Modeling Service Choreographies with Rule-enhanced Business Processes

The participation at EDOC 2010 was overwhelming in every positive sense, and I am very thankful to the committee for this award. Our presentation was received highly positive and triggered several questions. The questions were mainly about the relations of our work with the use of ontology and vocabulary representation languages, and our plans for developing executable models rather than generating code from models. In fact, this was already in line with our previous plans and research directions. Some of these discussions even continued during the following days. In particular, we had plans for two concrete collaborations. One is related to the development of a formal semantics of the rBPMN languages by using process algebra, that is, by using the mCRL2 language in particular. Moreover, we also created a common plan for integration of semi-structured English language for defining business rules and vocabularies. This will also allow us to have a more effective way to capture rules in rBPMN process models. Moreover, our presentation of the rBPMN editor, as an practical implementation tool for the work with the rBPMN language received a special attention, and several researchers have already approached us to establish research collaboration and/or to use our tool, which is now publically available. The overall experience was also extremely valuable. The program of the conference covered nearly all of the diverse topics in enterprise computing. That is, the selected papers cover engineering aspects in many phases of development life cycle of enterprise systems, especially those designed for distributed environments. I have also delivered a keynote at the VORTE 2010 workshop with the audience with was the largest of all workshop keynotes at the conference. The participants very positively received my insights. In a very interactive session, we discussed some of the main research challenges important for better integration of business rules and business process modeling languages.The research community has so far mainly focused on the problem of modeling of service orchestrations in the domain of service composition, while modeling of service choreographies has attracted less attention. The following challenges in choreography modeling are tackled in this paper: i) choreography models are not well-connected with the underlying business vocabulary models. ii) there is limited support for decoupling parts of business logic from complete choreography models. This reduces dynamic changes of choreographies; iii) choreography models contain redundant elements of shared business logic, which might lead to an inconsistent implementation and incompatible behavior. Our proposal – rBPMN – is an extension of a business process modeling language with rule and choreography modeling support. rBPMN is defined by weaving the metamodels of the Business Process Modeling Notation and REWERSE Rule Markup Language. To evaluate our proposal, we use service-interaction patterns and compare our approach with related solutions

Model-Driven Semantic Web Rule Engineering

The tutorial was given at the Conference Center of Fairmount Spring Hotel in Banff on the 10th of May, 2007 and the tutorial was scheduled for the main conference program. We approximately had 60 participants. The overall impressions of all participants were very positive about the quality of the tutorial and the information presented. Many participants stressed that they especially like how we combined three different areas (i.e., MDE, Semantic Web, and service-oriented architectures) in a very consistent and informative way, so that they were able to grasp a completely-new perspective on how these area could be combined and practically used. Our approach was especially appreciated by participants coming from industrial settings, who like the way we tried to combine novel and not widely adopted Semantic Web technologies with well-known software engineering techniques. However, our impression was that the next editions of the tutorial to be submitted to other conferences could slightly be updated, so that we can put less emphasis on the fundamental technologies (e.g., ontologies and metamodeling) and more focus on semantic service-oriented architectures and Web applications. This is due to the fact that tutorials should always have strong analysis on how some novel technologies can be transferred to industrial setting. Of course, this also depends on the conference where we are going to present the tutorial, since different research communities have different background knowledge, and thus they need more emphasis on different background knowledge, which decreases the time we can spend on advance applications. Moreover, even the audience from the same community does not have the same background knowledge and tutorial presenters should always make some trade-offs. Our plan is to revise the tutorial accordingly and submit it to other conferences such as International Semantic Web Conference and International Conference on Software Engineering. In addition to new tutorial editions, we also plan to write a paper that will be covering the tutorial subject. That paper will be submitted to an international journal such as ACM Computing Surveys and Knowledge Engineering Reviews or as a book chapter to an edited book. We hope that this paper will not only be a suitable lecture note, but it could be a relevant visionary paper for the future development of this area of integration of Semantic Web technologies into software development process. I am also happy to report that Dr. Marco Brambilla of Politecnico di Milano, who is a member of the well-known WebML research group and leading Web engineering company (WebRatio), expressed his wish to collaborate with us in the future tutorial editions and the work on the future papers covering the tutorial subject. On the grounds of the subject of this tutorial, I have already submitted a project proposal in collaboration with Prof. Marek Hatala and TELUS Communications for a NSERC strategic project grant in April 2007. This project proposal is also fully coordinated with the European consortia led by Prof. Gerd Wagner that also submitted a project proposal to EU commission for a grant within Framework Program 7. In addition, Dr. Brambilla is also very enthusiastic about setting up similar research collaboration in the future, and we made a plan on how to collaborate by trying to get involve our students to work on the subjects that are looking at the intersections of our research areas. At the conference, I had a contact with Mr. Ralf Gerstner of Springer who was the editor of the research monograph “Model-Driven Architecture and Ontology Development” where I was the led author. He invited me to write another book that will be covering the subject of this tutorial, as he was very positive about the high interest of the audience, rising importance of the subject and the feedback we got form the audience at the WWW2007. Our plan is that we should first proceed with the above-mentioned paper and also produce some more research experiments with the technology till the end of this year, and then prepare a book proposal in early 2008. My personal plan is to try to develop a new computer science course at Athabasca University that will cover the subject of this tutorial as well as to revise some of the existing ones (e.g., COMP 603 and COMP 610) that can benefit from the expertise in this area. I anticipate that the experience obtained at the WWW2007 conference will be used as a very good input for increasing the quality of that new course and potentially increase competitiveness of Athabasca University’s courses by offering challenging research subjects that are attracting a high attention of industry and which we explore collaboratively with world leading researchers. Thanks to the research reputation and presentation experience in the area covered in the tutorial, I am invited to give 3 technology lectures (2 hours altogether) at the 2nd Summer School on Generative Transformational Technologies in Software Engineering (GTTSE 2007) in Braga, Portugal from July 1st till July 7, 2007. Given that this event attracts the most renowned researchers giving talks (which will be excellent opportunity to share research experience, disseminate our research results, and collaborate with well-known researchers) and encouraged with the positive experience from WWW2007, I plan to apply for another A&PDF award to support my attendance at GTTSE 2007.Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and the Semantic Web represent two key technologies with a far-reaching vision for the future of software engineering and Web engineering. the main promise of MDE is to raise the level of abstraction from technology-platform-specific concepts to the higher levels of platform-independence and "computation-independent" modeling. The Semantic Web vision starts from another perspective: sharing data, resources and knowledge between parties that belong to different organizations, different cultures and/or different communities. Ontologies and rule play the main role in the Semantic Web for publishing community vocabularies and policies, for annotating resources and for turning Web applications into inference-enabled collaboration platforms. Although these two technology visions have been developed by two different communities, they share number of principles and goals, and there are important synergies that can be achie3ved by combining them with each other. The ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) standard (http://ontology.omg.org) by the OMG can be viewed as a first step towards bridging MDE and the Semantic Web. Another important building block is domain-specific modeling languages suitable for describing specific domains. MDE provides a set of principles and techniques how to create domain-specific modeling languages by using metamodeling, how to transform from one type of modeling language to another, and how to change level of abstractions (e.g., from platform-specific to platform-independent and back). The most well-known initiatives in this areas are the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) by the OMG and the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The main goal of this tutorial is to give an introduction into state-of-the-art Web engineering methods based on the principles, models, and technologies of both MDE and the Semantic Web. The tutorial starts from the basics of the Semantic Web and MDE (e.g., ontology languages, modeling languages, mode transformations), and then explores how they can be employed in various states of Web engineering by addressing the following questions: 1) How can we develop ontologies and rules with MDE-based approaches and standards?, 2) How can we develop Semantic Web services that follow MDE recommendations?, 3) How we can build next generation Web applications that are taking advantage of both Semantic Web and MDE?Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF

Collaborative peer feedback and learning analytics: theory-oriented design for supporting class-wide interventions

Although dialogue can augment the impact of feedback on student learning, dialogic feedback is unaffordable by instructors teaching large classes. In this regard, peer feedback can offer a scalable and effective solution. However, the existing practices optimistically rely on students' discussion about feedback and lack a systematic design approach. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework of collaborative peer feedback which structures feedback dialogue into three distinct phases and outlines the learning processes involved in each of them. Then, we present a web-based platform, called Synergy, which is designed to facilitate collaborative peer feedback as conceptualised in the theoretical framework. To enable instructor support and facilitation during the feedback practice, we propose a learning analytics support integrated into Synergy. The consolidated model of learning analytics, which concerns three critical pieces for creating impactful learning analytics practices, theory, design and data science, was employed to build the analytics support. The learning analytics support aims to guide instructors' class-wide actions toward improving students' learning experiences during the three phases of peer feedback. The actionable insights that the learning analytics support offers are discussed with examples