Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

From Print to Digital: Implications for Dictionary Policy and Lexicographic Conventions

Editorial policies and lexicographic conventions have evolved over hundreds of years. They developed at a time when dictionaries were printed books of finite dimensions — as they have been for almost the whole of their history. In many cases, styles which we take for granted as "natural" features of dictionaries are in reality expedients designed to compress maximum information into the limited space available. A simple example is the kind of "recursive" definition found in many English dictionaries where a nominalization (such as assimilation) is defined in terms of the related verb ("the act of assimilating or state of being assimilated"), and the user is required to make a second look-up (to the base word). Is this an ideal solution, or was it favoured simply as a less space-intensive alternative to a self-sufficient explanation?As dictionaries gradually migrate from print to digital media, space constraints disappear. Some problems simply evaporate. To give a trivial example, the need for abbreviations, tildes and the like no longer exists (though a surprising number of dictionaries maintain these conventions even in their digital versions). So the question arises whether we need to revisit, and re-evaluate, the entire range of editorial policies and conventions in the light of changed circumstances. This paper looks at some familiar editorial and presentational conventions, and considers which are no longer appropriate in the digital medium — and what new policies might replace them.Keywords:  Definitions, example sentences, digital media, exclusion Criteria, gatekeeper, lexicographic conventions, online dictionary, user profil