Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Within the constant evolution observed in IT/IS area, new processes emerged faced to new customer’s requirements and also due to new trends in software engineering community, such as unified or agile processes. Despite the great set of available tools in process and project management, still there is a real gap between “process” and “project” management approaches and respective tools. To assist team members on their work, the effort spend in a process customization could be used in other tasks, such as the project management task to control activities, work products and team members. In this paper, we describe a simplified SPEM-based metamodel for process specification and explain the motivation around this proposal. Considering this metamodel, we also propose a metamodel for project definition and configuration. To conclude, we demonstrate that this metamodel is better adapted to processes specification and can be applied in a project definition.

The control of actions performed by parties involved in a decentralized cross-organizational workflow is done by several independent workflow engines. Due to the lack of a centralized coordination control, an auditing is required which supports a reliable and secure detection of malicious actions performed by these parties. In this paper we identify several issues which have to be resolved for such a secure logging system. Further, security requirements for a decentralized data store are investigated and evaluated with regard to decentralized data stores.

The grid has emerged as a platform that enables to put in place an inter-organizational shared space known as Virtual Organization. The Virtual Organization (VO) encompasses users and resources supplied by the different partners for achieving the VO’s creation goal. Though many works offer solutions to manage a VO, the dynamic, on the fly creation of virtual organizations is still a challenge. Dynamic creation of VOs is associated with the automated generation of access control policy to trace its boundaries, specify the different partners’ rights within it and assure its management during its life time. In this paper, we propose an OrBAC (Organization Based Access Control model) based Virtual Organization model which serves as a corner stone in the VO creation automated process. OrBAC framework specifies the users’ access permissions/interdiction to the VO resources, where its administration model AdOrBAC flexibly models the multi-stakeholder administration in the Grid.

The application of enterprise modelling supports the common understanding of the enterprise business processes in the company and across companies. To assure a correct cooperation between two or more entities it is mandatory to build an appropriate model of them. This can lead to a stronger amplification of all the cross-interface activities between the entities. Enterprise models illustrate the organisational business aspects as a prerequisite for the successful technical integration of IT systems or their configurations. If an IT system is not accepted because its usefulness is not transparent to the staff members, then it quickly loses its value due to erroneous or incomplete input and insufficient maintenance. This at the end results in investment losses.

The paper exemplifies the strengths, values, limitations and gaps of the application of enterprise modelling to support interoperability between companies. It illustrates a proposal for a common enterprise-modelling framework. This framework is presented in terms of problems to face and knowledge based methodological approach to help solving them. A specific application demonstrates enterprise modelling and the synchronisation between the models as prerequisite for the successful design of Virtual Enterprises.

Real data is often affected by errors and inconsistencies. Many of them depend on the fact that schemas cannot represent a sufficiently wide range of constraints. Data cleaning is the process of identifying and possibly correcting data quality problems that affect the data. Cleaning data requires to gather knowledge on the domain to which the data refer. Anyway, existing data cleaning techniques still access this knowledge as a fragmented collection of heterogenous rules and ad hoc data transformations. Furthermore, data cleaning methodologies for an important class of data based on the semistructured XML data model have not yet been proposed. In this paper we introduce the framework, that offers a methodology for XML data cleaning based on a uniform representation of domain knowledge through an ontology We describe how to define XML related data quality metrics based on our domain knowledge representation, and give a definition of various metrics related to the data quality dimension.

This paper studies inter-organizational communication of strategic design information. The focus is on global software subcontracting, where communication problems are common. Software patterns, which have been recognized as a valuable tool in software development, are proposed to be means to facilitate the communication of design information in subcontracting relationship. The position of patterns in subcontracting related processes are studied and the implications of introducing patterns to software subcontracting relationship are analyzed. As a result an evaluation of software patterns’ suitability as means for efficient, systematic and explicit communication in managing the subcontracting relationship is presented.

Based on changing market conditions companies are more and more focusing on their core competencies while outsourcing supporting processes to their business partners. The outsourcing of business processes results in a strong dependency between companies and their business partners building so called . In order to perform well in such value networks, the of both direct and indirect suppliers is of main importance. Potential supply networks need therefore to be and in order to strategically select the appropriate supply network. The selection of adequate supply networks, satisfying evaluation criteria defined by the OEM, is the topic of this paper. It builds on preparatory work done in the area of strategic supply network development, where the identification and dynamic modeling of strategic supply networks has been elaborated, and focuses on the evaluation of strategic supply networks providing the base for supply network selection.

What the scope of knowledge management (KM) is concerned, the focus of attention is shifting towards inter-organisational aspects resulting in new requirements for the KM process. This paper introduces the concept of self modelling knowledge networks supporting KM in networks by means of dynamic self-configuration. Apart from introducing the concept, technical issues and design aspects of the implementation are discussed and a component model for an inter-organisational knowledge management system is introduced.

Fact-Oriented Modeling is a conceptual approach to modeling and querying the information semantics of business domains in terms of the underlying facts of interest, where all facts and rules may be verbalized in language that is readily understandable by non-technical users of those business domains. Unlike Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling and UML class diagrams, fact-oriented modeling treats all facts as relationships (unary, binary, ternary etc.). How facts are grouped into structures (e.g. attribute-based entity types, classes, relation schemes, XML schemas) is considered a lower level, implementation issue that is irrelevant to the capturing essential business semantics. Avoiding attributes in the base model enhances semantic stability and populatability, as well as facilitating natural verbalization. For information modeling, fact-oriented graphical notations are typically far more expressive than those provided by other notations. Fact-oriented textual languages are based on formal subsets of native languages, so are easier to understand by business people than technical languages like OCL. Fact-oriented modeling includes procedures for mapping to attribute-based structures, so may also be used to front-end other approaches.

Though less well known than ER and object-oriented approaches, fact- oriented modeling has been used successfully in industry for over 30 years, and is taught in universities around the world. The fact-oriented modeling approach comprises a family of closely related “dialects”, the most well known being Object-Role Modeling (ORM), Natural Language Information Analysis Method (NIAM), and Fully-Communication Oriented Information Modeling (FCO-IM). Though adopting a different graphical notation, the Object-oriented Systems Model (OSM) is a close relative, with its attribute-free philosophy.

Due to ever larger ORM models and ORM-represented ontologies, information management and its GUI representation is even more important. One useful mechanism is abstraction, which has received some attention in conceptual modelling and implementation, as well as its foundational characteristics. Extant heuristics for ORM abstractions are examined and enriched with several foundational aspects of abstraction. These improvements are applicable to a wider range of types of representations, including conceptual models and ontologies, thereby not only alleviating the Database Comprehension Problem, but also facilitate conceptual model and ontology browsing.