Reasoning on the usage control security policies over data artifact business process models

The inclusion of security aspects in organizations is a crucial aspect to ensure compliance with both internal and external regulations. Business process models are a well-known mechanism to describe and automate the activities of the organizations, which should include security policies to ensure the correct performance of the daily activities. Frequently, these security policies involve complex data which cannot be represented using the standard Business Process Model Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we propose the enrichment of the BPMN with a UML class diagram to describe the data model, that is also combined with security policies defined using the UCONABC framework annotated within the business process model. The integration of the business process model, the data model, and the security policies provides a context where more complex reasoning can be applied about the satisfiability of the security policies in accordance with the business process and data models. To do so, wetransform the original models, including security policies, into the BAUML framework (an artifact-centric approach to business process modelling). Once this is done, it is possible to ensure that there are no inherent errors in the model (verification) and that it fulfils the business requirements (validation), thus ensuring that the business process and the security policies are compatible and that they are aligned with the business security requirements.This work has been supported by Project PID2020-112540RB-C44 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, Project TIN2017-87610-R funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa”, Project 2017-SGR-1749 by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Projects COPERNICA (P20 01224) and METAMORFOSIS by the Junta de Andalucía.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales

Semantic interpretation of events in lifelogging

The topic of this thesis is lifelogging, the automatic, passive recording of a person’s daily activities and in particular, on performing a semantic analysis and enrichment of lifelogged data. Our work centers on visual lifelogged data, such as taken from wearable cameras. Such wearable cameras generate an archive of a person’s day taken from a first-person viewpoint but one of the problems with this is the sheer volume of information that can be generated. In order to make this potentially very large volume of information more manageable, our analysis of this data is based on segmenting each day’s lifelog data into discrete and non-overlapping events corresponding to activities in the wearer’s day. To manage lifelog data at an event level, we define a set of concepts using an ontology which is appropriate to the wearer, applying automatic detection of concepts to these events and then semantically enriching each of the detected lifelog events making them an index into the events. Once this enrichment is complete we can use the lifelog to support semantic search for everyday media management, as a memory aid, or as part of medical analysis on the activities of daily living (ADL), and so on. In the thesis, we address the problem of how to select the concepts to be used for indexing events and we propose a semantic, density- based algorithm to cope with concept selection issues for lifelogging. We then apply activity detection to classify everyday activities by employing the selected concepts as high-level semantic features. Finally, the activity is modeled by multi-context representations and enriched by Semantic Web technologies. The thesis includes an experimental evaluation using real data from users and shows the performance of our algorithms in capturing the semantics of everyday concepts and their efficacy in activity recognition and semantic enrichment

Knowledge-base and techniques for effective service-oriented programming & management of hybrid processes

Recent advances in Web 2.0, SOA, crowd-sourcing, social and collaboration technologies, as well as cloud-computing, have truly transformed the Internet into a global development and deployment platform. As a result, developers have been presented with ubiquitous access to countless Web-services, resources and tools. However, while enabling tremendous automation and reuse opportunities, new productivity challenges have also emerged: The exploitation of services and resources nonetheless requires skilled programmers and a development-centric approach; it is thus inevitably susceptible to the same repetitive, error-prone and time consuming integration work each time a developer integrates a new API. Business Process Management on the other hand were proposed to support service-based integration. It provided the benefit of automation and modelling, which appealed to non-technical domain-experts. The problem however: it proves too rigid for unstructured processes. Thus, without this level of support, building new application either requires extensive manual programming or resorting to homebrew solutions. Alternatively, with the proliferation of SaaS, various such tools could be used for independent portions of the overall process - although this either presupposes conforming to the in-built process, or results in "shadow processes" via use of e-mail or the like, in order to exchange information and share decisions. There has therefore been an inevitable gap in technological support between structured and unstructured processes. To address these challenges, this thesis deals with transitioning process-support from structured to unstructured. We have been motivated to harness the foundational capabilities of BPM for its application to unstructured processes. We propose to achieve this by: First, addressing the productivity challenges of Web-services integration - simplifying this process - whilst encouraging an incremental curation and collective reuse approach. We then extend this to propose an innovative Hybrid-Process Management Platform that holistically combines structured, semi-structured and unstructured activities, based on a unified task-model that encapsulates a spectrum of process specificity. We have thus aimed to bridge the current lacking technology gap. The approach presented has been exposed as service-based libraries and tools. Whereby, we have devised several use-case scenarios and conducted user-studies in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of our proposed work

Toward an Effective Automated Tracing Process

Traceability is defined as the ability to establish, record, and maintain dependency relations among various software artifacts in a software system, in both a forwards and backwards direction, throughout the multiple phases of the project’s life cycle. The availability of traceability information has been proven vital to several software engineering activities such as program comprehension, impact analysis, feature location, software reuse, and verification and validation (V&V). The research on automated software traceability has noticeably advanced in the past few years. Various methodologies and tools have been proposed in the literature to provide automatic support for establishing and maintaining traceability information in software systems. This movement is motivated by the increasing attention traceability has been receiving as a critical element of any rigorous software development process. However, despite these major advances, traceability implementation and use is still not pervasive in industry. In particular, traceability tools are still far from achieving performance levels that are adequate for practical applications. Such low levels of accuracy require software engineers working with traceability tools to spend a considerable amount of their time verifying the generated traceability information, a process that is often described as tedious, exhaustive, and error-prone. Motivated by these observations, and building upon a growing body of work in this area, in this dissertation we explore several research directions related to enhancing the performance of automated tracing tools and techniques. In particular, our work addresses several issues related to the various aspects of the IR-based automated tracing process, including trace link retrieval, performance enhancement, and the role of the human in the process. Our main objective is to achieve performance levels, in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and usability, that are adequate for practical applications, and ultimately to accomplish a successful technology transfer from research to industry

From event streams to process models and back: Challenges and opportunities

The domains of complex event processing (CEP) and business process management (BPM) have different origins but for many aspects draw on similar concepts. While specific combinations of BPM and CEP have attracted research attention, resulting in solutions to specific problems, we attempt to take a broad view at the opportunities and challenges involved. We first illustrate these by a detailed example from the logistics domain. We then propose a mapping of this area into four quadrants — - two quadrants drawing from CEP to create or extend process models and two quadrants starting from a process model to address how it can guide CEP. Existing literature is reviewed and specific challenges and opportunities are indicated for each of these quadrants. Based on this mapping, we identify challenges and opportunities that recur across quadrants and can be considered as the core issues of this combination. We suggest that addressing these issues in a generic manner would form a sound basis for future applications and advance this area significantly

About model-based approaches in pervasive information systems development

Tese de doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de InformaçãoUbiquitous computing is a research field of computing technology with a growing number of researchers and represents a new direction on the thinking about the integration and use of computers in people’s lives. It aims to achieve a new computing paradigm, one in which there is a high degree of pervasiveness and widespread availability of computers or other IT devices, usually with communication capabilities, in the physical environment. Model-Driven Development (MDD) constitutes an approach to software design and development that strongly focuses and relies on models, through which we build software-platform independent models. Several contributions of MDD are: gains of productivity; concepts closer to domain and reduction of semantic gap; automation and less sensitivity to technological changes; and capture of expert knowledge and reuse. This thesis aims to contribute for the appropriate use of model-based/driven development approaches in software development for pervasive information systems (PIS). This work considers a case study research strategy. It uses two projects developed in the field of ubiquitous and mobile computing that directed their software development to a model-based/driven approach. This thesis describes and analyses the projects. Each one of the project is formalized in a SPEM 2.0 model that presents the main elements of the project. This SPEM model allows perceiving the structure and elements of the project, along with some issues and facts of the project. This thesis conceives a development framework that introduces several useful conceptions. Among these conceptions are the dimensions of development, functional profiles, resources categories, functional profile instances, global and elementary development process. In consonance with this development framework, the thesis proposes a SPEM 2.0 Base Plug-In extension and a development framework pattern to assist in the analysis of the projects. The SPEM 2.0 Base Plug-In extension defines elements that are fundamental to the definition and application of the development framework pattern. The development framework pattern is applied to each of the projects to facilitate the analysis. From the analysis of the projects, the thesis synthesizes a set of guidelines and insight related to the adoption of model-based/driven approaches to pervasive information system development.A computação ubíqua é um campo de investigação de tecnologia de computação com um número crescente de investigadores e representa uma nova direcção no pensamento sobre a integração e o uso de computadores na vida das pessoas. O objectivo é alcançar um novo paradigma de computação em que há um alto grau de abrangência e ampla disponibilidade de computadores ou outros dispositivos de tecnologias de informação, geralmente com recursos de comunicação, no ambiente físico. Model-Driven Development (MDD), constitui uma abordagem de desenho e desenvolvimento de software que se baseia em modelos, através da qual construímos modelos de plataforma de software independentes. Várias contribuições de MDD são: ganhos de produtividade; conceitos mais próximos ao domínio e à redução do salto semântico; automação e menor sensibilidade às mudanças tecnológicas; captura de conhecimento especializado e reutilização. Esta tese visa contribuir para a adequada utilização de abordagens de desenvolvimento baseadas/conduzidas por modelos no desenvolvimento de software para sistemas de informação “pervasive” (PIS). Esta tese apresenta uma estratégia de investigação de estudo de caso. Usa, como estudos de caso, dois projectos desenvolvidos no campo da computação ubíqua e móvel, e os quais dirigiram o seu desenvolvimento de software para uma abordagem baseada/conduzida por modelos. Esta tese descreve e analisa os projectos; cada um dos projectos é formalizado num modelo SPEM 2.0 que apresenta os elementos principais do projecto. Este modelo SPEM permite perceber a estrutura e os elementos do projecto, juntamente com alguns problemas e factos do projecto. Esta tese concebe uma estrutura de desenvolvimento que apresenta várias concepções úteis. Entre essas concepções estão as dimensões de desenvolvimento, os perfis funcionais, as categorias de recursos, instâncias de perfil funcional, os processos de desenvolvimento global e elementar. Em consonância com esta estrutura de desenvolvimento, a tese propõe uma extensão ao SPEM 2.0 Base Plug- In e um padrão de desenvolvimento para auxiliarem a análise dos projectos. A extensão ao SPEM 2.0 Base Plug-In define elementos que são fundamentais para a definição e aplicação do padrão de estrutura de desenvolvimento. O padrão de estrutura de desenvolvimento é aplicado a cada um dos projectos para facilitar a sua análise. A partir da análise dos projectos, a tese sintetiza um conjunto de directrizes e de ilações relacionadas com a adopção de abordagens MDD para o desenvolvimento de PIS.Programa Operacional Educacional (PRODEP), e do Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, através da sua Escola Superior de Tecnologia e de Gestão.Instituto Politécnico de Bragança. Escola Superior de Tecnologia e de Gestã

A bottom-up process management environment dedicated to process actors

Les organisations adoptent de plus en plus les environnements de gestion des processus car ils offrent des perspectives prometteuses d'exécution en termes de flexibilité et d'efficacité. Les environnements traditionnels proposent cependant une approche descendante qui nécessite, de la part de concepteurs, l'élaboration d'un modèle avant sa mise en oeuvre par les acteurs qui le déploient tout au long du cycle d'ingénierie. En raison de cette divergence, un différentiel important est souvent constaté entre les modèles de processus et leur mise en oeuvre. De par l'absence de prise directe avec les acteurs de terrain, le niveau opérationnel des environnements de processus est trop faiblement exploité, en particulier en ingénierie des systèmes et des logiciels. Afin de faciliter l'utilisation des environnements de processus, cette thèse présente une approche ascendante mettant les acteurs du processus au coeur de la problématique. L'approche proposée autorise conjointement la modélisation et la mise en oeuvre de leurs activités quotidiennes. Dans cet objectif, notre approche s'appuie sur la description des artéfacts produits et consommés durant l'exécution d'une activité. Cette description permet à chaque acteur du processus de décrire le fragment de processus exprimant les activités dictées par son rôle. Le processus global se décompose ainsi en plusieurs fragments appartenant à différents rôles. Chaque fragment est modélisé indépendamment des autres fragments ; il peut aussi être greffé progressivement au modèle de processus initial. La modélisation des processus devient ainsi moins complexe et plus parcellaire. En outre, un fragment de processus ne modélise que l'aspect structurel des activités d'un rôle sans anticiper sur le comportement des activités ; il est moins prescriptif qu'un ordonnancement des activités de l'acteur. Un moteur de processus basé sur la production et la consommation d'artéfacts a été développé pour promulguer des activités provenant de différents fragments de processus. Ce moteur ne requiert pas de relations prédéfinies d'ordonnancement entre les activités pour les synchroniser, mais déduit leur dépendance à partir de leurs artéfacts échangés. Les dépendances sont représentées et actualisées au sein d'un graphe appelé Process Dependency Graph (PDG) qui reflète à tout instant l'état courant de l'exécution du processus. Cet environnement a été étendu afin de gérer les changements imprévus qui se produisent inévitablement lors de la mise en oeuvre des processus. Ce dispositif permet aux acteurs de signaler des changements émergents, d'analyser les impacts possibles et de notifier les personnes affectées par les modifications. En résumé, notre approche préconise de répartir les tâches d'un processus en plusieurs fragments, modélisés et adoptés séparément par les acteurs du processus. Le moteur de processus, qui s'appuie sur la disponibilité des artéfacts pour synchroniser les activités, permet d'exécuter indépendamment les fragments des processus. Il permet aussi l'exécution d'un processus partiellement défini pour lequel certains fragments seraient manquants. La vision globale de l'état d'avancement des différents acteurs concernés émerge au fur et à mesure de l'exécution des fragments. Cette nouvelle approche vise à intégrer au mieux les acteurs du processus dans le cycle de vie de la gestion des processus, ce qui rend ces systèmes plus attractifs et plus proches de leurs préoccupations.Companies increasingly adopt process management environments, which offer promising perspectives for a more flexible and efficient process execution. Traditional process management environments embodies a top-down approach in which process modeling is performed by process designers and process enacting is performed by process actors. Due to this separation, there is often a gap between process models and their real enactments. As a consequence, the operational level of top down process environments has stayed low, especially in system and software industry, because they are not directly relevant to process actors' needs. In order to facilitate the usage of process environments for process actors, this thesis presents a user-centric and bottom-up approach that enables integration of process actors into process management life cycle by allowing them to perform both the modeling and enacting of their real processes. To this end, first, a bottom-up approach based on the artifact-centric modeling paradigm was proposed to allow each process actor to easily describe the process fragment containing the activities carried out by his role. The global process is thus decomposed into several fragments belonging to different roles. Each fragment can be modeled independently of other fragments and can be added progressively to the process model; therefore the process modeling becomes less complex and more partial. Moreover, a process fragment models only the structural aspect of a role's activities without anticipating the behavior of these activities; therefore the process model is less prescriptive. Second, a data-driven process engine was developed to enact activities coming from different process fragments. Our process engine does not require predefined work-sequence relations among these activities to synchronize them, but deduces such dependencies from their enactment-time exchanged artifacts. We used a graph structure name Process Dependency Graph (PDG) to store enactment-time process information and establish the dependencies among process elements. Third, we extend our process environment in order to handle unforeseen changes occurring during process enactment. This results in a Change-Aware Process Environment that allows process actors reporting emergent changes, analyzing possible impacts and notifying people affected by the changes. In our bottom-up approach, a process is split into several fragments separately modeled and enacted by process actors. Our data-driven process engine, which uses the availability of working artifacts to synchronize activities, enables enacting independently process fragments, and even a partially modeled process where some fragments are missing. The global process progressively emerges only at enactment time from the execution of process fragments. This new approach, with its simpler modeling and more flexible enactment, integrates better process actors into process management life cycle, and hence makes process management systems more attractive and useful for them

Mobile Learning: location, collaboration and scaffolding inquiry

Critiques of mobile learning pedagogy are concerned with whether such approaches are technology led. This chapter discusses how the particular features of mobile learning can be harnessed to provide new learning opportunities in relation to collaboration, inquiry and location-based learning. Technology supported inquiry learning is a situation rich with possibilities for collaboration. In particular, mobile learning offers new possibilities for scaffolding collaboration together with its other better-known features such as scaffolding the transfer between settings and making learning relevant by making use of the possibilities of location-based learning. These features are considered as part of mobile learning models, in particular mobile collaborative learning models