Proceedings of the Inaugural Meeting ofAIS SIGPrag

The Special Interest Group on Pragmatist IS Research (SIGPrag) was approved by the Association for InformationSystems (AIS) council at its June 2008 meeting in Gallway. The motivation for this initiative is the growingrecognition of the importance of theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context from apragmatic and action-oriented perspective. SIGPrag\u27s mission is to provide a much-needed centre of gravity and tofacilitate exchange of ideas and further development of this area of IS scholarship.In summary, pragmatist IS research rests on the following set of assumptions: * Human life is a life of activity.* Humans do things that effect changes in their environment and/or within themselves.* Doing permeates thinking, conceptualizations and language use.* Human consciousness is a practical one that is in constant interplay with interventive, investigative, andevaluative actions.* Practical consciousness is formed by experience from previous actions and participation in social contexts.* IT and information systems are fundamentally symbolic language systems.* Linguistically expressed collective presuppositions, norms and categories (such as those embedded in ITand information systems) serve human activity and life.* The true value of IT and information systems lies in their potential to support human communication andcollaboration central to human activity and life.For more information about SIGPrag, its mission and current activities, please visit http://www.sigprag.org/The inaugural meeting of SIGPrag is to be held in Paris on Dec 14, 2008, in conjunction with the InternationalConference on Information Systems (ICIS). The meeting will consist of two parts, a scientific meeting and abusiness meeting. For the scientific meeting a call for position papers was issued in the summer of 2008, whichresulted in the following papers being selected for presentation:• What Kind of Pragmatism in Information Systems Research? by Göran Goldkuhl.• Pragmatic Approach in IS Projects Grounded on Recognised Frameworks by Raija Halonen.• Co-Design as Social Constructive Pragmatism by Mikael Lind, Ulf Seigerroth, Olov Forsgren, and AndersHjalmarsson.• Pragmatism and Information Systems (IS): Neurophilosophical approach by Garikoitz Lerma Usabiagaand Francesc Miralles.• Sustainability Communication: A role for IT and IS in relating business and Society by Mark Aakhus andPaul Ziek.• Managing Ambiguity while Reducing Uncertainty by Gianni Jacucci and Mike Martin.• A Pragmatic Conception of Service Encounters by Mikael Lind and Nicklas Salomonson.• Making the Web More Pragmatic: Exploring the Potential Of Some Pragmatic Concepts For IS ResearchAnd Development by Jens Allwood and Mikael Lind.• Introducing Human in Complex System: A Cognitive Pragmatics Based Model by G. Lortal.• The Pragmatic Web: An Application View by Mareike Schoop.• Design Research from a Communicative Perspective: How to Design Things with Words by Hans Weigand.• Representation and Correspondence: On the Validity of the Representation Assumption in InformationSystem Design by Pär J. Ågerfalk and Owen Eriksson.• Habermas’ theory in action by Jan L.G. Dietz.• Challenges to Information Systems Development by Roland Kaschek.The idea behind this inaugural meeting was to bring together people that share an affinity with pragmatist ISresearch and to initiate a scientific discussion about the role of pragmatist research in IS. We certainly hope that thisdiscussion will continue over the years to come. The papers are freely available for download athttp://www.sigprag.org

Towards an Ontology of Software

Software is permeating every aspect of our personal and social life. And yet, the cluster of concepts around the notion of software, such as the notions of a software product, software requirements, software specifications, are still poorly understood with no consensus on the horizon. For many, software is just code, something intangible best defined in contrast with hardware, but it is not particularly illuminating. This erroneous notion, software is just code, presents both in the ontology of software literature and in the software maintenance tools. This notion is obviously wrong because it doesn’t account for the fact that whenever someone fixes a bug, the code of a software system changes, but nobody believes that this is a different software system. Several researchers have attempted to understand the core nature of software and programs in terms of concepts such as code, copy, medium and execution. More recently, a proposal was made by Irmak to consider software as an abstract artifact, distinct from code, just because code may change while the software remains the same. We share many of his intuitions, as well as the methodology he adopts to motivate his conclusions, based on an analysis of the condition under which software maintains its identity despite change. However, he leaves the question of ‘what is the identity of software’ open, and we answer this question here. Trying to answer the question left open by Irmak, the main objective of this dissertation is to lay the foundations for an ontology of software, grounded on the foundational ontology DOLCE. This new ontology of software is intended to facilitate the communication within the community by reducing terminological ambiguities, and by resolving inconsistencies. If we had a better footing on answering the question ‘What is software?’, we'd be in a position to build better tools for maintaining and managing a software system throughout its lifetime. The research contents of the thesis consist of three results. Firstly, we dive into the ontological nature of software, recognizing it as an abstract information artifact. To support this proposal the first main contribution of the dissertation is demonstrated from three dimensions: (1) We distinguish software (non-physical object) from hardware (physical object), and demonstrate the idea that the rapid changing speed of software is supported by the easy changeability of its medium hardware; (2) Furthermore, we discuss about the artifactual nature of software, addressing the erroneous notion, software is just code, presents both in the ontology of software literature and in the software maintenance tools; (3)At last, we recognize software as an information artifact, and this approach ensures that software inherits all the properties of an information artifact, and the study and research could be directly reused for software then. Secondly, we propose an ontology founded on the concepts adopted from Requirements Engineering (RE), such as the notions of World and Machine phenomena. In this ontology, we make a sharp distinction between different kinds of software artifacts (software program, software system, and software product), and describe the ways they are inter-connected in the context of a software engineering process. Additionally, we study software from a Social Perspective, explaining the concepts of licensable software product and licensed software product. Also, we discuss about the possibility to adopt our ontology of software in software configuration management systems to provide a better understanding and control of software changes. Thirdly, we note the important role played by assumptions in getting software to fulfill its requirements. The requirements for most software systems -- the intended states-of-affairs these systems are supposed to bring about -- concern their operational environment, usually a social world. But these systems don’t have any direct means to change that environment in order to bring about the intended states-of-affairs. In what sense then can we say that such systems fulfill their requirements? One of the main contributions of this dissertation is to account for this paradox. We do so by proposing a preliminary ontology of assumptions that are implicitly used in software engineering practice to establish that a system specification S fulfills its requirements R given a set of assumptions A, and our proposal is illustrated with a meeting scheduling example

Enterprise architecture for small and medium-sized enterprises : CHOOSE

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise’s organizational structure, business processes, information systems, and IT infrastructure. EA is used as a holistic approach to keep things aligned in a company. Some emphasize the use of EA to align IT with the business, others see it broader and use it to also keep the processes aligned with the strategy. Recent research indicates the need for EA in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), important drivers of the economy, as they struggle with problems related to a lack of structure and overview of their business. However, existing EA frameworks are perceived as too complex and, to date, none of the EA approaches are sufficiently adapted to the SME context. Therefore, in this PhD, we present the CHOOSE approach for EA for SMEs. The approach consists of four artifacts: a metamodel, a method, software tool support, and a visualization. The approach is kept simple so that it may be applied in an SME context and is based on the essential dimensions of EA frameworks. Five steps were taken: first, the problem of EA in SMEs was extensively analyzed. Next, the CHOOSE metamodel was developed during action research in SMEs. Then, action research in six companies was used to develop an adequate method (consisting of guidelines, a roadmap, and stop criteria) and to further refine this CHOOSE metamodel, while different types of software tools (PC, iPad, Android, ...) were developed to enable the evaluation rounds. Finally, a proper visualization was established

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"

Linguistic Refactoring of Business Process Models

In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization and internationalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support for business. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to align business strategy, organization, controlling, and business activities to react flexibly to market changes. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since companies tend to have a growing number of business process models stored in a process model repository, analysis techniques are required that assess the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. While available techniques can easily check the formal content of a process model, there are only a few techniques available that analyze the natural language content of a process model. Therefore, techniques are required that address linguistic issues caused by the actual use of natural language. In order to close this gap, this doctoral thesis explicitly targets inconsistencies caused by natural language and investigates the potential of automatically detecting and resolving them under a linguistic perspective. In particular, this doctoral thesis provides the following contributions. First, it defines a classification framework that structures existing work on process model analysis and refactoring. Second, it introduces the notion of atomicity, which implements a strict consistency condition between the formal content and the textual content of a process model. Based on an explorative investigation, we reveal several reoccurring violation patterns are not compliant with the notion of atomicity. Third, this thesis proposes an automatic refactoring technique that formalizes the identified patterns to transform a non-atomic process models into an atomic one. Fourth, this thesis defines an automatic technique for detecting and refactoring synonyms and homonyms in process models, which is eventually useful to unify the terminology used in an organization. Fifth and finally, this thesis proposes a recommendation-based refactoring approach that addresses process models suffering from incompleteness and leading to several possible interpretations. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed techniques is further evaluated by real-world process model repositories from various industries. (author's abstract

Paradoxes of interactivity: perspectives for media theory, human-computer interaction, and artistic investigations

Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. "Paradoxes of Interactivity" brings together reflections on "interactivity" from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound

Paradoxes of Interactivity

Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. »Paradoxes of Interactivity« brings together reflections on »interactivity« from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound