The structured phase of concurrency

This extended abstract summarizes the state-of-the-art solution to the structuring problem for models that describe existing real world or envisioned processes. Special attention is devoted to models that allow for the true concurrency semantics. Given a model of a process, the structuring problem deals with answering the question of whether there exists another model that describes the process and is solely composed of structured patterns, such as sequence, selection, option for simultaneous execution, and iteration. Methods and techniques for structuring developed by academia as well as products and standards proposed by industry are discussed. Expectations and recommendations on the future advancements of the structuring problem are suggested

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

A Service-Learning Contract: Clarity, Commitment, and Completion

A student was reporting her service-learning experience to her classmates during a reflection session. She was hesitant to begin ... and then explained \Vhy. Everyone in the class seemed to be having fun and fulfillment in their experiences. She said, My experience isn\u27t fun. I don\u27t know what I\u27m supposed to be doing; I don\u27t even think they know I\u27m there, and I don\u27t think I want to finish my service. She then said, I think we need something like ... a learning contract

The Politicisation gap in socio-ecological transitions: lessons from Portugal

The multiple challenges of the Anthropocene set a new context for transformative social innovation towards a form of living and working based on the principles of sustainability. Community-based initiatives (CBIs), the most visible representatives of the latter, have started to appear worldwide and are increasingly perceived as a crucial actor in the socio-ecological transition towards sustainability. CBIs are receiving a growing attention from transdisciplinary academia. Yet, there remains a research blind spot on the transformative social innovation dynamics in Portugal. This paper addresses this gap by inquiring into Portugal’s CBI dynamics, appearance, buildup, reach and future transitional pathways. Having traversed a rapid and significant growth over the last decade, CBIs, their practices and discourses are still marginalised in Portugal’s public arenas. Therefore, this paper argues, Portuguese CBIs remain an untapped resource for socio-ecological transitions and institutional innovation in Portugal. We scrutinize why the latter falter to engage head-on with the public and political spheres and identify key contextual changes and premises that determine CBIs social innovation potential in Portugal: a) CBIs need to engage the existent institutional landscape and become politicized change actors in order to sit at key decisionmaking processes, and b) CBIs’ full potential is unlikely to bloom without favourable institutional frameworks and policy environments. This paper applies a value-based lens onto social transformation frameworks and engages in a wider theoretical debate on the role of niche actors, thereby adding to the existing literature on socio-ecological transitions. Based on an actor-, politics- and governance-centered approach, we ultimately inquire into Portugal’s CBI’s agency and how it can bring about wider structural change in a socio-ecological transitions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Community-based initiatives and the politicization gap in socio-ecological transitions: Lessons from Portugal

Post print version.Community-based initiatives (CBIs) are an embodiment and potential catalyst of societal change towards sustainability. In Portugal, they remain a largely untapped resource. This paper examines different nuances of CBIs’ societal change agency by proposing an innovative inquiry framework focused on substance, processes and outcomes via an actor, politics and governance-centered approach. Through an inward- versus outward-looking dialectical reflection on CBIs’ politicization dynamics, we analyze Portugal’s CBI landscape drawing upon previous research, databases and semi-structured interviews. We conclude that a politicization gap and the absence of both socio-political visibility and of favorable institutional and policy frameworks are crucial contextual premises hindering CBIs’ change agency. Notwithstanding, CBI’s transformative potential is undeniable. We find them perfectly positioned to mediate co-shaping processes between social innovators and incumbent institutions, contesting the latter’s unsustainable development logic. If CBIs and governments acknowledge the complementarity of their scope of societal change agency, CBIs’ transformational time may have arrived.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

Configurable Process Models as a Basis for Reference Modeling

Off-the-shelf packages such as SAP need to be configured to suit the requirements of an organization. Reference models support the configuration of these systems. Existing reference models use rather traditional languages. For example, the SAP reference model uses Eventdriven Process Chains (EPCs). Unfortunately, traditional languages like EPCs do not capture the configuration-aspects well. Consider for example the concept of "choice" in the control-flow perspective. Although any process modeling language, including EPCs, offers a choice construct (e.g., the XOR connector in EPCs), a single construct will not be able to capture the time dimension, scope, and impact of a decision. Some decisions are taken at run-time for a single case while other decisions are taken at build-time impacting a whole organization and all current and future cases. This position paper discusses the need for configurable process models as a basic building block for reference modeling. The focus is on the control-flow perspective. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006