6,754 research outputs found
Integration of BPM systems
New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and
maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities
and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors.
Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes.
Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are
inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions
XML Matchers: approaches and challenges
Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences
between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic
in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the
past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models
(e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years,
the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed
a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching
approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between
concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known
techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on
DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical
structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching
process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research
area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and
classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the
specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we
introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main
components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each
of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We
consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing
approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction
of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally,
we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two
challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering
and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.Comment: 34 pages, 8 tables, 7 figure
Dutch parallel corpus: a balanced parallel corpus for Dutch-English and Dutch-French
status: publishe
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