OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Distributed interoperable workflow support for electronic commerce.

Abstract. This paper describes a flexible distributed transactional workflow environment based on an extensible object-oriented framework built around class libraries, application programming interfaces, and shared services. The purpose of this environment is to support a range of EC-like business activities including the support of financial transactions and electronic contracts. This environment has as its aim to provide key infrastructure services for mediating and monitoring electronic commerce.

Concept integration precedes enterprise integration

The integration of enterprises in a vertical market is not solved but rather facilitated by information technology. One aspect is the coupling of heterogeneous information systems from the participating enterprises. However, before this integration can be tackled, the enterprises have to create a common set of concepts to discuss their cooperation. We call this the inter-organizational concept base and present a proposal on how to structure such a concept base and how to co-develop it by participants from various enterprises. Product ontologies are bundled into reference models for certain industry sectors and serve as a starting point for the discussion about concepts. The second ingredient are explicit representations of norms that describe who is supposed to participate in which part of the discussion process. The end result, the inter-organizational concept base, is the input for an inter-organizational workflow modeling to specify precisely the enterprise integration. 1 Introduct..

A cross organisation compatible workflows generation and execution framework

With the development of the Internet, the demand for electronic and online commerce has increased. This has, in turn, increased the demand for business process automation. In this paper, we look at the use of workflows for business process automation. An automatically generated workflow can save time and resources needed for running online businesses. In general, due to the interdependencies between their activities, multiple business organisations will need to work together by collaborating and coordinating their activities with each other. This gives rise to the need for workflow collaboration across organisations. Current systems for workflow collaboration are only capable of reconciling existing workflows of the collaborating organisations. Automatic workflow generation systems only generate workflows for individual organisations and cannot handle the automatic generation of compatible workflows for multiple collaborating organisations. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we present a framework that is able to generate multiple sets of compatible workflows for multiple collaborating organisations. The proposed framework supports runtime enactment and runtime collaboration of the generated workflows. This framework enables users to save the time and resources that would otherwise be spent in modelling, reconciling and reengineering workflows