Do Process Modelling Techniques Get Better? A Comparative Ontological Analysis of BPMN

Current initiatives in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) strive for the development of a BPM standard notation by pushing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). However, such a proposed standard notation needs to be carefully examined. Ontological analysis is an established theoretical approach to evaluating modelling techniques. This paper reports on the outcomes of an ontological analysis of BPMN and explores identified issues by reporting on interviews conducted with BPMN users in Australia. Complementing this analysis we consolidate our findings with previous ontological analyses of process modelling notations to deliver a comprehensive assessment of BPMN

Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

The influence of conceptual user models on the creation and interpretation of diagrams representing reactive systems

In system design, many diagrams of many different types are used. Diagrams communicate design aspects between members of the development team, and between these experts and the non-expert customers and future users. Mastering the creation of diagrams is often a challenging task, judging by particular errors persistently found in diagrams created by undergraduate computer science students. We assume a possible misalignment between human perception and cognition on the one hand and the diagrams’ structure and syntax on the other. This article presents the results of an investigation of such a misalignment. We focus on the deployment of so-called 'conceptual user models' (mental models, created by users in their mind) at the creation of diagrams. We propose a taxonomy for mental mappings, used for categorization of representations. We describe an experiment where naive and novice subjects created one or several diagrams of a familiar task. We use our taxonomy for analysing these diagrams, both for the represented task structure and the symbols used. The results indeed show a mismatch between mental models and currently used diagram techniques

Learning-based constraints on schemata

Schemata are frequently used in cognitive science as a descriptive framework for explaining the units of knowledge. However, the specific properties which comprise a schema are not consistent across authors. In this paper we attempt to ground the concept of a schema based on constraints arising from issues of learning. To do this, we consider the different forms of schemata used in computational models of learning. We propose a framework for comparing forms of schemata which is based on the underlying representation used by each model, and the mechanisms used for learning and retrieving information from its memory. Based on these three characteristics, we compare examples from three classes of model, identified by their underlying representations, specifically: neural network, production-rule and symbolic network models

GTA: Groupware task analysis Modeling complexity

The task analysis methods discussed in this presentation stem from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ethnography (as applied for the design of Computer Supported Cooperative Work CSCW), different disciplines that often are considered conflicting approaches when applied to the same design problems. Both approaches have their strength and weakness, and an integration of them does add value to the early stages of design of cooperation technology. In order to develop an integrated method for groupware task analysis (GTA) a conceptual framework is presented that allows a systematic perspective on complex work phenomena. The framework features a triple focus, considering (a) people, (b) work, and (c) the situation. Integrating various task-modeling approaches requires vehicles for making design information explicit, for which an object oriented formalism will be suggested. GTA consists of a method and framework that have been developed during practical design exercises. Examples from some of these cases will illustrate our approach