Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

GUISET: A CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF A GRID-ENABLED PORTAL FOR E-COMMERCE ON-DEMAND SERVICES

Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been largely influenced by the usual functional requirements such as security requirements, grid resource requirements and job management requirements. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms mean that additional requirements must be considered in order to realize effective grid-enabled portals design for such platforms. This work investigates those relevant additional requirements that must be considered for the design of grid-enabled portals for utility computing contexts. Based on a thorough review of literature, we identified a number of those relevant additional requirements, and developed a grid-enabled portal prototype for the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for SMME-enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a utility computing platform. The GUISET portal was designed to cater for both the traditional grid requirements and some of the relevant additional requirements for utility computing contexts. The result of the evaluation of the GUISET portal prototype using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for the utility context

Actas del Taller de Trabajo Zoco’08 / JISBD Integración de Aplicaciones Web : XIII Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos Gijón, 7 al 10 de Octubre de 2008

Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007-64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-0260

Käsitteellinen lähestymistapa organisatoristen verkostojen tutkimukseen

Tutkimusympäristöt joissa eri tieteenalojen tutkijat toimivat yhdessä ratkaistakseen verkostoissa toimivien kumppaniyritysten ongelmia ovat haasteellisia tiedonvaihdon ja tutkimustiedon keräämisen kannalta. Vaikka tutkimuskohde on yhteinen, tutkijat lähestyvät sitä omien tieteidensä näkökulmasta käyttäen siihen teorioita ja menetelmiä jotka eivät ole yhteensopiva muiden kanssa. Lapin yliopistossa tehdyn tutkimustyön aikana nämä ongelmat tulivat esiin, kun useissa monialaisissa projekteissa tarkasteltiin liiketoimintaverkostoja sekä teollisuusliiketoiminnan että matkailun alalta. Projektien kohteina olevissa verkostoissa yritykset pyrkivät tyypillisesti hakemaan verkostotoiminnasta hyötyjä informaatioteknologian avulla tehostaakseen liiketoimintasuhteitaan ja siten edesauttamaan johtamiseen ja operatiiviseen toimintaan liittyvää tiedonkulkua. Pääasiallinen ongelma näissä ympäristöissä tapahtuvassa tutkimuksessa on, että uudet projektit eivät helposti pysty hyödyntämään edellisten projektien tuotoksia, koska aikaisemmin kerättyä tutkimustietoa, analyysejä tai luotuja ratkaisumalleja ei ole saatavilla siinä muodossa että ne voitaisiin ottaa uuden tutkimuksen pohjaksi. Tässä työssä on tarkasteltu ja kehitetty käsitteellisiä malleja ja niihin liittyviä menetelmiä, jotka tukevat monitieteistä liiketoimintaverkostojen tutkimusta, ja samalla tekevät mahdolliseksi hyödyntää jo olemassa olevaa tutkimustietoa. Tässä diplomityössä kehitetty ratkaisu perustuu liiketoimintaverkostojen analysointiin käsitemallintamisen avulla. Tämän tuloksena on luotu organisatoristen ympäristöjen käsitemalli, joka keskittyy integraatiota edistäviin yhteistoimintasuhteisiin, ja kuvattu siihen liittyvä tutkimuksellinen prosessi joka mahdollistaa projektin aikana syntyvän tutkimusaineiston käsitteellistämisen ja lisätiedon liitämisen niihin. Tämä helpottaa tutkimustiedon jäsentämistä ja sen jakamista tutkijoiden ja kohdealueen toimijoiden välillä. Lisäksi työssä määritellään metatietokuvauksia ja rajattuja sanastoja jotka perustuvat semanttisen webin tekniikoihin, joilla voidaan luokitella eri projektien aikana syntyviä tutkimusartefakteja ja hallinnoida tutkimustietoa.The research settings, where project teams consisting of researchers from different scientific fields, and working together to provide solutions to the issues of networked partner organizations, are challenging in terms of communicating and accumulating research knowledge. Although the focus of the research is shared, difficulties emerge because it is explored from different scientific perspectives, relying on theories and methods that do not match with others. This observation was made during research work conducted at the University of Lapland in projects that concentrated on business networks in the manufacturing and tourism industries. The organizations in these commercial environments typically seek benefits from information technology to intensify the network-wide business relationships and to improve knowledge-intensive operations and management. The main problem is that new projects cannot easily benefit from the results of past projects because the collected research materials, analyses and models are not easily found and they are difficult to align with the objectives of new projects. In this work, to resolve theses issues, conceptual models and related approaches have been analyzed and elaborated to support cross disciplinary research on business networks, and at the same time enable the re-use and sharing of research knowledge. The solution presented in this Master's thesis has been developed by relying on conceptual modelling approaches to analyze business networks. As a result, general concept model of inter-organizational environments has been built that focuses on the integrative relationships in them. Further, accompanying research process that enabies the conceptualization and annotating of the project research outcomes has been constructed. This helps in organizing and sharing research information between researchers and stakeholders. Additionally, metadata descriptions and controlled vocabularies based on semantic web technologies are defined to align research constructs originating from different projects and to support research knowledge management

Ontology-based information standards development

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Standards may be argued to be important enablers for achieving interoperability as they aim to provide unambiguous specifications for error-free exchange of documents and information. By implication, therefore, it is important to model and represent the concept of a standard in a clear, precise and unambiguous way. Although standards development organisations usually provide guidelines for the process of developing and approving standards, they are usually more concerned with administrative aspect of the process. As a consequence, the state-of-the-art lacks practical support for developing the structure and content of a standard specification. In short, there is no systematic development method currently available: (a) For developing the conceptual model underpinning a standard; and/or (b) to guide a group of stakeholders to develop a standard specification. Semantic interoperability is considered to be an essential factor for effective interoperation – the ability to achieve semantic interoperability effectively and efficiently being strongly equated with quality by some. Semantics require that the meaning of terms, their relationships and also the restrictions and rules in the standards should be clearly defined in the early stages of standard development and act as a basis for the latter stages. This research proposes that ontology can help standards developers and stakeholders to address the issues of improving conceptual models and providing a robust and shared understanding of the domain. This thesis presents OntoStanD, a comprehensive ontology-based standards development methodology, which utilises the best practices of the existing ontology creation methods. The potential value of OntoStanD is in providing a comprehensive, clear and unambiguous method for developing robust information standards, which are more test friendly and of higher quality. OntoStanD also facilitates standards conformance testing and change management, impacts interoperability and also assists in improved communication among the standards development team. Last, OntoStanD provides an approach that is repeatable, teachable and potentially general enough for creating any kinds of information standard.Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Ltd, Google Anitaborg Memorial Scholarshi

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

Frameworks and models to identify and increase the success potential of e-services

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Ontology-based information standards development

Standards may be argued to be important enablers for achieving interoperability as they aim to provide unambiguous specifications for error-free exchange of documents and information. By implication, therefore, it is important to model and represent the concept of a standard in a clear, precise and unambiguous way. Although standards development organisations usually provide guidelines for the process of developing and approving standards, they are usually more concerned with administrative aspect of the process. As a consequence, the state-of-the-art lacks practical support for developing the structure and content of a standard specification. In short, there is no systematic development method currently available: (a) For developing the conceptual model underpinning a standard; and/or (b) to guide a group of stakeholders to develop a standard specification. Semantic interoperability is considered to be an essential factor for effective interoperation – the ability to achieve semantic interoperability effectively and efficiently being strongly equated with quality by some. Semantics require that the meaning of terms, their relationships and also the restrictions and rules in the standards should be clearly defined in the early stages of standard development and act as a basis for the latter stages. This research proposes that ontology can help standards developers and stakeholders to address the issues of improving conceptual models and providing a robust and shared understanding of the domain. This thesis presents OntoStanD, a comprehensive ontology-based standards development methodology, which utilises the best practices of the existing ontology creation methods. The potential value of OntoStanD is in providing a comprehensive, clear and unambiguous method for developing robust information standards, which are more test friendly and of higher quality. OntoStanD also facilitates standards conformance testing and change management, impacts interoperability and also assists in improved communication among the standards development team. Last, OntoStanD provides an approach that is repeatable, teachable and potentially general enough for creating any kinds of information standard.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceFujitsu Laboratories of Europe LtdGoogle Anitaborg Memorial ScholarshipGBUnited Kingdo