. However, in contrast to common self-adaptive systems the domain of business processes features two additional challenges: (i) a bigger than usual abstraction gap between the business process models and the actual run-time information of the enterprise system and (ii) the possibility of run-time deviations from the planned models. Developing an understanding of such processes is a crucial necessity in order to optimise business processes and dynamically adapt to changing demands. This thesis explores the potential of adopting and enhancing principles and mechanisms from the [email protected] domain to the business process domain for the purpose of run-time reasoning, i.e. investigating the potential role of Descriptive Business Process Models at Run-time (DBPMRTs) in the business process management domain. The DBPMRT is a model describing the enterprise system at run-time and thus enabling higher-level reasoning on the as-is state. Along with the specification of the DBPMRT, algorithms and an overall framework are proposed to establish and maintain a causal link from the enterprise system to the DBPMRT at run-time. Furthermore, it is shown that proactive higher-level reasoning on a DBPMRT in the form of performance prediction allows for more accurate results. By taking these steps the thesis addresses general challenges of business process management, e.g. dealing with frequently changing processes and shortening the business process life cycle. At the same time this thesis contributes to research in [email protected] by providing a complex real-world use case as well as a reference approach for dealing with volatile [email protected] of a higher abstraction level

Conservative re-use ensuring matches for service selection

Abstract—The greater and greater quantity of services that are available over the web causes a growing attention to techniques that facilitate their reuse. A web service specification can be quite complex, including various operations and message exchange patterns. In this work, we give a declarative representation of services, and in particular of WSDL operations, that enables the application of techniques for reasoning about actions and change. By means of these techniques it becomes possible to reason on the specification of choreography roles and on possible role players, as a basis for selecting services which match in a flexible way with the specifications. Flexible match is, indeed, fundamental in order to enable web service reuse but it does not guarantee the preservation of the goals, that can be proved over the role specification itself. We show how to enrich various kinds of match proposed in the literature so to produce substitutions that preserve goals. I

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING The Autobiographical Subject in the Drama and Memoirs of Ronald Duncan

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/737 on 20.03.2017 by CS (TIS)This study developed after considerable time spent collating and cataloguing data contained in Ronald Duncan's archive. Familiarisation with the material led to my identifying a need to explore the elusive nature of the personality that biographical material should hope to uncover. Duncan was prone to mainly confessional writing, a kind of writing that demands a causal inference between life and work. Furthermore, the archive supplies multiple data sources that serve to aid chronology, trace reliability, provide external corroboration and investigate truth-value. My study follows a loosely chronological structure after discerning shifts in his thematic concerns. The years up until the mid-' 60s are detailed because, from his youth until that time, Duncan is consistently idealistic but expresses preoccupations particularly manifest in society in each period. Chapters 1 and 2 study Duncan's concern with utopian politics (1930s); Chapter 3, his relationship to religion (1940s); Chapter 4, his part in West End Theatre in the 1950s; and Chapters 5 and 6, his tackling of issues of gender and sexuality (1950s and '60s). Each chapter draws upon the autobiography and-related documents of those years. The thesis refers particularly to Duncan's dramatic writing, avoiding serious analysis of the poetry because it has been recently researched. Because theatre movements are imbued with popular cultural codes, these and his memoirs are chosen to convey how his texts centralise the idea of authenticity but also manipulate the idea using subjects and characters caught between idealism and despair, the textual and the historical. Consequently, my approach to Duncan's work emphasises subject-hood rather than a pre-textual authorial presence which prompts the reader to seek an explanation for the work in its producer. Theoretical implications emerge from the association of Duncan's autobiographical personalities with the notion of writerly authority and its creations. With Duncan the 'question' of self-hood is ultimately conceived as a process whereby the text is attributed to the author through a complex and disparate set of operations, not referential simply to a real individual, but to several simultaneous selves and subject positions. Displacing a perception of the author as the origin of meaning, webs of intertextual voices are discerned within the texture of discourse.THE RONALD DUNCAN FOUNDATIO

Experiences with Some Benchmarks for Deductive Databases and Implementations of Bottom-Up Evaluation

OpenRuleBench is a large benchmark suite for rule engines, which includes deductive databases. We previously proposed a translation of Datalog to C++ based on a method that "pushes" derived tuples immediately to places where they are used. In this paper, we report performance results of various implementation variants of this method compared to XSB, YAP and DLV. We study only a fraction of the OpenRuleBench problems, but we give a quite detailed analysis of each such task and the factors which influence performance. The results not only show the potential of our method and implementation approach, but could be valuable for anybody implementing systems which should be able to execute tasks of the discussed types.Comment: In Proceedings WLP'15/'16/WFLP'16, arXiv:1701.0014

BINARY PATRIARCHY IN NIKAH SIRI: An Ecofeminism Perspective

Nikah Siri (unregistered, or ‘secret’ marriage) has increased in Indonesia since the passing of marriage law No. 1/1974, one article of which required the registration of all marriages. Meanwhile, under Islamic law (fikih munakahat), registration was not one of the pillars of marriage. The 1974 state law provides for penalties for persons involved in unregistered marriages such as nikah siri: on the other hand, under Islamic law nikah siri was considered as marriage, as the terms and the pillars of marriage were fulfilled, even without registration. Religious and state law are clearly at odds as far as marriage registration is concerned.Gradually, Nikah Siri has led to various forms of social problems such as nikah siri online, falsification of documents, and  even human trafficking. The main problem which is one focus of this research is the negative impact of nikah siri on women and children. Not having an official marriage registration document creates difficulties for women and children which affects their future life opportunities, as with children not being accepted for schooling, as one example. One significant legal ruling discussed has implications for this social deprivation of women and children but not to the extent expected to date.By using the concepts of dualism from ecofeminism theory (perspective) to analyse the role of patriarchy in creating and perpetuating gender inequality in the case of nikah siri, the writer argues that Islamic marriage law - as it has developed in Indonesia -  is still dominated by patriarchal values and, as such, impacts negatively on women and children. The stereotype of istri siri is proven in that the hierarchical dualism that underlies patriarchal structures and thinking, is placing women in a subordinate position. Patriarchal interpretations of Islamic law have put many women in a position where they regard nikah siri as the best option for themselves, although such marriages in fact place them in a precarious position legally and socially, and lead to an imbalance of power both between themselves and the men they marry, and any other legal wives of that man