GQ-BPAOntoSOA: A goal- and object- based semantic framework for deriving software services from an organisation’s goals and riva business process architecture

Understanding a business organisation is a primary activity that is required for deriving service-oriented systems that assist in carrying out the business activities of an organisation. Business IT alignment is one of the hot topics that concerns with aligning business needs and system needs in order to keep a business organisation competitive in a market. One example in this area is the BPAOntoSOA framework that aligned business process architecture and the service-oriented model of computing. The BPAOntoSOA framework is a semantically enriched framework for deriving service oriented architecture candidate software services from a Riva-based business process architecture. The BPAOntoSOA framework was recently proposed in order to align the candidate software services to the business processes presented in a Riva business process architecture. The activities of the BPAOntoSOA framework are structured into two-semantic-based layers that are formed in a top-down manner. The top layer, the BPAOnt ontology instantiation layer, concerned with conceptualising the Riva business process architecture and the associated business process models. The bottom layer, which is the software service identification layer, concerned with the semantic identification of the service-oriented architecture candidate software services and their associated capabilities. In this layer, RPA clusters were used to describe the derived candidate software service. Ontologies were used in order to support addressing the semantic representation. However, the BPAOntoSOA framework has two limitations. First, the derived candidate software services are identified without considering the business goals. Second, the desired quality of service requirements that constrain the functionality of the software services are absent. This research is concerned with resolving these two limitations within the BPAOntoSOA framework. In this research, the original BPAOntoSOA framework has been extended into the GQ-BPAOntoSOA framework. A new semantic-based layer has been added into the two original layers. The new layer is concerned with conceptualising the goal- and quality- oriented models in order to address their absence in the original BPAOntoSOA framework. The new layer is called the GQOnt ontology instantiation layer. This extension has highlighted the need for aligning the models within the original BPAOnt intonation layer with the ones in the new layer. This is because the BPAOnt was the base for the identification of the candidate software services and capabilities. Therefore, a novel alignment approach has been proposed in order to address this need. Also, the original service identification approach is refined in order to adapt with the integration of goals and quality requirements.The GQ-BPAOntoSOA framework, which is a goal-based and quality-linked extended BPAOntoSOA framework, has been evaluated using the Cancer Care Registration process. This is the same case study used in the evaluation of the BPAOntoSOA framework. And this is required in order to investigate the implication of integrating goals and quality requirements into the pre-existing BPAOntoSOA framework-driven candidate software services. This has shown that: (1) the GQOnt ontology does not only contribute to the extension of the BPAOntoSOA framework, yet it also contributes to providing a semantic representation of a business strategy view for an organisation. The GQOnt ontology acts as an independent repository of knowledge in order to have an early agreement between stakeholders with regard to business goals and quality requirements. The semantic representation could be reused for different purposes with respect to the needs. (2) the alignment approach has bridged the gap between goal-oriented models and Riva-based business process architectures. (3) the Riva business process architecture modelling method and business process models have been enriched with the integration of goals and quality requirements in order to provide a rich representation of business process architecture and process models that reflect an important information for the given organisation. (4) The service identification approach used in the original BPAOntoSOA framework has been enriched with goals and quality requirements. This has affected the identification of candidate software services (clusters) and their capabilities. Also, the derived candidate software services have conformed to service-oriented architecture principles. Accordingly, This research has bridged the gap between the BPAOntoSOA framework and the business goals and quality requirements. This is anticipated to lead to highly consistent, correct and complete software service specifications

Critical Analytical Insights of Palliative Care Process Modelling in a Regional Cancer Care

Palliative care services are rapidly evolving in cancer care organisations. In palliative care processes, administratives are involved without acknowledging that they may hinder rather than facilitate the path of palliative care in respect to cancer patients. Comprehending a palliative care organisation, without looking at current running processes is groundless. Therefore, a critical understanding of palliative care processes is necessary for improving respective cancer care systems. In this research palliative care Business Process Models (BPMs) have been developed to empower palliative care domain experts not only attaining a critical understanding of the currently running palliative care operations, but also in informing further required improvements with associated implications on cancer patients. Amongst the key outcomes of developing and analysing palliative BPMs in a cancer care organisation revealed identifying gaps, limitations, challenges, and opportunities to reflectively improve palliative care processes in cancer care centres. Finally, this research suggests further re-engineering of palliative care processes as reference models that may be instantiated in specific socio-cultural, person-centered, and other contextual settings aimed at improved qualitative palliative care for cancer patients

Critical Analysis of Palliative Homecare Using the i∗ Framework\u27s Strategic and Social Requirements Modelling Applied to a Cancer Care Organisation

Home Health Care (HHC) is an essential and critical part of palliative care and especially for terminal cancer patients. This research is aimed as a first attempt to align with the research gap in modelling the social requirements of palliative care processes and the HHC process in particular. Consequently, this research is a first attempt at developing an $\mathbf{i}^{\ast}$ framework visual goal-oriented and social requirements models of the HHC process of the domain of palliative care with a reflected application using a case study from a leading regional cancer centre in the Middle East, namely KHCC. Furthermore, this research has made it possible for palliative care domain experts in the HHC process and using the associated $\mathbf{i}^{\ast}$ framework strategic dependency and strategic rationale models to visually trace the most critical and strategic actors in the HHC process along with the highly interacting dependers and dependees. Finally, the HHC $\mathbf{i}^{\ast}$ strategic models contribute to bridging the gap between the world of palliative care requirements and their reflective computer-based information systems and $\mathbf{IoT}$ smart devices. Hence, this sheds light towards the realisation of the field of palliative care as being a “systems of systems” virtual organisation with the respective socio-technical systems involvement, for the best care of the palliative patient and especially terminal cancer patients. A further corollary of this research is the insufficiency and less representativeness of palliative care process models to utilise in guiding the development of the HHC $\mathbf{i}^{\ast}$ framework strategic models without linking to the full associated strategic and policy documents of palliative care

OntoBioethics: A framework for the agile development of bioethics ontologies in pandemics, applied to COVID-19

Background: Few ontological attempts have been reported for conceptualizing the bioethics domain. In addition to limited scope representativeness and lack of robust methodological approaches in driving research design and evaluation of bioethics ontologies, no bioethics ontologies exist for pandemics and COVID-19. This research attempted to investigate whether studying the bioethics research literature, from the inception of bioethics research publications, facilitates developing highly agile, and representative computational bioethics ontology as a foundation for the automatic governance of bioethics processes in general and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular. Research Design: The iOntoBioethics agile research framework adopted the Design Science Research Methodology. Using systematic literature mapping, the search space resulted in 26,170 Scopus indexed bioethics articles, published since 1971. iOntoBioethics underwent two distinctive stages: (1) Manually Constructing Bioethics (MCB) ontology from selected bioethics sources, and (2) Automatically generating bioethics ontological topic models with all 26,170 sources and using special-purpose developed Text Mining and Machine-Learning (TM&ML) engine. Bioethics domain experts validated these ontologies, and further extended to construct and validate the Bioethics COVID-19 Pandemic Ontology. Results: Cross-validation of the MCB and TM&ML bioethics ontologies confirmed that the latter provided higher-level abstraction for bioethics entities with well-structured bioethics ontology class hierarchy compared to the MCB ontology. However, both bioethics ontologies were found to complement each other forming a highly comprehensive Bioethics Ontology with around 700 concepts and associations COVID-19 inclusive. Conclusion: The iOntoBioethics framework yielded the first agile, semi-automatically generated, literature-based, and domain experts validated General Bioethics and Bioethics Pandemic Ontologies Operable in COVID-19 context with readiness for automatic governance of bioethics processes. These ontologies will be regularly and semi-automatically enriched as iOntoBioethics is proposed as an open platform for scientific and healthcare communities, in their infancy COVID-19 learning stage. iOntoBioethics not only it contributes to better understanding of bioethics processes, but also serves as a bridge linking these processes to healthcare systems. Such big data analytics platform has the potential to automatically inform bioethics governance adherence given the plethora of developing bioethics and COVID-19 pandemic knowledge. Finally, iOntoBioethics contributes toward setting the first building block for forming the field of “Bioethics Informatics”

Linking Palliative Homecare to the Universal Health Coverage Principles and the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals Using the i* Framework’s Strategic and Social Requirements Modelling, Applied to a Cancer Care Organisation

Adherence to the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) principles in relation to palliative care is a key WHO directive to attain as a right for every citizen. However, UHC principles have been observed to be hindered by several barriers. Moreover, the UNSDGs, and in particular the UNSDG 3, demands “Good Health and Well Being” with the two key indicators UNSDG 3.8.1 and 3.8.2 that can be considered as metrics to assess governance conformance to palliative care. This paper reports on addressing the current research gap in linking the UHC principles to UNSDGs and, in particular, UNSDG3 and the WHO identified Palliative Care Barriers (PCB) using the i* framework Strategic Dependency (SD) and Strategic Rationale (SR) models applied to Home Healthcare Care (HHC) of a regional cancer care organisation, namely King Hussain Cancer Center (KHCC). Building on our i* HHC SD and SR developed models, and for HHC being an essential and critical part of palliative care, an integrated framework has been developed that not only links UHC principles and WHO barriers of palliative care to UNSDG 3, but a full network of dependencies that facilitates observing the linkages and impact of the most critical and strategic actors in HHC on the UHC, barriers to palliative care and UNSDG 3. Furthermore, such highly comprehensive UHC-PCB-UNSDG-i* framework network instantiations have led to identifying patterns of categories or groups of associations between UNSDG3 KPIs, UHC principles, WHO PCB and HHC actors. Hence, this contributes to healthcare policy and decision makers to revisit their policies, plans, budgets, and constraints for the deficiencies in the qualitative satisfaction of the UHC principles and how PCB can be alleviated in association with the actors in the i* SD and SR models and associated goals, tasks and resources. A further corollary of this research is that change impact analysis can be timely attained to study the impact of a change driven by updating goals, tasks, and resources of the i* model to improve adherence to the UNSDG3 KPIS and UHC principles. Finally, this work has inspired work in progress to develop a data analytics platform from the evolving instances of applying palliative care processes using the resultant UHC-PCB-UNSDG-i* framework