Do Process Modelling Techniques Get Better? A Comparative Ontological Analysis of BPMN

Current initiatives in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) strive for the development of a BPM standard notation by pushing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). However, such a proposed standard notation needs to be carefully examined. Ontological analysis is an established theoretical approach to evaluating modelling techniques. This paper reports on the outcomes of an ontological analysis of BPMN and explores identified issues by reporting on interviews conducted with BPMN users in Australia. Complementing this analysis we consolidate our findings with previous ontological analyses of process modelling notations to deliver a comprehensive assessment of BPMN

Business Process Assessment and Evaluation in Public Administrations using Activity Based Costing

Public administrations in Germany currently face challenges of cost reduction and modernization. Furthermore, Pan-European directives foster process harmonization and introduction of IT-supported and optimized processes. Hereby activity-based costing can be a useful instrument for process assessment and evaluation. Especially through the introduction of New Public Management and double-entry accounting Public Administrations in Germany now get the opportunity to use cost-centered accounting mechanisms to assess process performance and evaluate their activities in a holistic concept. Process Modeling can be a useful instrument to help the public administrations to structure their activities and capture information about them and thereby create a basis for activity-based costing. Therefore, the aim of this article is combining the domain specific process modeling method PICTURE and concept of activity-based costing for supporting Public Administrations in process assessment and evaluation

Toward more rigor in ontological analyses

Ontological analyses have been used in numerous publications to compare existing modelling grammars with an ontology. However, a sound theoretical research framework is still missing. Consequently, working with the results of such ontological analyses is theoretically questionable. The aim of the paper is threefold. Firstly, we want to contribute to such a theoretical research framework by formalising the ontological analyses approach. Secondly, we derive four formal requirements each ontological analyses must comply with. Lastly, we analyse whether current state of the art ontological analyses comply with our findings. While the formalisation demonstrates the strengths of the approach we conclude that current ontological analyses have theoretical deficiencies, which lead to serious limitations in their application

Ontological clarity and comprehension in health data models

Conceptual modeling forms an important part of systems analysis. If this is done incorrectly or incompletely, there can be serious implications for the resultant system, specifically in terms of rework and useability. One approach to improving the conceptual modelling process is to evaluate how well the model represents reality. Emergence of the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) ontological model introduced a platform to classify and compare the grammar of conceptual modelling languages. This work applies the BWW theory to a real world example in the health arena. The general practice computing group data model was developed using the Barker Entity Relationship Modelling technique. We describe an experiment, grounded in ontological theory, which evaluates how well the GPCG data model is understood by domain experts. The results show that with the exception of the use of entities to represent events, the raw model is better understood by domain expert

Applying Grounded Theory to Conceptual Data Modeling: Effects of Constant Comparative Method

This article presents an experimental design and the pilot experiment results of applying grounded theory to conceptual datamodeling. The objective of this study is to develop a procedural method for concept discovery, which is essential in datamodeling. The research focuses on addressing the lack of procedural methods for understanding domain knowledge by datamodeler. The key idea of this article is that conceptual modeling can be strengthened by applying a constant comparativemethod of coding and analysis, which has been used to discover concepts in the social sciences. This article contributes newknowledge about the effects of applying interdisciplinary concept discovery in the context of conceptual data modeling. Theresults of the pilot experiment show that the proposed approach would have positive results

Evaluation of Conceptual Models - A Structuralist Approach

The quality and thus the validation of conceptual models are of high economic importance. However, only little empirical work has focused on their evaluation so far. This raises the question whether a holistic approach to determining the quality of conceptual models is available yet. In order to describe the current state of research and to expose the so far neglected research fields we develop a two dimensional framework. With the help of this framework we can identify a notable shortcoming on conceptual model evaluation. Contrary to models on theories a lot of empirical work has been performed. Therefore we apply the structuralist approach from philosophy of science in order to develop an inner structure of conceptual models. Based on these findings we deduce the structural requirements that conceptual models shall meet. We explain the practical implications of our proposal and sketch an outlook to future scientific inquiries

Un outil d'assistance à la construction de tests de modèles à composants et services

National audienceDans l’article "COSTOTest : A Tool for Building and Running Test Harness forService-Based Component Models" publié dans les proceedings de la conférenceinternationale ISSTA 2016 [1] et présenté en session démonstration, nous décrivonscomment l’outil COSTOTest nous assiste pour tester directement les modèles decomposants logiciels basés sur les services. Ces travaux concernent la vérificationde systèmes logiciels à base de composants et services (Service-based Componentou SBC) et exploitent l’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles (IDM)