The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Position paper on realizing smart products: challenges for Semantic Web technologies

In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies

Mining social network data for personalisation and privacy concerns: A case study of Facebook’s Beacon

This is the post-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below.The popular success of online social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook is a hugely tempting resource of data mining for businesses engaged in personalised marketing. The use of personal information, willingly shared between online friends' networks intuitively appears to be a natural extension of current advertising strategies such as word-of-mouth and viral marketing. However, the use of SNS data for personalised marketing has provoked outrage amongst SNS users and radically highlighted the issue of privacy concern. This paper inverts the traditional approach to personalisation by conceptualising the limits of data mining in social networks using privacy concern as the guide. A qualitative investigation of 95 blogs containing 568 comments was collected during the failed launch of Beacon, a third party marketing initiative by Facebook. Thematic analysis resulted in the development of taxonomy of privacy concerns which offers a concrete means for online businesses to better understand SNS business landscape - especially with regard to the limits of the use and acceptance of personalised marketing in social networks

Strategies for Serving Our Women Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is committed to transformation, with the aim of becoming an increasingly Veteran-centric, results-oriented, and forward-looking organization. In line with this commitment, Secretary Shinseki called for the formation of a Womens Veterans Task Force (WVTF) in July 2011, to be charged with developing a comprehensive VA action plan for resolving gaps in how our organization serves women Veterans. As an interim deliverable, the WVTF developed this draft strategy report to solicit stakeholder feedback on its initial findings and recommendations. Based on public comments to this draft, the WVTF will finalize its recommendations and develop a detailed action plan for implementation.The urgency of this effort is acute, given the rapid growth of the women Veteran population

Proceedings of the ECCS 2005 satellite workshop: embracing complexity in design - Paris 17 November 2005

Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr). Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr)