Towards Process-Aware Cross-Organizational Human Resource Management

Finding human resources with the required set of skills, experience, and availability to execute an activity at a specific moment, is a socio-technical challenge for enterprises that use business-process aware systems. On an intra-organizational level, there exists an increasing body of knowledge for automated human-resource management. However, the recent pervasiveness of service-oriented cloud computing combined with mobile devices and big data, has resulted in the emergence of crossorganizational ecosystems in which workforce is distributed. Consequently, human-resource management has to consider more requirements compared to a purely intra-organizational setting. This position paper addresses the gap and describes a set of challenges in the management of human resources in service outsourcing scenarios based on process views and automatic process-view matching. The contribution is a specification of research directions that must be pursued so that resource management successfully adopts the special requirements for scaling to a cross-organizational level. Keywords: human resource management, process matching, process view, resource allocation, resource assignment, service outsourcin

SOA4All: enabling Web-scale service economies

Establishing Web services as resources on the Web opens up highly productive but challenging new possibilities for service economies. In addition, lifting services to the semantic level enables more sophisticated means for automating the service-related management processes and the composition of arbitrary functionality into new services and businesses. In this paper we present the SOA4All approach to a global service delivery platform. By means of semantic technologies, SOA4All facilitates the creation of service infrastructures and increases the interoperability between large numbers of distributed and heterogeneous functionalities on the Web

A semi-automated digital preservation system based on semantic Web services

This paper describes a Web-services-based system which we have developed to enable organizations to semi -automatically preserve their digital collections by dynamically discovering and invoking the most appropriate preservation service, as it is required. By periodically comparing preservation metadata for digital objects in a collection with a software version registry, potential object obsolescence can be detected and a notification message sent to the relevant agent. By making preservation software modules available as Web services and describing them semantically using a machine-processable ontology (OWL-S), the most appropriate preservation service(s) for each object can then be automatically discovered, composed and invoked by software agents (with optional human input at critical decision-making steps). We believe that this approach represents a significant advance towards providing a viable, cost-effective solution to the long term preservation of large-scale collections of digital objects

Semantically-Enhanced Information Extraction

Information Extraction using Natural Language Processing (NLP) produces entities along with some of the relationships that may exist among them. To be semantically useful, however, such discrete extractions must be put into context through some form of intelligent analysis. This paper1,2 offers a two-part architecture that employs the statistical methods of traditional NLP to extract discrete information elements in a relatively domain-agnostic manner, which are then injected into an inference-enabled environment where they can be semantically analyzed. Within this semantic environment, extractions are woven into the contextual fabric of a user-provided, domain-centric ontology where users together with user-provided logic can analyze these extractions within a more contextually complete picture. Our demonstration system infers the possibility of a terrorist plot by extracting key events and relationships from a collection of news articles and intelligence reports

COWS: A Timed Service-Oriented Calculus

COWS (Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services) is a foundational language for Service Oriented Computing that combines in an original way a number of ingredients borrowed from well-known process calculi, e.g. asynchronous communication, polyadic synchronization, pattern matching, protection, delimited receiving and killing activities, while resulting different from any of them. In this paper, we extend COWS with timed orchestration constructs, this way we obtain a language capable of completely formalizing the semantics of WS-BPEL, the ‘de facto’ standard language for orchestration of web services. We present the semantics of the extended language and illustrate its peculiarities and expressiveness by means of several examples

A metadata service for service oriented architectures

Service oriented architectures provide a modern paradigm for web services allowing seamless interoperation among network applications and supporting a flexible approach to building large complex information systems. A number of industrial standards have emerged to exploit this paradigm with the development o f the J2E E and .N E T infrastructure platforms, communication protocol SOAP, d e scription language WSDL and orchestration languages BPEL, XLANG and WSCI. At the same time the Semantic Web enables automated use of ontologies to describe web services in a machine interpretable language. To enable process composition and large scale resource integration over heterogeneous sources a new research in itiative is needed. Current initiatives have identified the role of Peer-to-Peer networks and Service Oriented Architectures to enable large scale resource communication an d integration. However this approach neglects to identify or utilise the role of Semantic Web technologies to promote greater automation and reliability using service semantics, thus a new framework is required adopting Peer-to-Peer networks, Service Oriented Architectures and Semantic Web technologies. In this context, this thesis presents a management an d storage framework for a distributed service repository over a super peer network to facilitate process composition

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Service discovery and negotiation with COWS

To provide formal foundations to current (web) services technologies, we put forward using COWS, a process calculus for specifying, combining and analysing services, as a uniform formalism for modelling all the relevant phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, deployment and execution. In this paper, we show that constraints and operations on them can be smoothly incorporated in COWS, and propose a disciplined way to model multisets of constraints and to manipulate them through appropriate interaction protocols. Therefore, we demonstrate that also QoS requirement specifications and SLA achievements, and the phases of dynamic service discovery and negotiation can be comfortably modelled in COWS. We illustrate our approach through a scenario for a service-based web hosting provider

A Reference Model for Common Understanding of Capabilities and Skills in Manufacturing

In manufacturing, many use cases of Industry 4.0 require vendor-neutral and machine-readable information models to describe, implement and execute resource functions. Such models have been researched under the terms capabilities and skills. Standardization of such models is required, but currently not available. This paper presents a reference model developed jointly by members of various organizations in a working group of the Plattform Industrie 4.0. This model covers definitions of most important aspects of capabilities and skills. It can be seen as a basis for further standardization efforts