Data Workflow - A Workflow Model for Continuous Data Processing

Online data or streaming data are getting more and more important for enterprise information systems, e.g. by integrating sensor data and workflows. The continuous flow of data provided e.g. by sensors requires new workflow models addressing the data perspective of these applications, since continuous data is potentially infinite while business process instances are always finite.\ud In this paper a formal workflow model is proposed with data driven coordination and explicating properties of the continuous data processing. These properties can be used to optimize data workflows, i.e., reducing the computational power for processing the workflows in an engine by reusing intermediate processing results in several workflows

Graphing of E-Science Data with varying user requirements

Based on our experience in the Swiss Experiment, exploring experimental, scientific data is often done in a visual way. Starting from a global overview the users are zooming in on interesting events. In case of huge data volumes special data structures have to be introduced to provide fast and easy access to the data. Since it is hard to predict on how users will work with the data a generic approach requires self-adaptation of the required special data structures. In this paper we describe the underlying NP-hard problem and present several approaches to address the problem with varying properties. The approaches are illustrated with a small example and are evaluated with a synthetic data set and user queries

A language for information commerce processes

Automatizing information commerce requires languages to represent the typical information commerce processes. Existing languages and standards cover either only very specific types of business models or are too general to capture in a concise way the specific properties of information commerce processes. We introduce a language that is specifically designed for information commerce. It can be directly used for the implementation of the processes and communication required in information commerce. It allows to cover existing business models that are known either from standard proposals or existing information commerce applications on the Internet. The language has a concise logical semantics. In this paper we present the language concepts and an implementation architecture

Observation Centric Sensor Data Model

Management of sensor data requires metadata to understand the semantics of observations. While e-science researchers have high demands on metadata, they are selective in entering metadata. The claim in this paper is to focus on the essentials, i.e., the actual observations being described by location, time, owner, instrument, and measurement. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated in two very different case studies

Start Time and Duration Distribution Estimation in Semi-Structured Processes

Semi-structured processes are business workflows, where the execution of the workflow is not completely controlled by a workflow engine, i.e., an implementation of a formal workflow model. Examples are workflows where actors potentially have interaction with customers reporting the result of the interaction in a process aware information system. Building a performance model for resource management in these processes is difficult since the required information is only partially recorded. In this paper we propose a systematic approach for the creation of an event log that is suitable for available process mining tools. This event log is created by an incrementally cleansing of data. The proposed approach is evaluated in an experiment

Towards Automatic Capturing of Manual Data Processing Provenance

Often data processing is not implemented by a work ow system or an integration application but is performed manually by humans along the lines of a more or less specified procedure. Collecting provenance information during manual data processing can not be automated. Further, manual collection of provenance information is error prone and time consuming. Therefore, we propose to infer provenance information based on the read and write access of users. The derived provenance information is complete, but has a low precision. Therefore, we propose further to introducing organizational guidelines in order to improve the precision of the inferred provenance information

webXice: an Infrastructure for Information Commerce on the WWW

Systems for information commerce on the WWW have to support flexible business models if they should be able to cover a wide range of requirements imposed by the different types of information businesses. This leads to non-trivial functional and security requirements both on the provider and consumer side, for which we introduce an architecture and a system implementation, webXice. We focus on the question, how participants with minimal technological requisites, i.e. solely standard Web browsers available, can be technologically enabled to articipate in the information commerce at a system level, while not sacrificing the functionality and security required by an autonomous participant in an information commerce scenario. In particular, we propose an implementation strategy to efficiently support persistent message logging for light-weight clients, that enables clients to collect and manage non-reputiable messages as proofs. We believe that the capability to support minimal system platforms is a necessary precondition for the wide-spread use of any information commerce infrastructure

Configuration of Distributed Message Converter Systems using Performance Modeling

To find a configuration of a distributed system satisfying performance goals is a complex search problem that involves many design parameters, like hardware selection, job distribution and process configuration. Performance models are a powerful tools to analyse potential system configurations, however, their evaluation is expensive, such that only a limited number of possible configurations can be evaluated. In this paper we present a systematic method to find a satisfactory configuration with feasible effort, based on a two-step approach. First, using performance estimates a hardware configuration is determined and then the software configuration is incrementally optimized evaluating Layered Queueing Network models. We applied this method to the design of performant EDI converter systems in the financial domain, where increasing message volumes need to be handled due to the increasing importance of B2B interaction

Data Provenance Inference in Logic Programming: Reducing Effort of Instance-driven Debugging

Data provenance allows scientists in different domains validating their models and algorithms to find out anomalies and unexpected behaviors. In previous works, we described on-the-fly interpretation of (Python) scripts to build workflow provenance graph automatically and then infer fine-grained provenance information based on the workflow provenance graph and the availability of data. To broaden the scope of our approach and demonstrate its viability, in this paper we extend it beyond procedural languages, to be used for purely declarative languages such as logic programming under the stable model semantics. For experiments and validation, we use the Answer Set Programming solver oClingo, which makes it possible to formulate and solve stream reasoning problems in a purely declarative fashion. We demonstrate how the benefits of the provenance inference over the explicit provenance still holds in a declarative setting, and we briefly discuss the potential impact for declarative programming, in particular for instance-driven debugging of the model in declarative problem solving