Design of a New Data Structure to Support Non-Invasive Diagnostic on Heritage Metals

Conservation of heritage artifacts is a very sensitive task as conservators usually have very little information about the artifacts. Moreover, due to the uniqueness and the historic value of these artifacts, invasive analysis are not always possible. Therefore, without sampling options, conservators are required to use non-invasive diagnostic methods in order to identify the metal characteristics of the artifact. When confronted with an unknown artifact, conservators generate conceptual models of the corrosion forms. These models are based on formal representations of corrosion forms, but are not directly exploitable for drawing hypotheses regarding the underlying metal. This paper presents the design of a data structure generated from the conceptual models which supports the comparison and retrieval of corresponding artifacts. Integrated with a database of heritage artifacts, this data structure offers advanced decision support to conservators confronted with unknown artifacts

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Research in Business Process Management: A bibliometric analysis

It contains several growing subtopics such as process mining, process flexibility and process compliance. BPM is also highly relevant for numerous related fields, such as Business Intelligence, ERP systems or Knowledge Management. The growing number of publications and the variety of topics in BPM make it useful to apply bibliometric methods on this scientific field. With bibliometric methods, topical clusters, essential authors and the relationships between them can be discovered. In this work, the BibTechMon software from the Austrian Institute of Technology is utilized to perform the bibliometric analyses. As a novelty for the work with BibTechMon, data from Google Scholar is used as the basis of the analyses. The nature of Google Scholar data differs significantly from the data of other scientific databases. These differences lead to changes on how the bibliometric analyses can be performed. After these changes have been assessed, several bibliometric analyses in the BPM field and related fields are performed. As a result of these analyses, diverse topical clusters in BPM and its related fields could be discovered. Additionally, important authors for each cluster and for the BPM field as a whole were determined. In order to evaluate the results of the bibliometric analyses, I conducted an interview on BPM with Professor Reichert, who is an active researcher in the field. Subsequently, his statements are compared with the results of the bibliometric analyses and the match between the bibliometric analyses and his statements is assessed

Linking data and BPMN processes to achieve executable models

We describe a formally well founded approach to link data and processes conceptually, based on adopting UML class diagrams to represent data, and BPMN to represent the process. The UML class diagram together with a set of additional process variables, called Artifact, form the information model of the process. All activities of the BPMN process refer to such an information model by means of OCL operation contracts. We show that the resulting semantics while abstract is fully executable. We also provide an implementation of the executor.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An MDA Approach to Business Process Model Transformations

We present in this work an MDA approach for the definition of transformations for business process models. These transformations are based on the use of two platform independent workflow universal languages –UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams and BPMN– and a platform specific language, the XPDL language. The first two languages are used in the definition of a horizontal transformation, while BPMN and XPDL are used in the definition of a vertical transformation. Although there are several options for a model transformation language, we have adhered to one of the principles of MDA, namely the use of standards, therefore adopting the QVT language, which is the transformation language proposed by the OMG. We also show, in this work, a practical case of an application of the transformations proposed here.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ