Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

SCALE, ECOLOGY AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS

The relationship between political jurisdictions and ecologically-sensible geographic areas is a central concern of political ecologists; few are the cities, provinces, states or countries which map closely onto watersheds, airsheds, aquifers, ranges of migratory birds or top predators, or any other terrestrial space which makes (more-than-human) ecological sense. As the need becomes more pressing to devise policies which help to reduce human impact on ecological systems, the inefficiencies and dysfunctionalities which result from this disjuncture between political spaces and ecological spaces are becoming more readily apparent. It is extremely difficult to devise and implement policies to protect Monarch butterflies, the ozone layer, North Atlantic groundfish stocks, or even the Oglalla aquifer, due in large part to the many political jurisdictions which must commit to policies and their enforcement. Ecological issues which are of central concern for some jurisdictions matter only peripherally or are swamped by other economic or foreign-policy considerations for other jurisdictions, leading to the familiar gridlock in environmental policy -- which of course exists not just at the international level, but also at regional and local scales (Press, 1994:84-107; Bhaskar and Glyn, 1995; Borgese, 1995:151-166; Schreurs and Economy, 1997; Adam, 1998:104-125; Altvater, 1998:34-39; O’Connor, 1994; Eckersley, 1998; Harvey, 1996:203-204; Rifkin, 1991:288-289). Even in the unlikely event that political (and other) ecologists were to reach a consensus on how to create a global, nested series of political jurisdictions and boundaries which respected the earth’s most important ecological features and systems, it would not be at all easy to redraw political boundaries in this way, especially if democratic principles were to be employed (Low, 1997). Moreover, much of the literature on globalization stresses the declining importance of political jurisdictions and policy-making anyway, in the face of increasing global corporate power (Korten, 1995; Sachs, 1993). So what is the point of discussing the relationship between political scales and ecological scales? In this paper, I will try to argue that the importance of political scale (both as a concept and in its grounded, appropriate ecological application) extends far beyond policy-making and supersedes corporate erosion. Political scale provides a primary means for humans to “make sense of” the world and come to terms with our place in it, as individuals and as a species.Its value is educational, epistemological, ontological, and cultural; in fact, political scale can be seen as both a motivator and agenda for action.Complex systems theory offers a number of insights about scale questions. After discussing some of these theoretical issues, I will return at the end of the paper to the role of political scale in a practical sense for activists

Advanced Architectures for Transactional Workflows or Advanced Transactions in Workflow Architectures

In this short paper, we outline the workflow management systems research in the Information Systems division at the University of Twente. We discuss the two main themes in this research: architecture design and advanced transaction management. Attention is paid to the coverage of these themes in the context of the completed Mercurius and WIDE projects and in the new CrossFlow project. In the latter project, contracts are introduced as a new theme to support electronic commerce aspects in workflow management

Distributed interoperable workflow support for electronic commerce.

Abstract. This paper describes a flexible distributed transactional workflow environment based on an extensible object-oriented framework built around class libraries, application programming interfaces, and shared services. The purpose of this environment is to support a range of EC-like business activities including the support of financial transactions and electronic contracts. This environment has as its aim to provide key infrastructure services for mediating and monitoring electronic commerce.

A Direct Multigrid Poisson Solver for Oct-Tree Adaptive Meshes

We describe a finite-volume method for solving the Poisson equation on oct-tree adaptive meshes using direct solvers for individual mesh blocks. The method is a modified version of the method presented by Huang and Greengard (2000), which works with finite-difference meshes and does not allow for shared boundaries between refined patches. Our algorithm is implemented within the FLASH code framework and makes use of the PARAMESH library, permitting efficient use of parallel computers. We describe the algorithm and present test results that demonstrate its accuracy.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted by the Astrophysical Journal; minor revisions in response to referee's comments; added char

Constructing commons in the cultural environment

This Article sets out a framework for investigating sharing and resource-pooling arrangements for information- and knowledge-based works. We argue that adapting the approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators to commons arrangements in the natural environment provides a template for examining the construction of commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environments in which they are embedded, in relation to information and knowledge resources that they produce and use, and in relation to one another