Dorn, Christoph

Dustdar, Schahram

Werth, Dirk

English

Computing and Informatics (E-Journal - Institute of Informatics, SAS, Bratislava)

Computing and Informatics, Vol. 30, 2011, 1–5INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL SECTIONON BUSINESS COLLABORATION SUPPORTFOR MICRO, SMALL, AND MEDIUM-SIZEDENTERPRISESSchahram DustdarDistributed Systems GroupVienna University of TechnologyArgentinierstr. 8/184-11040 Vienna, Austriae-mail: dustdar@infosys.tuwien.ac.atDirk WerthDeutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)Stuhlsatzenhausweg 366123 Saarbrücken, Germanye-mail: dirk.werth@dfki.deChristoph DornDistributed Systems GroupVienna University of TechnologyArgentinierstr. 8/184-11040 Vienna, Austriae-mail: dorn@infosys.tuwien.ac.at1 PREFACEOver the past decades, industry has been evolving from a vertically integrated en-vironment into an ecosystem of collaborating companies [1], each providing specia-lized products, technologies, and services. Tight business collaboration [2] is now2 S. Dustdar, D. Werth, C. Dorna fundamental concern and the key to success in today’s dynamic business environ-ment.Although the vast majority of European enterprises are SMEs, enterprise in-teroperability research and solutions have been successfully employed only in largeorganizations. Business and communication assistance systems for SMEs face twomain challenges [3]. First, SMEs lack resources to invest in full-blown solutionsand integrate them in their local IT landscape. Subsequently, SMEs usually em-ploy a set of non-standardized, custom-tailored ERP and communication systemsto engage in B2B and B2C relations [4]. Second, SMEs need to remain flexible andresponsive quickly to changing market needs [5]. Most interoperability solutionstoday, however, are rigidly configured and require considerable adaptation efforts tokeep up-to-date with business requirements. In an environment of loosely-coupled,dynamically adapting SMEs, business collaboration support tools need to remainlight-weight, flexible, and to automatically adapt to certain degree to changing con-text.This special section focuses on latest research in models, architectures, protocols,and algorithms that support SMEs in inter-organizational collaboration and thecorresponding enterprise integration. This special section highlights three mainresearch areas:1. exploitation and integration of unstructured and semi-structured communicationmeans such as web-interfaces, email [6], or social media [7] such as twitter orfacebook,2. automated semantic analysis and mapping of business artifacts [8], and3. people-driven flexible workflow support mechanisms [9].Particular focus is on research that promises to lower the entry bar for SMEs to em-ploy business collaboration and assistance solutions. This explicitly includes mecha-nisms, algorithms, and protocols for self-organizing, self-configuring, self-learning,and self-adjusting behavior.Specifically, papers in this section bring together diverse research domains suchas collaborative working environments, semantic rule systems, information retrieval,social network analysis, business collaboration patterns, BPMN, ontology negotia-tion algorithms, process self-tuning, and business document alignment.The first paper in this special section addresses the challenge of semantic-awarecollaborative working environments (CWE). Maria Antonia Martinez Carreras et al.make the case for an integrated CWE as an effective way to share information be-tween experts as well as between SMEs. At the core of their proposed architecture,a unified collaboration ontology brings together and extends existing ontologies suchas FOAF, SIOC, and OPO. The management tier applies an inference system to rea-son on knowledge and ultimately to provide interoperability between heterogeneousservices.The work by Cesar Marin et al. similarly addresses semantic interoperability.The authors, however, focus on devolved ontologies as the main tool to drive seam-Introduction to BCSE 3less semantic alignment in a dynamic collaboration network of SMEs. In theirapproach, SMEs agree merely on a very basic, fundamental set of core compo-nents that describe information tokens such as organizations, addresses, or productitems. An aggregation of multiple tokens creates a business document. Each SMEin the network matches the content of business documents to their current set ofdocuments, and extends the set by simply adding relations between documents andinformation tokens. For disagreements between SMEs a negotiation protocol candetermine the best replacement document type.Michal Laclavik et al. focus on the most used communication means betweenSMEs: email. Their work centers around information extraction from emails andsubsequent structural analysis of information links and the emerging social network.The authors combine regular expressions, gazetteers, and layout structure to extractthe basic information such as addresses, persons, and products and add them toa semantic tree. Identifying items are placed in a multipartite graph together withemail identifiers, web links, and structural data. An algorithm based on spreadactivation can then determine dependencies (e.g., organizations and their respectivecontact details) from the resulting information network.Recommendations for dynamic people-driven processes are addressed by ThomasBurkhart et al. The authors describe a flexible approach to self-adapting recommen-dations through a feedback loop. Users receive recommendations what immediateprocess step to execute for an incoming business message and what to continueworking on afterwards. Based on explicit feedback by the user on the correctness ofthe first recommendation, and execution of subsequent process steps (implicit feed-back) their proposed system learns deviations from the underlying process modeland adapts it accordingly.This special section concludes with a work on collaboration process modelingthrough design patterns by Anna Lisa Guido et al. Based on a case study, theauthors identified five key business process collaboration patterns. These patternsare mapped to BPMN notation and therefore simplify the design of processes whichspecifically encourage collaboration and data exchange between involved knowledgeworkers.We hope this special section provides the reader an interesting insight into cur-rent research efforts on collaboration support for SMEs. We are looking forward tofuture upcoming research results, as we believe this domain will continue to receivea lot of attention both from academia and industry.AcknowledgmentThis special section would not have been possible without the excellent work pro-vided by the guest editorial board and additional reviewers. We would like to thank(in alphabetical order): Daniela Angelucci (IASI-CNR), Thomas Burkhart (IWi,German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), Samia Drissi-Kablouti (Fraun-hofer IPA), Ladislav Hluchý (Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences),Michal Laclav́ık (Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences), César Maŕın4 S. Dustdar, D. Werth, C. Dorn(University of Manchester), Gregorio Mart́ınez Pérez (University of Murcia), Niko-lay Mehandjiev (University of Manchester), Michele Missikoff (IASI-CNR), HervePanetto (Nancy-Universite, CNRS), Hong-Linh Truong (Vienna University of Tech-nology).REFERENCES[1] Fontaine, M.A.—Parise, S.—Miller, D.: Collaborative Environments: An Ef-fective Tool for Transforming Business Processes. Business Journal-Improving thePractices of Management, May/June 2004, pp. 1–10.[2] Chen, D.—Doumeingts, G.—Vernadat, F.: Architectures for Enterprise Integra-tion and Interoperability: Past, Present and Future. Computers in Industry Vol. 59,2008, No. 7, pp. 647–659. Enterprise Integration and Interoperability in ManufacturingSystems.[3] Li, M.-S.—Cabral, R.—Doumeingts, G.—Popplewell, K.: Enterprise Inter-operability: Research roadmap, July 2006.[4] META Group Inc.: 80% of Users Prefer E-Mail as Business Communication Tool.2003, http://tinyurl.com/MetaEmail03.[5] Dellen, B.—Maurer, F.—Pews, G.: Knowledge Based Techniques to Increasethe Flexibility of Workflow Management. Data and Knowledge Engineering, North-Holland 1997.[6] HP, The Radicati Group, Inc.: Taming the Growth of Email – An ROI Analysis (WhitePaper). 2005, http://tinyurl.com/RadicatiEmail05.[7] Cook, N.: Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software will change the future of Work. Gower,London (UK) 2008.[8] Kalfoglou, Y.—Schorlemmer, M.: Ontology Mapping: The State of the Art.Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 18, 2003, No. 1, pp. 1–31.[9] Reijers, H.—Rigter, J.—Aalst, W.V.D.: The Case Handling Case. Interna-tional Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 12, 2003, pp. 365–391.Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science (In-formatics) heading the Distributed Systems Group, Vienna Uni-versity of Technology (TU Wien). Since 2009 he is an ACM Dis-tinguished Scientist. He received his M. Sc. (1990) and Ph.D.degrees (1992) in Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik)from the University of Linz, Austria. In April 2003 he receivedhis Habilitation degree (Venia Docendi) for his work on Process-aware Collaboration Systems – Architectures and CoordinationModels for Virtual Teams. From 1999–2007 he worked as theco-founder and chief scientist of Caramba Labs Software AG(CarambaLabs.com) in Vienna (acquired by Engineering NetWorld AG), a venture capi-tal co-funded software company focused on software for collaborative processes in teams.Introduction to BCSE 5He has published some 250 scientific papers as conference-, journal-, and book contribu-tions. He co-organized several scientific workshops and conferences (such as ICSOC 2007and BPM 2006) and has been serving on more than 200 international program commit-tees as well as on editorial boards of 10 scientific journals. His research interests includecollaborative computing, workflow systems, Internet technologies, software architecture,distributed systems, distributed multimedia systems, and mobile collaboration systems.Dirk Werth is Vice President Innovation&Research Consult-ing and Head of Business Integration Technologies at the Ger-man Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saar-brücken and Berlin. Before, he was directing coordinator of a re-search competence center, as well as project manager and over-all coordinator of national and international R&D projects. Heheld leading positions in multiple industrial consulting projects.Furthermore, he is giving lectures on Enterprise Resource Plan-ning and Business Integration at the University of Saarland andthe Clausthal University of Technology. He holds diplomas inBusiness Administration and in Computer Sciences as well as a Ph.D. in economics. HisPh.D. thesis got the Special Award for Business Process Management from the FederalAssociation of German Political and Business Economists. His research activities comprisecollaborative business processes, business integration and advanced business informationsystems.Christoph Dorn received his M. Soc. Ec. Sc. (Magister) in Bu-siness Informatics in 2004, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science(Dr. techn.) in 2009, both from the Vienna University of Tech-nology. Currently he works as a Post-Doc researcher in the Dis-tributed Systems Group. His research interests cover context-aware computing, people-driven ad-hoc workflows, Web serviceadaptation, social network analysis, and collaborative workingenvironments. He was recently awarded a FWF Schrödinger Mo-bility Fellowship to conduct research with Prof. Richard Taylorat UC Irvine.

Introduction to the Special Section on Business Collaboration Support for Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises

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Introduction to the Special Section on Business Collaboration Support for Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises

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Computing and Informatics (E-Journal - Institute of Informatics, SAS, Bratislava)