Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales

Ontologies, Disorders and Prototypes

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field (such as, in the first place, the Web Ontology Language - OWL) do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. The need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific disorders. We favour a hybrid approach to concept representation, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual space. As a preliminary step to apply our proposal to mental disorder concepts, we started to develop an OWL ontology of the schizophrenia spectrum, which is as close as possible to the DSM-5 descriptions

Modeling Adoption, Security, and Privacy of COVID-19 Apps: Findings and Recommendations From an Empirical Study Using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology

Background: The global health crisis caused by COVID-19 has drastically changed human society in a relatively short time. However, this crisis has offered insights into the different roles that such a worldwide virus plays in the lives of people and how those have been affected, as well as eventually proposing new solutions. From the beginning of the pandemic, technology solutions have featured prominently in virus control and in the frame of reference for international travel, especially contact tracing and passenger locator applications. Objective: The objective of this paper is to study specific areas of technology acceptance and adoption following a unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) research model. Methods: We presented a research model based on UTAUT constructs to study the determinants for adoption of COVID-19–related apps using a questionnaire. We tested the model via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) using travelers’ data from an insular tourist region. Results: Our model explained 90.3% of the intention to use (N=9555) and showed an increased understanding of the vital role of safety, security, privacy, and trust in the usage intention of safety apps. Results also showed how the impact of COVID-19 is not a strong predictor of adoption, while age, education level, and social capital are essential moderators of behavioral intention. Conclusions: In terms of scientific impact, the results described here provide important insights and contributions not only for researchers but also for policy and decision makers by explaining the reasons behind the adoption and usage of apps designed for COVID-19.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

What is a process model composed of? A systematic literature review of meta-models in BPM

Business process modelling languages typically enable the representation of business process models by employing (graphical) symbols. These symbols can vary depending upon the verbosity of the language, the modelling paradigm, the focus of the language and so on. To make explicit different constructs and rules employed by a specific language, as well as bridge the gap across different languages, meta-models have been proposed in the literature. These meta-models are a crucial source of knowledge on what state-of-the-art literature considers relevant to describe business processes. The goal of this work is to provide the first extensive systematic literature review (SLR) of business process meta-models. This SLR aims to answer research questions concerning: (1) the kind of meta-models proposed in the literature, (2) the recurring constructs they contain, (3) their purposes and (4) their evaluations. The SRL was performed manually considering papers automatically retrieved from reference paper repositories as well as proceedings of the main conferences in the Business Process Management research area. Sixty-five papers were selected and evaluated against four research questions. The results indicate the existence of a reasonable body of work conducted in this specific area, but not a full maturity. In particular, in answering the research questions several challenges have (re-)emerged for the Business Process Community, concerning: (1) the type of elements that constitute a Business Process and their meaning, (2) the absence of a (or several) reference meta-model(s) for the community, (3) the purpose for which meta-models are introduced in the literature and (4) a framework for the evaluation of the meta-models themselves. Moreover, the classification framework devised to answer the four research questions can provide a reference structure for future descriptive categorizations

Towards Sustainable Island Futures: Design for Ocean Wave Energy

This article explores the role of the future in contemporary technology design, and examines how imagination can influence the present through the mechanism of speculation. Three applications of futures are introduced: extrapolation examines present data and trends to predict possible futures, reflecting on the present imagines possible futures for insights on current practices, while backcasting visualizes a preferred future and plots a trajectory from the present to achieve it. Design speculations for Ocean Wave Energy capture systems are presented that illustrate the shaping of the future with conceptual prototypes, and a future narrative when humanity has averted a climate catastrophe

Beyond arrows in process models: A user study on activity dependences and their rationales

Despite the number and variety of business process modelling languages and notations available in the Business Process Management field, all of them mainly focus on a single type of relationship holding between business process activities, namely the activity execution order within the control flow. However, other types of relationships may hold between activities (e.g., co-occurrence or causal constraints) and the motivation behind these relationships can also be different (e.g., a norm or an ontological law-of-nature). In this paper, we focus on one type of these activity relationships whose semantics goes beyond the semantics of arrows in traditional business process modelling languages, i.e., on the so called occurrence dependences. In particular, we aim at evaluating whether making these occurrence dependences explicit in business process models could support business process modellers and analysts in their tasks. To this aim, we propose a notation for representing the occurrence dependences and their rationale, and carry out an empirical study with human subjects for evaluating their support in comprehension and redesign tasks; in addition, we qualitatively investigate the effort required for enriching business process models with these dependences

BPMN 2.0 Choreography Language: Interface or Business Contract?

Choreography diagrams have been introduced in the Business Process Model and Notation language 2.0 (BPMN 2.0), one among the most used languages for modelling and analyzing business processes in industry, in order to provide a view on the interaction between participants. Besides the intuitive definition of choreographies as interfaces among participants, the BPMN 2.0 specifications also define choreographies as business contracts among the parties. However, the adoption and the diffusion of the business contract nature of choreography diagrams seem to be hindered by the underspecification of the notation, which does not allow to model and formalize constraints and relationships among choreography entities,which would need to be specified in a business contract. In this paper we provide a preliminary investigation of some of the open issues characterizing BPMN 2.0 choreography diagrams when looking at the business contract nature of the notation, by focusing on those related to messages and participants

BPMN 2.0 Choreography Language: Interface or Business Contract?

Choreography diagrams have been introduced in the Business Process Model and Notation language 2.0 (BPMN 2.0), one among the most used languages for modelling and analyzing business processes in industry, in order to provide a view on the interaction between participants. Besides the intuitive definition of choreographies as interfaces among participants, the BPMN 2.0 specifications also define choreographies as business contracts among the parties. However, the adoption and the diffusion of the business contract nature of choreography diagrams seem to be hindered by the underspecification of the notation, which does not allow to model and formalize constraints and relationships among choreography entities, which would need to be specified in a business contract. In this paper we provide a preliminary investigation of some of the open issues characterizing BPMN 2.0 choreography diagrams when looking at the business contract nature of the notation, by focusing on those related to messages and participants

Business Processes and Their Participants: An Ontological Perspective

Business process modelling (BPM) notations, such as BPMN, UML-Activity Diagram (UML-AD), EPC and CMMN describe processes using a graphical representation of process-relevant entities and their interplay. Despite the wide literature on the comparison between different modelling languages, the BPM community still lacks an ontological characterisation of process elements, among which process participants, that is, the main entities involved in a business process. Purpose of this paper is to start filling this gap by providing an ontological analysis of business processes from the standpoint of process participants. In particular, by discussing participants common to languages such as BPMN, EPC, UML-AD, and CMMN we characterize them on the basis of their ontological properties