Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales

Adaptive anwendungsspezifische Verarbeitung von XML-Dokumenten

In dieser Arbeit wird ein Konzept vorgeschlagen, mit dem neue hohere Operatoren auf der Grundlage existierender Operatoren einer XML-Transformationsprache aufgebaut werden können. Durch das Zusammenfassen von immer wieder auftretenden Operatorkombinationen zu höheren Operatoren können Transformationsdefinitionen bspw. kürzer und verständlicher beschrieben werden. Zur Umsetzung des Konzeptes ist die Ausführungsumgebung XTC entstanden. XTC koordiniert den Ablauf, um höhere Operatoren in niedrigere, letztendlich elementare Operatoren einer Basistransformationssprache zu überführen. Neben XTC wird das Generatorsystem XOpGen entwickelt, welches den Implementierungsaufwand für die neuen höheren Operatoren weiter verringert. Das Potential von höheren Operatoren wird an der vom W3C standardisierten XML-Transformationssprache XSLT demonstriert. XSLT wird mit verschiedenen, sowohl universellen als auch domänenspezifischen, Operatoren erweitert