people centred production design

This case reports on a worldwide operating SME producing floor cleaning machines. The SME distinguishes itself from its competitors by providing highly customizable high-quality products. Employees are one of the "most-valuable resources" to the management. However, the initial situation reveals significant improvement opportunities related to the employee involvement and empowerment concerning workplace re-design. The proposed subject-oriented solution aims to involve shop floor workers in workplace (re-)design by providing them structural empowerment means such as social media for suggestion proposals, discussions and negotiations. Furthermore, the newly introduced features are designed to allow for context-sensitive reporting of suggestions and errors. Context-sensitive elicitation provides the basis for analysing impacts of changes (e.g. the affected location or worker) and visualizing potential improvement areas within the shop floor. The generic suggestion and error handling process can be tailored to different organizations. The S-BPM process handling has been integrated with a semantic wiki allowing for context-sensitive workplace improvement elicitation and change propagation analysis. The evaluation reports on findings in developer workshops, focus groups and user tests conducted in parallel to the design and implementation to ensure a user-centred approach (formative part), and on findings related to the outcome of the case implementations at the given SME (summative part)

Flexible Views for View-based Model-driven Development

Modern software development faces the problem of fragmentation of information across heterogeneous artefacts in different modelling and programming languages. In this dissertation, the Vitruvius approach for view-based engineering is presented. Flexible views offer a compact definition of user-specific views on software systems, and can be defined the novel ModelJoin language. The process is supported by a change metamodel for metamodel evolution and change impact analysis

Guiding the Evolution of a Multilingual Ontology in a Concrete Setting

Evolving complex artifacts as multilingual ontologies is a difficult activity demanding for the involvement of different roles and for guidelines to drive and coordinate them. We present the methodology and the underlying tool that have been used in the context of the Organic.Lingua project for the collaborative evolution of the multilingual Organic Agriculture ontology. Findings gathered from a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation of the experience are reported, revealing the usefulness of the methodology used in synergy with the tool