Policy-Enabled Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for Semantic Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) develops into a new paradigm for enterprise computing that uses information technology (IT) not only to support or execute business processes, but also to continuously monitor and improve these processes in order to better achieve business objectives. BPM’s variant Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) is meant to further close the gap between business and IT by attaching business semantics to the IT artefacts used for BPM. A current problem in SBPM is that the specification of the business requirements that the business processes must respond to and that follow from the enterprise’s strategic decisions, is not fully integrated with the design of the business processes themselves. In this paper we propose an approach in which business requirements for business processes are formally modelled and the skeleton of the designs of these business processes is automatically generated from these models. The approach presented here focuses upon the modelling of policies (i.e. a kind of business requirements for business processes) and on the subsequent design of business processes that comply to these policies. A first contribution is extending an existing goal-oriented requirements specification language, i.e. Formal Tropos (FT), to incorporate policies, called Policy-extended Formal Tropos (PFT). A second contribution is offering an automated transformation to create business process design skeletons out of the PFT models. The paper also reports upon a case study that was conducted as a first, though preliminary, empirical test of our approach.Requirements Engineering, Early-phase Requirements Elicitation, Semantic Business Process Management, Enterprise Modelling, Goal-based Process Modelling, Compliance Management, Policy Modelling.

Business process compliance checking : current state and future challenges

Regulatory compliance sets new requirements for business process management (BPM). Companies seek to enhance their corporate governance processes and are required to put in place measures for ensuring compliance to regulations. In this sense, this position paper (i) reviews the current work in the context of BPM systems and (ii) suggests future directions to improve the current status. During the literature review, techniques are classified as supporting forward or backward compliance. The latter is a post-execution compliance (i.e. based on execution histories of systems) and the former takes place at design- or run-time. In a nutshell, this position paper claims that four main aspects need to be incorporated by current compliance checking techniques: (i) an integrated approach able to cover the full BPM life-cycle, (ii) the support for compliance checks beyond control-flow-related aspects, (iii) intuitive graphical notations for business analysts, and (iv) embedding semantic technologies during the definition, deployment and executions of compliance checks

Business process compliance checking : current state and future challenges

Regulatory compliance sets new requirements for business process management (BPM). Companies seek to enhance their corporate governance processes and are required to put in place measures for ensuring compliance to regulations. In this sense, this position paper (i) reviews the current work in the context of BPM systems and (ii) suggests future directions to improve the current status. During the literature review, techniques are classified as supporting forward or backward compliance. The latter is a post-execution compliance (i.e. based on execution histories of systems) and the former takes place at design- or run-time. In a nutshell, this position paper claims that four main aspects need to be incorporated by current compliance checking techniques: (i) an integrated approach able to cover the full BPM life-cycle, (ii) the support for compliance checks beyond control-flow-related aspects, (iii) intuitive graphical notations for business analysts, and (iv) embedding semantic technologies during the definition, deployment and executions of compliance checks

Gene expression profiles of human melanoma cells with different invasive potential reveal TSPAN8 as a novel mediator of invasion.

International audienceBACKGROUND: Metastatic melanoma requires early detection, being treatment resistant. However, the earliest events of melanoma metastasis, and especially of dermal invasion, remain ill defined. RESULTS AND METHODS: Gene expression profiles of two clonal subpopulations, selected from the same human melanoma cell line, but differing in ability to cross the dermal-epidermal junction in skin reconstructs, were compared by oligonucleotide microarray. Of 26 496 cDNA probes, 461 were differentially expressed (>2-fold; P< 0.001), only 71 genes being upregulated in invasive cells. Among them, TSPAN8, a tetraspanin not yet described in melanoma, was upregulated at mRNA and protein levels in melanoma cells from the invasive clone, as assessed by RT-PCR, flow cytometry and western blot analysis. Interestingly, TSPAN8 was the only tetraspanin in which overexpression correlated with invasive phenotype. Flow cytometry of well-defined melanoma cell lines confirmed that TSPAN8 was exclusively expressed by invasive, but not non-invasive melanoma cells or normal melanocytes. Immunohistochemistry revealed that TSPAN8 was expressed by melanoma cells in primary melanomas and metastases, but not epidermal cells in healthy skin. The functional role of TSPAN8 was demonstrated by silencing endogenous TSPAN8 with siRNA, reducing invasive outgrowth from tumour spheroids within matrigel without affecting cell proliferation or survival. CONCLUSION: TSPAN8 expression may enable melanoma cells to cross the cutaneous basement membrane, leading to dermal invasion and progression to metastasis. TSPAN8 could be a promising target in early detection and treatment of melanoma