A core ontology for business process analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of adaptation required by businesses. Initial steps have been performed towards including some sort of automated reasoning within Business Process Analysis (BPA) but this is typically limited to using taxonomies. We present a core ontology aimed at enhancing the state of the art in BPA. The ontology builds upon a Time Ontology and is structured around the process, resource, and object perspectives as typically adopted when analysing business processes. The ontology has been extended and validated by means of an Events Ontology and an Events Analysis Ontology aimed at capturing the audit trails generated by Process-Aware Information Systems and deriving additional knowledge

The Epistemology of scheduling problems

Scheduling is a knowledge-intensive task spanning over many activities in day-to-day life. It deals with the temporally-bound assignment of jobs to resources. Although scheduling has been extensively researched in the AI community for the past 30 years, efforts have primarily focused on specific applications, algorithms, or 'scheduling shells' and no comprehensive analysis exists on the nature of scheduling problems, which provides a formal account of what scheduling is, independently of the way scheduling problems can be approached. Research on KBS development by reuse makes use of ontologies, to provide knowledge-level specifications of reusable KBS components. In this paper we describe a task ontology, which formally characterises the nature of scheduling problems, independently of particular application domains and in-dependently of how the problems can be solved. Our results provide a comprehensive, domain-independent and formally specified refer-ence model for scheduling applications. This can be used as the ba-sis for further analyses of the class of scheduling problems and also as a concrete reusable resource to support knowledge acquisition and system development in scheduling applications

Imagination through virtuality for in-depth learning

Based on the fast growing technologies to allow students to explore and experience three-dimensional worlds, the question becomes relevant if and how technology offers essentially new dimensions to the learning process. In a number of prototypes this paper demonstrates how learners may undergo immersive experiences that complement the predominantly verbal expositions how complex realities like the many-facetted processes in living creatures work. Based upon the model of a mammal's heart, pre- and postsynaptic processing and finally the apprehension of cultural signs on migration, identity, culture and communication, this paper aims at provoking the discussion in how far we may already rely on visual semiotics that may complement traditional learning material and further stimulate the further evolution into perceptual learning. Based on experiments into the relation between cognitive style (holistic versus serialistic) and various memory capacities, the thesis is brought forward that we need to explore further the various concept-mapping techniques, both for the designer and the user of educational learning environment