Anatomy of the Unified Enterprise Modelling Ontology

Part 2: Full PapersInternational audienceThe Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) aims to become a hub for integrated use of enterprise and information systems (IS) models expressed using different languages. A central part of this hub is an extendible ontology into which modelling languages and their constructs can be mapped, so that precise semantic relations between the languages and constructs can be established by comparing their ontology mappings. The paper presents and discusses ongoing work on reformulating the UEML ontology as an OWL2 DL ontology, the Unified Enterprise Modelling Ontology (UEMO)

Communication Abstractions for Distributed Business Processes

Languages for business process definition generally suffer from myopic approaches to capturing communication between distributed processes. Effective communication between processes requires: support for conversations involving interrelated interactions spread over time; ability to select and group messages based on their content, regardless of format and transport technology; and resolving contention between processes or tasks for common sets of messages. This paper presents a set of communication abstractions that provide a 'glue' between the process layer and the middleware. The paper also reports on an implementation of these abstractions and an experimental evaluation

Intra- and inter-organizational process mining: Discovering processes within and between organizations

Due to the availability of more and more event data and mature process mining techniques, it has become possible to discover the actual processes within an organization. Process mining techniques use event logs to automatically construct process models that explain the behavior observed. Existing process models can be validated using conformance checking techniques. Moreover, the link between real-life events and model elements allows for the projection of additional information onto process models (e.g., showing bottlenecks and the flow of work within an organization). Although process mining has been mainly used within individual organizations, this new technology can also be applied in cross-organizational settings. In this paper, we identify such settings and highlight some of the challenges and opportunities. In particular, we show that cross-organizational processes can be partitioned along two orthogonal dimensions. This helps us to identify relevant process mining challenges involving multiple organizations

Formalization and verification of EPCs with OR-joins based on state and context

The semantics of the OR-join in business process modeling languages like EPCs or YAWL have been discussed for a while. Still, the existing solutions suffer from at least one of two major problems. First, several formalizations depend upon restrictions of the EPC to a subset. Second, several approaches contradict the modeling intuition since the structuredness of the process does not guarantee soundness. In this paper, we present a novel semantical definition of EPCs that addresses these aspects yielding a formalization that is applicable for all EPCs and for which structuredness is a sufficient condition for soundness. Furthermore, we introduce a set of reduction rules for the verification of an EPC-specific soundness criterion and present a respective implementation

Pattern-Based Analysis of the Control-flow Perspective of UML Activity Diagrams

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a well-known family of notations for software modelling. Recently, a new version of UML has been released. In this paper we examine the Activity Diagrams notation of this latest version of UML in terms of a collection of patterns developed for assessing control flow capabilities of languages used in the area of process-aware information systems. The purpose of this analysis is to assess relative strengths and weaknesses of control flow specification in Activity Diagrams and to identify ways of addressing potential deficiencies. In addition, the pattern-based analysis will yield typical solutions to practical process modelling problems and expose some of the ambiguities in the current UML 2.0 draft adopted specification

Towards a Method for Evolutionary Implementation of Groupware

Groupware is a typical example of an application domain in which requirements are hard to elicit and keep changing before, during, and after the introduction of the system. This calls for an evolutionary implementation approach. Several socio-technical models give an explanation of the interaction between the technical and the social system, i.e., the software and its organisational environment, but these models have not yet led to a clear method for evolutionary implementation. In order to arrive at such a method, we need a theoretical framework for how this adaptation process takes place. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) is a good candidate for such a framework. The BITE research project at the University of Twente aims to operationalise the concepts of AST through application in several industrial pilot projects. Based on these pilots we will develop a method for evolutionary implementation of groupware