Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

As the ontologies are the pivotal element of the Semantic Web in E-Commerce, it is necessary to protect the ontology’s integrity and availability. In addition, both suppliers and buyers will use an ontology to store confidential knowledge pertaining to their preferences or possible substitutions for certain products. Thus, parts of an ontology will need to be kept confidential. We propose to use well established standards of XML access control. E-commerce processes require the confidentiality of customer information, the integrity of product offers and the availability of the vendors’ servers. Our main contribution-the introduction of a Security Ontology-helps to structure and simulate IT security risks of e-commerce players that depend on their IT infrastructure.

Current functional requirements for Process Management Systems are often demanding accommodation of rapid changes of business processes as well as simple adoption to new business requirements. This paper identifies and distinguishes between two new ways to handle system’s assisted multiple work items execution; work item merging and work item grouping. We show that traditional workflow management systems technology has limitations for automatic item merging while Harmonized Messaging Technology (HMT) (Sadiq, Orlowska, Sadiq et al., 2004b) is better positioned for such item merging behaviour. For completeness of presentation, we provide a brief introduction to the basic concepts in HMT and demonstrate how automatic merging can be specified in this environment. We conclude by investigating the impact on process related data when adopting such merging extension into process enforcement technology.

Flow-oriented process modeling languages have a long tradition in the area of Business Process Management and are widely used for capturing activities with their behavioral and data dependencies. Individual events were introduced for triggering process instantiation and activities. However, real-world business cases drive the need for also covering complex event patterns as they are known in the field of Complex Event Processing. Therefore, this paper puts forward a catalog of requirements for handling complex events in process models, which can be used as reference framework for assessing process definition languages and systems. An assessment of BPEL and BPMN is provided.

In this work, we propose a holistic analysis framework for collaborative e-Business process modelling approaches that takes into account the specific challenges small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are facing with regard to modelling inter-organizational processes. Based on concepts of the management approach Balanced Scorecard (BSC) four different perspectives are derived from empirical studies, conceptual research results and completed with modelling experiences of an EU-funded project. By considering concepts of Management Theories, Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigms, requirements for collaborative modelling approaches are presented according to the four perspectives financial, working process, innovation/ learning and user. Finally, a strategy map describes the complex interactions of the identified requirements between the perspectives.

In this work, we present a conceptual framework for deriving executable business process models from high-level, graphical business process models based on the paradigm of Service-Oriented Architectures and Semantic Web technology. We hereby envision a direct, but implicit link from a business analyst’s view on a process model to its execution driven by an IT system. This linkage enables the derivation of an execution-level model for newly created business process models as well as adaptation of the execution model after re-engineering processes, possibly under certain re-design goals (such as quality, cost, execution time, flexibility, or others).

The framework includes a component architecture and an algorithm that describes how to combine executable artifacts, such as (Semantic) Web services, in order to find an implementation that matches a given business process model. An extensible set of criteria can be used for validating the composition.

This paper presents a process dependency model for dynamically analyzing data dependencies among concurrently executing processes in an autonomous, distributed service composition environment. Data dependencies are derived from incremental data changes captured at each service execution site. Deltas are then used within a rule-based recovery model to specify how failure recovery of one process can potentially affect another process execution based on application semantics. This research supports relaxed isolation and application-dependent semantic correctness for concurrent process execution, with a unique approach to resolving the impact of process failure recovery on other processes, using data dependencies derived from distributed, autonomous services.

There has been a huge influx of business process modeling languages as business process management (BPM) and process-aware information systems continue to expand into various business domains. The origins of process modeling languages are quite diverse, although two dominant approaches can be observed; one based on graphical models, and the other based on rule specifications. However, at this time, there is no report in literature that specifically targets a comparative analysis of these two approaches, on aspects such as the relative areas of application, power of expression, and limitations. In this paper we have attempted to address this question. We will present both a survey of the two approaches as well as a critical and comparative analysis.

Web service technology provides a way for simplifying interoperability among different organizations. A piece of functionality available as a web service can be involved in a new business process. Given the steadily growing number of available web services, it is hard for developers to find services appropriate for their needs. The main research efforts in this area are oriented on developing a mechanism for semantic web service description and matching. In this paper, we present an alternative approach for supporting users in web service discovery. Our system implements the implicit culture approach for recommending web services to developers based on the history of decisions made by other developers with similar needs. We explain the main ideas underlying our approach and report on experimental results.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architecture for a system or application that is built using services that implement business functionality with proper granularity. If the granularity of a service is finer, the flexibility and reusability of the service is lower. Therefore, it is critically important to identify what pieces of functionality will become services and to define the interfaces of those services. In this paper, we define a process to identify services by use case refactoring. Task trees are defined to restructure use cases, and five refactoring rules are introduced along with a running example. Because this modeling process can choose the correct levels of abstraction and granularity, it can be helpful in identifying coarse-grained services.

Choreography description languages have been put forward for capturing sets of interactions and their control and data dependencies, seen from a global perspective. Choreographies serve as starting point for generating interface processes for the different participants which in turn are used for implementing new services or adapting existing ones. However, such top-down approaches are not sufficient for scenarios where given implementations cannot be changed and are to be used as a starting point for choreography design. This paper identifies and classifies three categories of choreography design: , and . Each category is motivated through an example from the eGovernment domain. Existing techniques needed for the individual design categories are discussed and missing techniques are highlighted.