Product Line-based customization of e-Government documents

International audienceContent personalization has been one of the major trends in recent Document Engineering Research. The "one docum ent for n users" paradigm is being replaced by the "one user, one document" model, where the content to be delivered to a particular user is generated by some means. This is a very promising approach for e-Government, where personalized government services, including document generation, are more and more required by users. In this paper, we introduce a method to the generation of personalized documents called Document Product Lines (DPL). DPL allows generating content in domains with high variability and with high levels of reuse. We describe the basic principles underlying DPL and show its application to the e-Government field using the personalized tax statement as case study

Improving emergency plans management with SAGA

[EN] Emergency plans are the tangible result of the preparedness activities of the emergency management lifecycle. In many countries, public service organizations have the legal obligation to develop and maintain emergency plans covering all possible hazards relative to their areas of operation. However, little support is provided to planners in the development and use of plans. Often, advances in software technology have not been exploited, and plans remain as text documents whose accessibility is very limited. In this paper, we advocate for the definition and implementation of plan management processes as the first step to better produce and manage emergency plans. The main contribution of our work is to raise the need for IT-enabled planning environments, either at the national or organization-specific levels, which can lead to more uniform plans that are easier to evaluate and share, with support to stakeholders other than responders, among other advantages. To illustrate our proposal, we introduce SAGA, a framework that supports the full lifecycle of emergency plan management. SAGA provides all the actors involved in plan management with a number of tools to support all the stages of the plan lifecycle. We outline the architecture of the system, and show with a case study how planning processes can benefit from a system like SAGA.We thank J. Marzal and R. Garrido, from the UPV Prevention Service, for their cooperation in the early design of SAGA. The work of J.H. Canós, M.C. Penadés, M. Llavador and A. Gómez is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) under grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03). The work of M.R.S. Borges is partially supported by grant nos. 560223/2010-2 and 308003/2011-0 from CNPq (Brazil) and grant no. E-26/103.076/2011 from FAPERJ (Brazil). The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/PHB2007-0064-PC.Canos Cerda, JH.; Borges, M.; Penadés Gramage, MC.; Gómez Llana, A.; Llavador Campos, M. (2013). Improving emergency plans management with SAGA. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 80(9):1868-1876. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2013.02.014S1868187680

QuEP: Building a Continuous Improvement of Emergency Plans Management

ABSTRACT While different governments worldwide have published sets of recommendations-or even laws-for increasing preparedness, a reference framework to assess the level of compliance of organizations is still to come. For instance, emergency plans often remain stored in closets where they stay until some emergency or major legal change occurs. Consequently, achieving actual preparedness is difficult to assess. QuEP is a framework for the assessment and improvement of the management of emergency plans within organizations. It is inspired by the Total Quality Management strategy, and provides a hierarchy of emergency plan management maturity levels. The aim of QuEP is to guide organizations to assess and improve their emergency preparedness by following a set of principles, practices and techniques at the technical, human and strategic levels. In this paper, we show the model underlying the framework, and give details of the current framework evaluation processes

DPLFW: a Framework for the Product-Line-Based Generation of Variable Content Documents

International audienceDocument Product Lines (DPL) is a document engineering methodology that applies product-line engineering principles to the gen-eration of documents in high variability contexts and with high reuse of components. Instead of standalone documents, DPL promotes the defi-nition of families of documents where the members share some common content while differ in other parts. The key for the definition is the avail-ability of a collection of content assets which can be parameterized and instantiated at document generation time. In this demonstration, we show the features of the DPL framework (DPLfw), the tool that supports DPL. DPLfw implements the domain engineering and application engineering stages of typical product line engineering approaches, supports different asset repositories, and gener-ates customized documents in different output formats. We use the case study of the generation of customized emergency plans in a University campus [http://youtu.be/ueKGfmfkyI0]

Turning Emergency Plans into Executable Artifacts

ISBN: 978-0-692-21194-6 Available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) LicenseInternational audienceOn the way to the improvement of Emergency Plans, we show how a structured specification of the response procedures allows transforming static plans into dynamic, executable entities that can drive the way different actors participate in crisis responses. Additionally, the execution of plans requires the definition of information access mechanisms allowing execution engines to provide an actor with all the information resources he or she needs to accomplish a response task. We describe work in progress to improve the SAGA's Plan definition Module and Plan Execution Engine to support information-rich plan execution

A framework for variable content document generation with multiple actors

“NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Information and Software Technology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Information and Software Technology, Volume 56, Issue 9, September 2014, Pages 1101–1121 DOI10.1016/j.infsof.2013.12.006Context - Advances in customization have highlighted the need for tools supporting variable content document management and generation in many domains. Current tools allow the generation of highly customized documents that are variable in both content and layout. However, most frameworks are technology-oriented, and their use requires advanced skills in implementation-related tools, which means their use by end users (i.e. document designers) is severely limited. Objective - Starting from past and current trends for customized document authoring, our goal is to provide a document generation alternative in which variants are specified at a high level of abstraction and content reuse can be maximized in high variability scenarios. Method Based on our experience in Document Engineering, we identified areas in the variable content document management and generation field open to further improvement. We first classified the primary sources of variability in document composition processes and then developed a methodology, which we called DPL based on Software Product Lines principles to support document generation in high variability scenarios. Results - In order to validate the applicability of our methodology we implemented a tool DPLfw to carry out DPL processes. After using this in different scenarios, we compared our proposal with other state-of-the-art tools for variable content document management and generation. Conclusion - The DPLfw showed a good capacity for the automatic generation of variable content documents equal to or in some cases surpassing other currently available approaches. To the best of our knowledge, DPLfw is the only framework that combines variable content and document workflow facilities, easing the generation of variable content documents in which multiple actors play different roles.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03).Gómez Llana, A.; Penadés Gramage, MC.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Borges, MR.; Llavador Campos, M. (2014). A framework for variable content document generation with multiple actors. Information and Software Technology. 56(9):1101-1121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2013.12.006S1101112156

The assessment of information technology maturity in emergency response organizations

[EN] In emergency response organizations, information technologies are not adequately explored. Sometimes, the mere adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on other interrelated technologies and the environment where they are installed. This work describes a model to help organizations understand their capability in respect to the adoption of these technologies. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the proposed model, an organization can measure its maturity level in different aspects of the evaluation and guide the investment on its capabilities. Part of the model has been developed for emergency response organizations and the information technology dimension of the model has been applied to two fire department installations.Marcos R. S. Borges was partially supported by grants No. 560223/2010-2 and 480461/2009-0 from CNPq (Brazil). Work of José H. Canós is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio. de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) under grant TIPEX (TIN2010–19859-C03-03). The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/ PHB2007-0064-PC.Santos, RS.; Borges, MRS.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Gomes, JO. (2011). The assessment of information technology maturity in emergency response organizations. Group Decision and Negotiation. 20(5):593-613. doi:10.1007/s10726-011-9232-zS593613205Bigley G, Roberts KH (2001) The incident command system: high reliability organizing for complex and volatile task environments. Acad Manag J 44(6): 1281–1299Chinowsky P, Molenaar K, Realph A (2007) Learning organizations in construction. J Manag Eng 23(1): 27–34Diniz VB, Borges MRS, Gomes JO, Canós JH (2008) Decision making support in emergency response. In: Encyclopedia of decision making, Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global), New York, pp 184–191Dörner R, Grimm P, Seiler C (2001) ETOILE—an environment for team, organizational and individual learning. CG Top 13(3): 5–6Dykstra E (2003) Concept paper: toward an international system model in emergency management. In: Proceedings of toward an international system model in emergency management, Public Entity Risk InstituteFederal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (1998) Emergency management guide for business and industry: a step-by-step approach to emergency planning, response and recovery for companies of all sizesGu Q, Mendonça D (2005) Patterns of group information seeking in a simulated emergency response environment. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international ISCRAM conference, Brussels, BelgiumHale J (1997) A layered communication architecture for the support of crisis response. J Manag Inf Syst 14(1): 235–255King W, Teo T (1997) Integration between business planning and information systems planning: validating a stage hypothesis. Decis Sci 28(2): 279–307Lachner J, Hellwagner H (2008) Information and communication systems for mobile emergency response. Lecture notes in business information processing, vol 5. pp 213–224Lavoie D, Culbert A (1978) Stages in organization and development. Human Relat 31(5): 417–438Lindel MK, Prater C, Perry RW (2007) Emergency management. Wiley, New YorkLlavador M, Letelier P, Penadés MC, Borges MRS, Solís C (2006) Precise yet flexible specification of emergency resolution procedures. In: Proceedings of the information systems for crisis response and management (ISCRAM), pp 110–120Meissner A, Wang Z, Putz W, Grimmer J (2006) MIKoBOS: a mobile information and communication system for emergency response. 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Towards Requirements Engineering of Active Database Systems

Active systems are emerging in many fields, being particularly interesting those like Active Database Management Systems which always provide some kind of reactive capabilities. In this paper, starting from the assumption that activity is an important notion not only for database systems, but also for capturing semantics in the Requirements Analysis and Specification field, we present a model of active behavior that is independent of a concrete database data model, in the sense that the set of events is not predefined (imposed by the database system used), rather it varies with each problem being modelled. We define both a syntax and semantics to formalize different dimensions of active behavior. This approach, first, extends an OO model supporting formal requirements specification and rapid prototyping (OASIS) with active capabilities and second, allows implementing information systems in different architectures by translating the active concepts of our model to those of particular active database systems (relational, object-relational or object-oriented). This is a first step towards a CARE tool for the specification and prototyping of active systems