Managing Consistency of Business Process Models across Abstraction Levels

Process models support the transition from business requirements to IT implementations. An organization that adopts process modeling often maintain several co-existing models of the same business process. These models target different abstraction levels and stakeholder perspectives. Maintaining consistency among these models has become a major challenge for such an organization. For instance, propagating changes requires identifying tacit correspondences among the models, which may be only in the memories of their original creators or may be lost entirely. Although different tools target specific needs of different roles, we lack appropriate support for checking whether related models maintained by different groups of specialists are still consistent after independent editing. As a result, typical consistency management tasks such as tracing, differencing, comparing, refactoring, merging, conformance checking, change notification, and versioning are frequently done manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. This thesis presents the Shared Model, a framework designed to improve support for consistency management and impact analysis in process modeling. The framework is designed as a result of a comprehensive industrial study that elicited typical correspondence patterns between Business and IT process models and the meaning of consistency between them. The framework encompasses three major techniques and contributions: 1) matching heuristics to automatically discover complex correspondences patterns among the models, and to maintain traceability among model parts---elements and fragments; 2) a generator of edit operations to compute the difference between process models; 3) a process model synchronizer, capable of consistently propagating changes made to any model to its counterpart. We evaluated the Shared Model experimentally. The evaluation shows that the framework can consistently synchronize Business and IT views related by correspondence patterns, after non-simultaneous independent editing

Connected Information Management

Society is currently inundated with more information than ever, making efficient management a necessity. Alas, most of current information management suffers from several levels of disconnectedness: Applications partition data into segregated islands, small notes don’t fit into traditional application categories, navigating the data is different for each kind of data; data is either available at a certain computer or only online, but rarely both. Connected information management (CoIM) is an approach to information management that avoids these ways of disconnectedness. The core idea of CoIM is to keep all information in a central repository, with generic means for organization such as tagging. The heterogeneity of data is taken into account by offering specialized editors. The central repository eliminates the islands of application-specific data and is formally grounded by a CoIM model. The foundation for structured data is an RDF repository. The RDF editing meta-model (REMM) enables form-based editing of this data, similar to database applications such as MS access. Further kinds of data are supported by extending RDF, as follows. Wiki text is stored as RDF and can both contain structured text and be combined with structured data. Files are also supported by the CoIM model and are kept externally. Notes can be quickly captured and annotated with meta-data. Generic means for organization and navigation apply to all kinds of data. Ubiquitous availability of data is ensured via two CoIM implementations, the web application HYENA/Web and the desktop application HYENA/Eclipse. All data can be synchronized between these applications. The applications were used to validate the CoIM ideas

Television Production : Managing the Technology

The idea to write the thesis about television production came into my mind a long time ago. I knew that this area of media technology was the most interesting for me. I had an internship in Aito Media Oy television production company in 2009, and I studied TV Production at Ferris State University, USA for one academic year 2010-2011. The main objective for my thesis is to research, compare and describe all steps in production of a television show from the developing an idea through planning, budgeting, shooting and editing to the final release of the TV show on the screen. Also I would like to observe the technologies used nowadays and determine the role of a producer in the TV production. To reach my objective, I read several books and electronical materials on different topics about phases of the production, equipment and techniques, communication and documentation. Furthermore, I use knowledge from my own experience, which I got while studying and making practical tasks at Television and Digital Media Production program at Ferris State University. I learned the professional skills required in all aspects of different phases of television production, including studio workflow, camera operation, field equipment, multicamera directing and the responsibilities and organ-izational expertise of the producer. At the same time, I explored the latest production techniques and technology, such as audio and lighting work-stations, non-linear editing, high-definition television and 3D television.Ajatus tehdä opinnäytetyöni televisiotuotannosta tuli jo kauan sitten, koska tiesin, että se on henkilökohtaisesti mielenkiintoisin alue mediatekniikassa. Olin työharjoittelussa Aito Media Oy tv-tuotantoyhtiössä vuonna 2009, ja lukuvuodessa 2010-2011 opiskelin Ferris State University:n TV-tuotanto ja Digimedian koulutusohjelmassa, Yhdysvaltoissa. Työn päätavoitteena on tutkia, vertailla ja kuvata kaikki tv-ohjelman tuotannon vaiheet alkaen idean kehittämisestä, sekä suunnittelun, budjetoinnin, kuvausten ja editoinnin kautta lopullisen tv-ohjelman version julkaistamiseen. Myöskin haluan havainnoida nykyaikaisia tekniikoita ja määrittää tuottajan roolin tv-tuotannossa. Tavoiteeni saavuttakseni olen lukenut useita kirjoja ja elektronisia lähteitä erilaisilla aiheilla, kuten tv tuotannon vaiheet, laitteisto ja tekniikat, viestintä ja dokumentointi. Lisäksi käytän tietoja omasta kokemuksestani, mitkä sain kun opiskelin Ferris State University:ssa ja tein erilaisia tv tuotannon liittyviä tehtäviä. Olen oppinut tarvittavaa ammattitaitoa kaikilla tv-tuotannon vaiheilla, kuten työnkulku studiossa, cameran operointi, tuotantolaitteiden käyttö kentällä, monicameroiden ohjaus sekä tuottajan vastuut ja järjestelytaidot. Samalla tutkin viimeisimpiä tuotantomenetelmiä ja tekniikkaa, kuten ääni- ja valaistustyöasemien käyttöä, käytössä olevia editointiohjelmistoja ja teräväpiirtotelevision ja 3D television ominaisuuksia

Contributions to the cornerstones of interaction in visualization: strengthening the interaction of visualization

Visualization has become an accepted means for data exploration and analysis. Although interaction is an important component of visualization approaches, current visualization research pays less attention to interaction than to aspects of the graphical representation. Therefore, the goal of this work is to strengthen the interaction side of visualization. To this end, we establish a unified view on interaction in visualization. This unified view covers four cornerstones: the data, the tasks, the technology, and the human.Visualisierung hat sich zu einem unverzichtbaren Werkzeug für die Exploration und Analyse von Daten entwickelt. Obwohl Interaktion ein wichtiger Bestandteil solcher Werkzeuge ist, wird der Interaktion in der aktuellen Visualisierungsforschung weniger Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet als Aspekten der graphischen Repräsentation. Daher ist es das Ziel dieser Arbeit, die Interaktion im Bereich der Visualisierung zu stärken. Hierzu wird eine einheitliche Sicht auf Interaktion in der Visualisierung entwickelt

Interactive Visual Analysis of Translations

This thesis is the result of a collaboration with the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. The goal of this collaboration is to design novel visualization techniques to enable digital humanities scholars to explore and analyze parallel translations. To this end, chapter 2 introduces the first survey of surveys on text visualization which reviews all of the surveys and state-of-the-art reports on text visualization techniques, classifies them, provides recommendations, and discusses reported challenges.Following this, we present three visual interactive designs that support the typical digital humanities scholars workflow. In Chapter 4, we present VNLP, a visual, interactive design that enables users to explicitly observe the NLP pipeline processes and update the parameters at each processing stage. Chapter 5 presents AlignVis, a visual tool that provides a semi-automatic alignment framework to build a correspondence between multiple translations. It presents the results of using text similarity measurements and enables the user to create, verify, and edit alignments using a novel visual interface. Chapter 6 introduce TransVis, a novel visual design that supports comparison of multiple parallel translations. It incorporates customized mechanisms for rapid and interactive filtering and selection of a large number of German translations of Shakespeare’s Othello. All of the visual designs are evaluated using examples, detailed observations, case studies, and/or domain expert feedback from a specialist in modern and contemporary German literature and culture.Chapter 7 reports our collaborative experience and proposes a methodological workflow to guide such interdisciplinary research projects. This chapter also includes a summary of outcomes and lessons learned from our collaboration with the domain expert. Finally, Chapter 8 presents a summary of the thesis and future work directions

Proceedings of the 18th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science

These proceedings contain the papers that were accepted for publication at AICS-2007, the 18th Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, which was held in the Technological University Dublin; Dublin, Ireland; on the 29th to the 31st August 2007. AICS is the annual conference of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland (AIAI)

Symmetric Edit Lenses: A New Foundation for Bidirectional Languages

Lenses are bidirectional transformations between pairs of connected structures capable of translating an edit on one structure into an edit on the other. Most of the extensive existing work on lenses has focused on the special case of asymmetric lenses, where one structures is taken as primary and the other is thought of as a projection or view. Some symmetric variants exist, where each structure contains information not present in the other, but these all lack the basic operation of composition. Additionally, existing accounts do not represent edits carefully, making incremental operation difficult or producing unsatisfactory synchronization candidates. We present a new symmetric formulation which works with descriptions of changes to structures, rather than with the structures themselves. We construct a semantic space of edit lenses between “editable structures”—monoids of edits with a partial monoid action for applying edits—with natural laws governing their behavior. We present generalizations of a number of known constructions on asymmetric lenses and settle some longstanding questions about their properties—in particular, we prove the existence of (symmetric monoidal) tensor products and sums and the non-existence of full categorical products and sums in a category of lenses. Universal algebra shows how to build iterator lenses for structured data such as lists and trees, yielding lenses for operations like mapping, filtering, and concatenation from first principles. More generally, we provide mapping combinators based on the theory of containers. Finally, we present a prototype implementation of the core theory and take a first step in addressing the challenge of translating between user gestures and the internal representation of edits