S-BPM in the Wild

This is the first book to present field studies on the application of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM). Each case presents a specific story and focuses on an essential modeling or implementation issue, and most end with implications or suggestions for further studies. Significant variables and success factors are identified that were discovered during the respective study and lead to suggesting S-BPM novelties. For each case, the authors explain step-by-step how the story develops, and provide readers guidance by detailing the respective rationale. The studies covered are clustered according to three main S-BPM themes: Part I “Business Operation Support” documents approaches to the practical development of S-BPM solutions in various application domains and organizational settings, while Part II “Consultancy and Education Support” highlights cases that can help to train readers in S-BPM modeling and knowledge acquisition for S-BPM lifecycle iterations. It also refers to architecting S-BPM solutions for application cases based on hands-on experience. Part III “Technical Execution Support” focuses on concepts for utilizing specific theories and technologies to execute S-BPM models. It also addresses how to create reference models for certain settings in the field. Lastly, the appendix covers all relevant aspects needed to grasp S-BPM modeling and apply it based on fundamental examples. Its format reconciles semantic precision with syntactic rigor.>Addressing the needs of developers, educators and practitioners, this book will help companies to learn from the experiences of first-time users and to develop systems that fit their business processes, explaining the latest key methodological and technological S-BPM developments in the fields of training, research and application

Modeling and verification of web service composition based interorganizational workflows

Interorganisationale Workflows sind Arbeitsabläufe, welche die Grenzen einer Organisation verlassen und einen Rahmen für Kooperationen der verschiedenen autonomen Organisationen zur Verfügung stellen. Ein wichtiger Punkt für den Entwurf solcher Workflows ist die Balance zwischen Offenheit und Abgrenzung, wobei erstere für Kooperationen und letztere die für den Schutz von Know-how benötigt wird. Workflow Sichten stellen ein effizientes Werkzeug für diesen Zweck zur Verfügung. Durch Offenlegung von bestimmten Teilen eines Prozesses, können Organisationen sowohl kooperieren als auch das Know-how schützen. Diese Dissertation präsentiert nun eine Methode für die korrekte Konstruktion von Workflow Sichten. Es wird angenommen, dass Organisationen Web Service orientierte Technologien zur Modellierung und Implementierung von interorganisationalen Workflows verwenden. Die Anwendung von Web Services bietet Organisationen viele Vorteile. Den eigentlichen Mehrwert von Web Services stellt aber die Kompositionsfähigkeit dar. Verfügbare Web Services können dadurch von anderen Choreographien und Orchestrationen (wieder-)verwendet werden. Die Notwendigkeit der Implementierung von Systemen von Null weg kann minimiert werden. Die zentralen Anforderungen sind einerseits eine Architektur mit adäquatem Potential, andererseits die Verifikation der Korrektheit. Diese Dissertation präsentiert nun eine Architektur zur Modellierung von Web Service Composition basierten interorganisationalen Workflows, genannt föderierte Choreographien, die verglichen mit anderen Architekturen verschiedene Vorteile anbieten. Darüber hinaus werden Algorithmen und Techniken zur Verifikation der strukturellen und temporalen Korrektheit vorgestellt. Strukturelle Korrektheit prüft, ob die Strukturen der beteiligten Prozesse zusammenpassen. Temporale Korrektheit überprüft, ob ein interorganisationaler Workflow, der aus mehreren Choreographien und Orchestrationen besteht hinsichtlich der lokalen und globalen Bedingungen fehlerfrei ist. Mit Hilfe dieser Techniken kann die strukturelle und temporale Konformität des Modells zur Designzeit überprüft werden. Falls das Modell nicht strukturell oder temporal konform ist, können nötige Änderungen durchgeführt werden, sodass die korrekte Ausführung zur Laufzeit garantiert werden kann. Die Überprüfung der Konformität zur Designzeit reduziert die Prozesskosten vor allem wegen den folgenden zwei Gründen: Erstens, die entdeckten Fehler zur Designzeit sind normalerweise billiger als jene, die zur Laufzeit entdeckt werden und zweitens, Fehlerbehandlungsmechanismen können verhindert werden, die wiederum Zusatzkosten verursachen. Zusätzlich zu der vorgestellten Architektur wird eine allgemeinere Architektur zusammen mit den passenden Konformitätsprüfungsalgorithmen präsentiert. Der Ansatz ist Platform- und sprachunabhängig und die Algorithmen sind verteilt.Interorganizational workflows are workflows that cross the boundaries of a single organization and provide a framework for cooperation of different autonomous organizations. An important issue when designing such workflows is the balance between the openness needed for cooperation and the privacy needed for protection of business know-how. Workflow views provide an efficient tool for this aim. By exposure of only selected parts of a process, organizations can both cooperate and protect their business logic. This dissertation presents a technique for a correct construction of workflow views. It is assumed that organizations and partners use web services and web service related technology to model and implement interorganizational workflows. Application of web services offers several advantages for organizations. The real surplus of web services is their capability of being composed to more complex systems. Available web services can be reused by other choreographies and orchestrations and the need for development of new systems from scratch can be minimized. The essential requirements are on the one hand an architecture with adequate capabilities and on the other hand, verification of correctness. This dissertation proposes an architecture for modeling web service composition based interorganizational workflows, called \emph{federated choreographies}, that provides several advantages compared to existing proposals. Moreover, algorithms and techniques for verification of structural and temporal correctness of interorganizational workflows are proposed. Structural conformance checks if the structures of the involved processes match. Temporal conformance checks if an interorganizational workflow composed of choreographies and orchestrations is temporally error-free with respect to local and global temporal constraints. The proposed algorithms can be applied for checking the structural and temporal conformance of the federated choreographies at design-time. If the model is not structurally or temporally conformant, necessary modifications can be done such that the correct execution of the flow at run-time can be guaranteed. The conformance checking at design time reduces the cost of process because of two reasons: first, errors detected at design time are normally cheaper than those detected at run time and second, exception handling mechanisms can be avoided which are, in turn, coupled with additional costs. In addition to the proposed architecture, a more general architecture together with the conformance checking algorithms and techniques for interorganizational workflows are presented. The presented approach is language and platform independent and algorithms work in a distributed manner

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Aligning business processes and IT of multiple collaborating organisations

When multiple organisations want to collaborate with one another they have to integrate their business processes. This requires aligning the collaborative business processes and the underlying IT (Information Technology). Realizing the required alignment is, however, not trivial and is the subject of this thesis. We approached the issue of alignment in three steps. First, we explored business-IT alignment problems in detail in a real-life business case. This is done in order to clarify what alignment of business processes and IT systems across a collaboration network entails. Second, we provided a business-IT alignment framework called BITA* (pronounce bita-star). The framework provides modelling abstractions for alignment. Third, we applied the framework in two real-life case studies, including the real-life business case used in step one. By applying the framework in practice we showed that the framework can, in fact, help to address the business-IT alignment problems that we identified in the first step. The work presented in this thesis is conducted over a number of years in the context of four large EU sponsored research projects. The projects focused on alignment problems in two very distinct application areas. Two projects were about realizing transparency systems for meat supply chains and constitute the first case study. The other two projects were about realizing multidisciplinary modelling collaboration systems and constitute the second case study. Although the projects were conducted sequentially the research questions were addressed iteratively over the years. The research methodology that shows how the framework is designed and how the case studies are applied is discussed in detail in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we present BITA*, a Business-IT Alignment framework for multiple collaborating organisations. The main challenges in designing BITA* have been what models to consider for alignment and how to compare them in order to make explicit statements about alignment. We addressed this problem by introducing allocation and alignment modelling constructs to help the alignment process, and the concept of business collaboration model to represent the models that have to be aligned. We identified three groups of stakeholders for whom we designed explicit design viewpoints and associated allocation and alignment models. The Business Process to Business Process (BP2BP) alignment viewpoint is designed for business analysts who have to align diverse business collaboration process models. The IT to IT (IT2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for software architects to align the distribution of data and IT systems across a collaboration network. The Business Process to IT (BP2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for an interdisciplinary team of business analysts and software architects who have to align the different ways of supporting business collaboration processes with distributed IT system. An essential element of this thesis has been elaborating how business-IT alignment problems occur in the context of multi-organisational collaboration. The case studies were used to demonstrate business-IT alignment concerns. Particularly, the details of the first case study presented in chapters 4 and 5 were used in chapter 3 to help derive the alignment framework. The case study presented an ideal problem scenario since realizing transparency across supply chains is intrinsically a collaborative effort. The second case study was used to enhance the validity of our approach. The results of the second case study are presented in chapter 6. The alignment framework was designed during the iterative process we followed when realizing a generic transparency system for meat supply chains. To realize the required generic transparency system we needed a reference architecture. To derive the reference architecture we adapted an already existing and broadly-accepted generic reference architecture. We have to adapt the generic reference architecture in order to address specific requirements of the meat sector that were not considered in the generic reference architecture. The adaptation process made it clear that we needed models for representing business collaborations. We, therefore, introduced the notion of business collaboration model, which we used both to model reference architectures and to adapt them. Adaptation required aligning the generic reference architecture with the diverse business collaboration models adopted by the organisations that have to collaborate. The alignment framework is thus used for adapting a generic reference architecture in order to create a reference architecture that the collaborating organisations can, and are willing to, adopt. We identified three types of business collaboration models: business collaboration process model, business collaboration IT model, and a model for representing the relationship between these two. A business collaboration process model is a business process model that spans a collaboration network. A business collaboration IT model is a model of the distribution of the IT across the collaboration network. A business collaboration process-IT model is a model of the relationships between the elements of the business collaboration processes and the elements of the distributed IT. Each organisation is considered to adopt its own business collaboration models. For instance, different actors in meat supply chains have different views on how chain-wide transparency should be realized. Which business processes and IT systems each organisation has to deploy and use depends on the business collaboration models each food operator adopts. If two different food operators adopt the same set of business collaboration models, they are aligned; otherwise they are misaligned. Hence, alignment entails comparing the different business collaboration models adopted by the participating organisations. The results of the alignment process are explicit statements about how convergent or divergent the organisations are from the chosen generic reference architecture. The explicit statements of alignment guide how best the generic and the corresponding organisational business collaboration models can be adapted to create a better state of alignment. To further enhance the validity of the overall approach the second case study was conducted. The second case study was a retrospective investigation of two past research projects focusing on aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems. A retrospective case study was chosen because launching a new business-IT alignment project involving multiple collaborating organisations was not feasible. The projects were undertaken to support the European Water Framework Directive, which mandated, among other things, participatory, multidisciplinary, river-basin wide and model-based studies to manage the water resources of Europe. The directive particularly required a collaborative approach to building environmental decision support systems and to deriving methodologies for applying existing decision support systems. We applied BITA* to aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems in order to evaluate the suitability of the framework to addressing alignment problems in other application areas. The contributions of the thesis are summarized in chapter 7. The contributions include a number of design artefacts, which can be grouped into four categories: constructs, models, methods, and instantiations. The contribution in the first category includes the conceptualization of allocation and alignment. The contributions in the second category include allocation and alignment models, and reference architectures. Allocation models are representations of business collaboration models in a form that can be compared and are the basis for alignment modelling. The main contribution in the third category is the BITA* systematic approach to alignment modelling. The contributions in the fourth category are the software systems developed with the help of the reference architectures.</p

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Konfigurierbare Visualisierung komplexer Prozessmodelle

Die in heutigen Unternehmen durch Informationssysteme unterstützten Geschäftsprozesse werden zunehmend komplexer. Häufig existieren keine zentralen Steuereinheiten, sondern die Ausführung eines Prozesses ist auf viele heterogene Systeme verteilt. Ohne entsprechende Werkzeugunterstützung ist es daher schwer, einen Überblick über den aktuellen Ausführungsstatus solcher fragmentierter Prozesse zu bewahren. Eine Visualisierungskomponente, welche die Prozesse (inkl. relevanter Applikationsdaten) durchgängig darstellt, ist hier essenziell. Allerdings muss eine solche Komponente in der Lage sein, die Informationsbedürfnisse der verschiedenen Benutzergruppen adäquat zu befriedigen. Typischerweise gibt es hier unterschiedliche Anforderungen an eine Prozessvisualisierung im Hinblick auf Detaillierungsgrad, angezeigte Daten und graphische Informationsaufbereitung. Heutige Werkzeuge stellen Prozesse meist in exakt derselben Form dar, wie sie vom Prozessmodellierer ursprünglich gezeichnet worden sind. Eine flexible Anpassung der Darstellung an die Bedürfnisse des Betrachters ist nicht oder nur in sehr engen Grenzen möglich. Diese Arbeit stellt mit Proviado ein Rahmenwerk für die konfigurierbare Visualisierung komplexer Prozesse vor. Proviado ermöglicht sowohl eine strukturelle als auch eine graphische Anpassung der Prozessvisualisierung. Mit Hilfe eines mächtigen View-Mechanismus können Prozessmodelle strukturell an die Bedürfnisse ihrer Betrachter angepasst werden, indem Prozesselemente reduziert oder zu abstrakten Elementen aggregiert werden. Es werden View-Bildungsoperationen bereitgestellt, die in mehreren Schichten organisiert sind. Mittels Konfigurationsparametern, die die Eigenschaften der resultierenden Prozessmodelle beeinflussen, kann die View-Bildung flexibel konfiguriert und an die Bedürfnisse des jeweiligen Anwendungsfalls angepasst werden. Weitere Möglichkeiten zur graphischen Konfiguration einer Prozessvisualisierung bietet ein fortschrittlicher Template-Mechanismus. Zum einen können die für die Visualisierung zu verwendenden Symbole einfach definiert werden. Zum anderen erlaubt dieser Mechanismus eine flexible Zuordnung der Symbole einer Prozessnotation zu Prozesselementen. Diese Zuordnung kann entweder statisch (z.B. abhängig vom Prozesselementtyp) oder dynamisch, d.h. abhängig von Laufzeitdaten (z.B. Ausführungszustand), erfolgen. Diese beiden Basismechanismen werden ergänzt um Konzepte, die für die Realisierung einer umfassenden Visualisierungskomponente unverzichtbar sind. Dazu zählen unter anderem die Anbindung prozessunterstützender Systeme (d.h. die Integration von Modell- und Laufzeitdaten) sowie Konzepte für das automatische Layout dynamisch berechneter Prozessgraphen. Insgesamt können mit Proviado Prozessvisualisierungen strukturell und graphisch an die Bedürfnisse des jeweiligen Betrachters angepasst werden. Die entsprechenden Darstellungen bieten allen in die Prozesse involvierten Personen eine wesentlich bessere Unterstützung bei der täglichen Arbeit als derzeit verfügbare Systeme

Consortium Proposal NFDI-MatWerk

This is the official proposal the NFDI-consortium NFDI-MatWerk submitted to the DFG within the request for funding the project. Visit www.dfg.de/nfdi for more infos on the German National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur - NFDI) initiative. Visit www.nfdi-matwerk.de for last infos about the project NFDI-MatWerk

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase