A New Relational Spatial OLAP Approach For Multi-resolution and Spatio-multidimensional Analysis of Incomplete Field Data

International audienceIntegrating continuous spatial data into SOLAP systems is a new research challenge. Moreover, representation of field data at different scales or resolutions is often mandatory for an effective analysis. Thus, in this paper, we propose a logical model to integrate spatial dimensions representing incomplete field data at different resolutions in a classical SOLAP architecture

An environment to support negotiation and contracting in collaborative networks

During the last years, manufacturing and service industries faced a global change in the production paradigm. They have to continuously adapt their operating principles in reaction to new business or collaboration opportunities, where a natural reaction is a shift to a new business paradigm with the creation of strategic alliances for product or services development, but also for innovative and emergent business services design. On one hand, the process of creating such alliances can be rather simple if organizations share the same geographical and cultural context. But on the other hand, considering different conditions, there might be a low success rate in the creation of successful consortia. One known reason for such low rate are the delays resulting from negotiations in the establishment of collaboration commitments, represented by contracts or agreements, which are crucial in the creation of such alliances. The collaborative networks discipline covers the study of networks of organizations specially when supported by computer networks. This thesis contributes with research in this field describing the creation process of virtual organizations, and proposing a negotiation support environment to help participants in the negotiation of the consortia creation process and in the co-design of new business services. A negotiation support environment is therefore proposed and described with its main requirements, adopted negotiation protocol, conceptual architecture, models, and software environment. To demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation of the proposed systems, a proof-ofconcept software prototype was implemented and tested using some specific scenarios. This thesis work has been validated adopting a methodology that includes: (i) validation in the research community; (ii) validation in a solar industry network; and (iii) validation by comparison analysis

Extensibility of Enterprise Modelling Languages

Die Arbeit adressiert insgesamt drei Forschungsschwerpunkte. Der erste Schwerpunkt setzt sich mit zu entwickelnden BPMN-Erweiterungen auseinander und stellt deren methodische Implikationen im Rahmen der bestehenden Sprachstandards dar. Dies umfasst zum einen ganz konkrete Spracherweiterungen wie z. B. BPMN4CP, eine BPMN-Erweiterung zur multi-perspektivischen Modellierung von klinischen Behandlungspfaden. Zum anderen betrifft dieser Teil auch modellierungsmethodische Konsequenzen, um parallel sowohl die zugrunde liegende Sprache (d. h. das BPMN-Metamodell) als auch die Methode zur Erweiterungsentwicklung zu verbessern und somit den festgestellten Unzulänglichkeiten zu begegnen. Der zweite Schwerpunkt adressiert die Untersuchung von sprachunabhängigen Fragen der Erweiterbarkeit, welche sich entweder während der Bearbeitung des ersten Teils ergeben haben oder aus dessen Ergebnissen induktiv geschlossen wurden. Der Forschungsschwerpunkt fokussiert dabei insbesondere eine Konsolidierung bestehender Terminologien, die Beschreibung generisch anwendbarer Erweiterungsmechanismen sowie die nutzerorientierte Analyse eines potentiellen Erweiterungsbedarfs. Dieser Teil bereitet somit die Entwicklung einer generischen Erweiterungsmethode grundlegend vor. Hierzu zählt auch die fundamentale Auseinandersetzung mit Unternehmensmodellierungssprachen generell, da nur eine ganzheitliche, widerspruchsfreie und integrierte Sprachdefinition Erweiterungen überhaupt ermöglichen und gelingen lassen kann. Dies betrifft beispielsweise die Spezifikation der intendierten Semantik einer Sprache

Spark solutions for discovering fuzzy association rules in Big Data

The research reported in this paper was partially supported the COPKIT project from the 8th Programme Framework (H2020) research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 786687) and from the BIGDATAMED projects with references B-TIC-145-UGR18 and P18-RT-2947.The high computational impact when mining fuzzy association rules grows significantly when managing very large data sets, triggering in many cases a memory overflow error and leading to the experiment failure without its conclusion. It is in these cases when the application of Big Data techniques can help to achieve the experiment completion. Therefore, in this paper several Spark algorithms are proposed to handle with massive fuzzy data and discover interesting association rules. For that, we based on a decomposition of interestingness measures in terms of α-cuts, and we experimentally demonstrate that it is sufficient to consider only 10equidistributed α-cuts in order to mine all significant fuzzy association rules. Additionally, all the proposals are compared and analysed in terms of efficiency and speed up, in several datasets, including a real dataset comprised of sensor measurements from an office building.COPKIT project from the 8th Programme Framework (H2020) research and innovation programme 786687BIGDATAMED projects B-TIC-145-UGR18 P18-RT-294

An evaluation of the challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse development

In this paper we discuss Business Intelligence and define what is meant by support for Multilingualism in a Business Intelligence reporting context. We identify support for Multilingualism as a challenging issue which has implications for data warehouse design and reporting performance. Data warehouses are a core component of most Business Intelligence systems and the star schema is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional Data Marts. We discuss the way in which Multilingualism can be supported in the Star Schema and identify that current approaches have serious limitations which include data redundancy and data manipulation, performance and maintenance issues. We propose a new approach to enable the optimal application of multilingualism in Business Intelligence. The proposed approach was found to produce satisfactory results when used in a proof-of-concept environment. Future work will include testing the approach in an enterprise environmen

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