FROM DATABASE TO DATAWAREHOUSE: A DESIGN QUALITY EVALUATION

Maurizio Pighin and Lucio Ieronutti

Data Warehousing provides tools and techniques for collecting, integrating and storing a large number of transactional data extracted from operational Databases, with the aim of deriving accurate management information that can be effectively used for supporting decision processes. However, the choice of which attributes have to be considered as dimensions and which as measures heavily influences the effectiveness of a data warehouse. Since this is not a trivial task, especially for databases characterized by a large number of tables and attributes, an expert is often required for correctly selecting the most suitable attributes and assigning them the correct roles. In this paper, we then propose a semantic-independent methodology targeted at (i) supporting the data warehouse design and creation, and (ii) deriving information on total quality of the built Data Warehouse. We also present the results of an experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our methodology.

PTSM: A PORTLET SELECTION MODEL

Mª Ángeles Moraga, Coral Calero, Mario Piattini and Oscar Díaz

The use of Web portals continues to rise, showing their importance in the current information society. The success of a portal depends on customers using and returning to it. Nowadays, it is very easy for users to change from one portal to another, so improving/assessing portal quality is a must. Hence, appropriate quality model should be available to measure and drive portal development. Specifically, this work focuses on portlet-based portals. Portlets are web components, and they can be thought as COTS but in a Web setting. This paper presents a portlet selection model that guides the portal developer in choosing the best portlet, among a set of portlets with similar functions for specified tasks and user objectives, in accordance to five quality measures, namely, functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency and reusability, and other three characteristics not related to the quality but important to carry out the selection.

TRANSFORMATION OF LEGACY BUSINESS SOFTWARE INTO CLIENT-SERVER ARCHITECTURES

Thomas Rauber and Gudula Rünger

Business software systems in use contain specific knowledge which is essential for the enterprise using the software and the software has often grown over years. However, it is difficult to adapt these software systems to the rapidly changing hardware and software technologies. This so-called legacy problem is extremely cost intensive when a change in the software itself or the hardware platform is required due to a change in the business processes of the enterprise or the hardware technology. Thus, a common problem in business software is the cost effective analysis, documentation, and transformation of business software. In this paper, we concentrate on the transformation issue of software systems and propose an incremental process for transforming monolithic business software into client-server architectures. The internal logical structure of the software system is used to create software components in a flexible way. The transformation process is supported by a transformation toolset which preserves correctness and functionality.

INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION DURING MERGERS - INTEGRATION MODES TYPOLOGY AND INTEGRATION PATHS

Gérald Brunetto

Today Information Systems (IS) integration constitutes one of the major success factors of mergers and acquisitions. This article draws on two case studies of firms having realized more than 10 mergers and acquisitions between 1990 and 2000. This paper shows the importance of carrying out a double approach to understand IS integration process. The first approach represents the necessity of using organizational configuration to define possible IS integration modes. Thus we show the importance of organizational, strategic and technological contingencies within the elaboration of integration mode.

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SEARCH SYSTEMS FOR HETEROGENEOUS CONTENT REPOSITORIES

Trieu C. Chieu, Shyh-Kwei Chen and Shiwa S. Fu

In larger enterprises, business documents are typically stored in disparate, autonomous content repositories with various formats. Efficient search and retrieval mechanisms are needed to deal with the heterogeneousness and complexity of this environment. This paper presents a general architecture and two industrial implementations of a service-based information system to perform search in Lotus Notes databases and data sources with Web service interfaces. The first implementation is based on a federated database system that maps the various schemas of the sources into a common interface and aggregates information from their native locations. This implementation offers the advantages of scalability and accessibility to real-time information. The second one is based on a one-index enterprise-scale search engine that crawls, parses and indexes the document contents from the sources. This latter implementation offers the ability of scoring the relevance ranking of documents and eliminating duplications in search results. The relative merits and limitations of both implementations will be presented.

A FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPORTING KNOWLEDGE WORK PROCESSES

Weidong Pan, Igor Hawryszkiewycz and Dongbei Xue

Improving knowledge work processes has become increasingly important for modern enterprises to maintain a competitive status in nowadays information society. This paper will propose a way to improve knowledge work processes through supportive services. A framework for supporting knowledge work processes will be presented where the best practices of knowledge work processes, developed by process organizers or derived from some successful applications, are described and stored in a database, and according to the description, software agents dynamically organize supportive services to guide process participants to advance process steps towards an efficient completion of the process. The paper will provide an overview of the method and explore the development of the main components involved in the framework.

A NEW LOOK INTO DATA WAREHOUSE MODELLING

Nikolay Nikolov

The dominating paradigm of Data Warehouse design is the star schema (Kimball, 1996). The main debate within the scientific community for years has been not whether this paradigm is really the only way, but, rather, on its details (e.g. “to snowflake or not to snowflake” – Kimball et al., 1998). Shifting the emphasis of the discourse entirely within the star schema paradigm prevents the search for better alternatives. We argue that the star schema paradigm is an artefact of the transactional perspective and does not account for the analytic perspective. The most popular formalized method for deriving the star schema (Golfarelli et al., 1998) underlines just that by taking only the entity-relationship-model (ERM) as an input. Although this design approach follows the natural data and work-flow, it does not necessarily offer the best performance. The main thrust of our argument is that the query model should be used on a par with the ERM as a starting point in the data warehouse design process. The rationale is that the end design should reflect not just the structure inherent in the data model, but also that of the expected workload. Such approach results in a schema which may look very different than the traditional star schema but the performance improvement it may achieve justifies going off-the-beaten track.

AN ORDER ALLOCATION MODEL IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES BASED ON INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS

Fangqi Cheng, Feifan Ye and Jianguo Yang

Industrial clusters can be found very often in the world, particularly in many developing countries. In the age of internationalisation and a highly competitive environment with shorter product life cycles, more customized needs and more uncertainties in markets, to build virtual enterprise based on an industrial cluster is one of the most important ways to improve the agility and competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises in the cluster. One of the key factors towards the success of virtual enterprises is the correct selection of cooperative partners in the virtual enterprise. An approach of order allocation and partner selection in the environment of industrial clusters is proposed. This approach is composed of two stages: task-resource matching and quantitative evaluation. In the first stage the potential candidates are identified and in the second stage evolutionary programming is applied to deal with partner selection and order allocation problem. The architecture for information evaluation and order allocation is studied for the proposed approach. The target function, in which the load rate of candidate enterprise is taken as the main variable, is developed, and a simplified example is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach. The result suggests that the proposed model and the algorithm obtain satisfactory solutions. It is expected that the proposed approach can efficiently improve the manufacturing resource’s utilization and enhance the agility of manufacturing enterprises in industrial clusters by means of virtual enterprise.

A DATABASE INTEGRATION SYSTEM BASED ON GLOBAL VIEW GENERATION

Uchang Park and Ramon Lawrence

Database integration is a common and growing challenge with the proliferation of database systems, data warehouses, data marts, and other OLAP systems in organizations. Although there are many methods of sharing data between databases, true interoperability of database systems requires capturing, comparing, and merging the semantics of each system. In this work, we present a database integration system that improves on the database federation architecture by allowing domain administrators to simply and efficiently capture database semantics. The semantic information is combined using a tool for producing a global view. Building the global view is the bottleneck in integration because there are few tools that support its construction, and these tools often require sophisticated knowledge and experience to operate properly. The technique and tool presented is simple and powerful enough to be used by all database administrators, yet expressive enough to support the majority of integration queries

UNASSSUMING VIEW-SIZE ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES IN OLAP - AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON

Kamel Aouiche and Daniel Lemire

Even if storage was infinite, a data warehouse could not materialize all possible views due to the running time and update requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to estimate quickly, accurately, and reliably the size of views. Many available techniques make particular statistical assumptions and their error can be quite large. Unassuming techniques exist, but typically assume we have independent hashing for which there is no known practical implementation. We adapt an unassuming estimator due to Gibbons and Tirthapura: its theoretical bounds do not make unpractical assumptions. We compare this technique experimentally with stochastic probabilistic counting, LogLog probabilistic counting, and multifractal statistical models. Our experiments show that we can reliably and accurately (within 10%, 19 times out 20) estimate view sizes over large data sets (1.5 GB) within minutes, using almost no memory. However, only Gibbons-Tirthapura provides universally tight estimates irrespective of the size of the view. For large views, probabilistic counting has a small edge in accuracy, whereas the competitive sampling-based method (multifractal) we tested is an order of magnitude faster but can sometimes provide poor estimates (relative error of 100%). In our tests, LogLog probabilistic counting is not competitive. Experimental validation on the US Census 1990 data set and on the Transaction Processing Performance (TPC~H) data set is provided.

IMPLEMENTING SPATIAL DATAWAREHOUSE HIERARCHIES IN OBJECT-RELATIONAL DBMSS

Elzbieta Malinowski and Esteban Zimányi

Spatial Data Warehouses (SDWs) allow to analyze historical data represented in a space supporting the decision-making process. SDW applications require a multidimensional view of data that includes dimensions with hierarchies and facts with associated measures. In particular, hierarchies are important since traversing them users can analyze detailed and aggregated measures. To better represent users' requirements for SDWs, the conceptual model with spatial support should be used. Afterwards, the conceptual schema is translated to the logical and physical schemas. However, during the translation process the semantics can be lost. In this paper, we present the translation of spatial hierarchies from the conceptual to physical schemas represented in the MultiDimER model and Oracle 10g Spatial, respectively. Further, to ensure the semantic equivalence between the conceptual and the physical schemas, integrity constraints are exemplified mainly using triggers.

TEXT ANALYTICS AND DATA ACCESS AS SERVICES - A CASE STUDY IN TRANSFORMING A LEGACY CLIENT-SERVER TEXT ANALYTICS WORKBENCH AND FRAMEWORK TO SOA

E. Michael Maximilien, Ying Chen, Ana Lelescu, James Rhodes, Jeffrey Kreulen and Scott Spangler

As business information is made available via the intranet and Internet, there is a growing need to quickly analyze the resulting mountain of information to infer business insights. For instance, analyzing a company’s patent database against another’s to find the patents that are cross licensable. IBM Research’s Business Insight Workbench (BIW) is a text mining and analytics tool that allows end–users to explore, understand, and analyze business information in order to come up with such insight. However, the first incarnation of BIW used a thick-client architecture with a database back-end. Though very successful, the architecture caused limitations in the tool’s flexibility, scalability, and deployment. In this paper we discuss our initial experiences in converting BIW into a modern Service-Oriented Architecture. We also provide some insights into our design choices and also outline some lessons learned.

A NEW ALGORITHM FOR TWIG PATTERN MATCHING

Yangjun Chen

Tree pattern matching is one of the most fundamental tasks for XML query processing. Prior work has typically decomposed the twig pattern into binary structural (parent-child and ancestor-descendent) relationships or paths, and then stitch together these basic matches by join operations. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm which explores both the document tree and the twig pattern in a bottom-up way and show that the join operation can be completely avoided. The new algorithm runs in O(|T|Þ|Q|) time and O(|Q|ÞleafT) space, where T and Q are the document tree and the twig pattern query, respectively; and leafT represents the number of leaf nodes in T. Our experiments show that our method is effective, scalable and efficient in evaluating twig pattern queries.

A METHOD FOR EARLY CORRESPONDENCE DISCOVERY USING INSTANCE DATA

Indrakshi Ray and C. J. Michael Geisterfer

In the database integration research, much effort has gone into developing automated solutions to integrating the schema (and then, afterwards, the data itself). In most of the research literature, the solutions and approaches have concentrated on matching schema-level information to determine the correspondences between data concepts in the component databases. If instance-level information is even utilized, it is used only to augment the correspondences found using the schema-level information, to catch what the schema-level matching missed. To use schema-level information, the component schemas must be transformed to a canonical data model before they can be compared. Furthermore, this bases for database integration has a strong reliance on the availability of schema experts, schema documentation, and well-designed schemas - items that are often not available. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a method of initial instance-based correspondence discovery that greatly reduces the manual effort involved in the current integration processes. The gains are accomplished because the ensuing method uses only instance data (a body of database knowledge that is always available) to make its initial discoveries. A secondary contribution will be to show that correspondence discovery before schemas transformation is a viable, even desired alternative to the current general integration process.

XML SCHEMA STRUCTURAL EQUIVALENCE

Angela C. Duta, Ken Barker and Reda Alhajj

The Xequiv algorithm determines when two XML schemas are equivalent based on their structural organization. It calculates the percentages of schema inclusion in another schema by considering the cardinality of each leaf node and its interconnection to other leaf nodes that are part of a sequence or choice structure. Xequiv is based on the Reduction Algorithm that focuses on the leaf nodes and eliminates intermediate levels in the XML tree.

SECURE KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE BY POLICY ALGEBRA AND ERML

Steve Barker and Paul Douglas

In this paper, we demonstrate how role-based access control policies may be used for secure forms of knowledge module exchange in an open, distributed environment. For that, we define an algebra that a security administrator may use for defining compositions and decompositions of shared information sources, and we describe a markup language for facilitating secure information exchange amongst heterogeneous information systems. We also describe an implementation of our approach and we give some performance measures, which offer evidence of the feasibility of our proposal.

MAINTENANCE COST OF A SOFTWARE DESIGN: A VALUE-BASED APPROACH

Daniel Cabrero, Javier Garzás and Mario Piattini

Alternative valid software design solutions can give response to the same software product requirements. In addition, a great part of the success of a software project depends on the selected software design. However, there are few methods to quantify how much value will be added by each design strategy, and hence very little time is spent choosing the best design option. This paper presents a new approach to estimate and quantify how profitable is to improve a design solution. This will be achieved by estimating the maintenance cost of a software project using two main variables: The probability of change of each design artifact, and the cost associated to each change. Two techniques are proposed in this paper to support this approach: COCM (Change-Oriented Configuration Management) and CORT (Change-Oriented Requirement Tracing).

THE CHALLENGES FACING GLOBAL ERP SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATIONS

Paul Hawking, Andrew Stein and Susan Foster

Large global companies are increasing looking towards information systems to standardise business processes and enhance decision making across their operations in different countries In particular these companies are implementing enterprise resource planning systems to provide this standardisation. This paper is a review of literature which focusses on the use of ERP systems to support global operations. There are many technological and cultural challenges facing these implementations. However a major challenge faced by companies is the balance between centralisation and localisation.

INCENTIVES AND OBSTACLES IN IMPLEMENTING INTER-ORGANISATIONAL INTEROPERABILITY

Raija Halonen and Veikko Halonen

This paper explores the incentives and obstacles that rise when implementing interoperability in organisations. In the focus we have an inter-organisational information system especially in a context with the information system having interfaces with several information systems managed by different organisations. Information systems are implemented because they bring along several benefits: they enable interaction between organisations without physical attendance; they enable information to be forwarded across organisational borders; they enable organisations better to compete in the market; and they enable organisations to partner with each other. In this respect, inter-organisational information systems differ from other information systems. Inter-organisational information systems often are linked with information systems that are aimed to support functionalities in the partnering organisations and that are implemented earlier, even several years earlier in the organisations. We limit this paper to consider only inter-organisational information systems that are implemented to support pre-defined joint functionalities.

KNOWLEDGE-MASHUPS AS NEXT GENERATION WEBBASED SYSTEMS - CONVERGING SYSTEMS VIA SELF-EXPLAINING SERVICES

Thomas Bopp, Birger Kühnel, Thorsten Hampel, Christian Prpitsch and Frank Lützenkirchen

Webservice-based architectures are facing new challegenges in terms of convergence of systems. By example of a webservice integration of a digital repository/library, systems of knowledge management in groups, and learning management systems this contribution shows new potentials of flexible, descriptive webservices. Digital libraries are understood in their key position as searching, structuring, and archiving instances of digital media and they actively provide services in this sense. The goal of this article is to introduce services suitable for everyday use for coupling different system classes. Conceptually, the requirements of a possible standard in the area of convergence of knowledge management, digital libraries, and learning management systems are discussed. The results are publish and search services with negotiation capabilities with a low-barrier for adoption.

A FRAMEWORK FOR MODEL-DRIVEN PATTERN MATCHING

Ignacio García-Rodríguez de Guzmán, Macario Polo and Mario Piattini

Today, software technology is evolving to model engineering. Standards such as MOF and MDA and languages such as QVT and ATL are emerging to support this evolution from object paradigm to model engineering. At times, these standards and languages give rules and advice at a high level of abstraction and concrete solutions and implementations are difficult to perform. As a consequence of this technological immaturity and the lack of documentation, many capabilities in this new field are not exploited. To this end, the authors in this paper propose a first step of providing a framework for performing Model-Driven Pattern Matching operations. Pattern matching based on models is an evolution of a traditional concept adapted to the model realm. In this respect, this kind of pattern matching seems to be promising not only for finding occurrences of given models in others, but also for giving meaning or sense to these patterns in order to undertake actions over the resulting matchings.

MODELING OF AN ANALYTICAL DATABASE SYSTEM

Alex Sandro Romeu de Souza Poletto and Jorge Rady Almeida Junior

This paper describes a modeling for constructing an analytical database, with the objective to store historical values and also the most recent values starting from operational databases. The first function of this modeling is to map operational database into analytical database, using their E-R diagrams. For that, we created ten steps, which will support the mapping. The second function is to make available mechanisms for generation, transport and storage of these historic data. For that, we specified triggers and procedures for each step.

EVIE - AN EVENT BROKERING LANGUAGE FOR THE COMPOSITION OF COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS PROCESSES

Tony O’Hagan, Shazia Sadiq and Wasim Sadiq

Technologies that facilitate the management of collaborative processes are high on the agenda for enterprise software developers. One of the greatest difficulties in this respect is achieving a streamlined pipeline from business modelling to execution infrastructures. In this paper we present Evie - an approach for rapid design and deployment of event driven collaborative processes based on a significant language extensions to Java that are characterized by abstract and succinct constructs. The new language is positioned within an overall framework that provides a bridge between a high level modelling tool and the underlying deployment environment.

INDUCTION OF DATA QUALITY PROTOCOLS INTO BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska and Wasim Sadiq

Data quality plays a fundamental role in the success of IT solutions deployment. Success of large projects may be compromised due to lack of governance and control of data quality. The criticality of this problem has increased manifold in the current business environment heavily dependent on external data, where such data may pollute enterprise databases. At the same time, it is well recognized that an organization’s business processes provide the backbone for business operations through constituent enterprise applications and services. As such business process management systems are often the first point of contact for dirty data. It is on the basis of this role that we propose that BPM technologies can and should be viewed as a vehicle for data quality enforcement. In this paper, we target a specific data quality problem, namely data mismatch. We propose to address this problem by explicitly inducting requisite data quality protocols in to the business process management system. In addition to presenting the details of the proposed approach, we will also present in this paper, a detailed analysis of process data properties and typical errors.

A DOCUMENT REPOSITORY ARCHITECTURE FOR HETEROGENEOUS BUSINESS INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Mohamed Mbarki, Chantal Soulé-Dupuy and Nathalie Vallès-Parlangeau

As part of business memories, document repositories should bring some solutions to ensure flexible and efficient uses of dematerialized information content. While the fields of repositories modeling, document integration and information interrogation have independently attracted a huge amount of attention, few works have tried to propose a general architecture of document repository management. Thus we propose a repository architecture based on the integration of different complementary modules ensuring an efficient storage of fragmented digital documents and then flexible fragments exploitation. This paper presents an implementation of such architecture of document repository.

EXTRACTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF DATA FROM SEMI-STRUCTURED TEXT FILES USING A DECLARATIVE APPROACH

R. Raminhos and J. Moura-Pires

The ETL problematic is becoming progressively less specific to the traditional data-warehousing domain and is being extended to the processing of textual data. The World Wide Web appears as a major source of textual information, following a human-readable semi-structured format, referring to multiple domains, some of them highly complex. Traditional ETL approaches following the development of specific source code for each data source and based on multiple domain / computer-science experts interactions, become an inadequate solution, time consuming and prone to error. This paper presents a novel approach to ETL, based on its decomposition in two phases: ETD (Extraction, Transformation and Data Delivery) followed by IL (Integration and Loading). The ETD proposal is supported by a declarative language for expressing ETD statements and a graphical application for interacting with the domain expert. When applying ETD, mainly domain expertise is required, while computer-science expertise will be centred in the IL phase, linking the processed data to target system models, enabling a clearer separation of concerns. This paper also presents how ETD has been integrated, tested and validated in a full data processing solution for a space domain project, currently operational at the European Space Agency for the Galileo Mission.

EXTENSIBLE METADATA REPOSITORY FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS

Ricardo Ferreira and João Moura-Pires

Today’s Information Systems and Enterprise Applications require extensive use of Metadata information. In Information Systems, metadata helps in integration and modelling their various components and computational processes, while in Enterprises metadata can describe business and management models, human or physical resources, among others. This paper presents a light and no-cost extensible Metadata Repository solution for such cases, relying on XML and related technologies to store, validate, query and transform metadata information, ensuring common operational concerns such as availability and security yet providing easy integration. The feasibility and applicability of the solution is proved by a set of case studies and applications where an implementation is running in operational state.

OLAP AGGREGATION FUNCTION FOR TEXTUAL DATA WAREHOUSE

Franck Ravat, Olivier Teste and Ronan Tournier

For more than a decade, OLAP and multidimensional analysis have generated methodologies, tools and resource management systems for the analysis of numeric data. With the growing availability of semi-structured data there is a need for incorporating text-rich document data in a data warehouse and providing adapted multidimensional analysis. This paper presents a new aggregation function for keywords. The AVG_KW function uses an ontology to join keywords into a more common one. This allows aggregation of textual data in OLAP environment as traditional arithmetic functions would do on numeric data.

DETERMINING THE COSTS OF ERP IMPLEMENTATION

Rob J. Kusters, Fred J. Heemstra and Arjan Jonker

The key question of the research reported here is 'which factors influence En¬terprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation costs'. No sufficient answers to this question can as yet be found in literature. A 'theoretical' answer to this question has been designed by studying the sparsely available literature on ERP implementation costs, and adding to this relevant items from the related fields of software cost estimation, COTS implementation cost estimation, and ERP implementation critical success factors. This result has been compared with empirical data that have been obtained from two large corporations. The combined result can be seen as a first attempt to define a generally applicable list of cost drivers for ERP implementation.

STATISTICS API: DBMS-INDEPENDENT ACCESS AND MANAGEMENT OF DBMS STATISTICS IN HETEROGENEOUS ENVIRONMENTS

Tobias Kraft and Bernhard Mitschang

Many of todays applications access not a single but a multitude of databases running on different DBMSs. Federation technology is being used to integrate these databases and to offer a single query-interface to the user where he can run queries accessing tables stored on different remote databases. So, the optimizer of the federated DBMS has to decide what portion of the query should be processed by the federated DBMS itself and what portion should be executed at the remote systems. Thereto, it has to retrieve cost estimates for query fragments from the remote databases. The response of these databases typically contains cost and cardinality estimates but no statistics about the data stored in these databases. However, statistics are optimization-critical information which is the crucial factor for any kind of decision making in the optimizer of the federated DBMS. When this information is not available optimization has to rely on imprecise heuristics mostly based on default selectivities. To fill this gap, we propose Statistics API, a JAVA interface that provides DBMS-independent access to statistics data stored in databases running on different DBMSs. Statistics API also defines data structures used for the statistics data returned by or passed to the interface. We have implemented this interface for the three prevailing commercial DBMSs IBM DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. These implementations will be available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This paper introduces the interface, i.e. the methods and data structures of the Statistics API, and discusses some details of the three interface implementations.

DYNAMIC COMMIT TREE MANAGEMENT FOR SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES

Stefan Böttcher and Sebastian Obermeier

Whenever Service Oriented Architectures make use of Web service transactions and an atomic processing of these transactions is required, atomic commit protocols are used for this purpose. Compared to traditional client server architectures, atomicity for Web services and Web service composition is much more challenging since in many cases sub-transactions belonging to a global transaction are not known in advance. In this contribution, we present a dynamic commit tree that guarantees atomicity for transactions that invoke sub-transactions dynamically during the commit protocol's execution. Furthermore, our commit tree allows the identification of obsolete sub-transactions that occur if sub-transactions are aborted and restart.

A VIRTUALIZATION APPROACH FOR REUSING MIDDLEWARE ADAPTERS

Ralf Wagner and Bernhard Mitschang

Middleware systems use adapters to integrate remote systems and to provide uniform access to them. Different middleware platforms use different adapter technologies, e.g. the J2EE platform uses J2EE connectors and federated database systems based on the SQL standard use SQL wrappers. However, a middleware platform cannot use adapters of a different middleware platform, e.g. a J2EE application server cannot use an SQL wrapper. Even if an SQL wrapper exists for a remote system that is to be integrated by a J2EE application server, a separate J2EE connector for that remote system has to be written. Tasks like that occur over and over again and require to invest additional resources where existing IT infrastructure should be reused. Therefore, we propose an approach that allows to reuse existing adapters. Reusing adapters is achieved by means of a virtualization tier that can handle adapters of different types and that provides uniform access to them. This enables middleware platforms to use each others adapters and thereby avoids the costly task of writing new adapters.

XML INDEX COMPRESSION BY DTD SUBTRACTION

Stefan Böttcher, Rita Steinmetz and Niklas Klein

Whenever XML is used as data format to exchange large amounts of data or even for data streams, the verbose behaviour of XML is one of the bottlenecks. While compression of XML data seems to be a way out, it is essential for a variety of applications that the compression result still can be queried efficiently. Furthermore, for efficient evaluation of path queries, an index is desired, which usually generates an additional data structure. For this purpose, we have developed a compression technique that uses structure information found in the DTD to perform a structure-preserving compression of XML data and provides a compression of an index that still allows for efficient search in the compressed data. Our evaluation shows that overall compression factors which are close to gzip are possible, whereas the structural part of XML files can be compressed even better.

DISTRIBUTED APPROACH OF CONTINUOUS QUERIES WITH KNN JOIN PROCESSING IN SPATIAL DATA WAREHOUSE

Marcin Gorawski and Wojciech Gębczyk

The paper describes realization of distributed approach to continuous queries with kNN join processing in the spatial telemetric data warehouse. Due to dispersion of developed system, new structural members were distinguished such as the mobile object simulator, the kNN join processing service and query manager. Distributed tasks communicate using JAVA RMI methods. The kNN queries (k Nearest Neighbor) joins every point from one dataset with its k nearest neighbors in the other dataset. In our approach we use the Gorder method, which is a block nested loop join algorithm that exploits sorting, join scheduling and distance computation filtering to reduce CPU and I/O usage.

AN EXTENSIBLE RULE TRANSFORMATION MODEL FOR XQUERY OPTIMIZATION - RULES PATTERN FOR XQUERY TREE GRAPH VIEW

Nicolas Travers and Tuyêt Trâm Dang Ngoc

Efficient evaluation of XML Query Languages has become a crucial issue for XML exchanges and integration. Tree Pattern [1][2][3] are now well admitted for representing XML Queries and a model -called TGV [4][5]- has extended the Tree Pattern representation in order to make it more intuitive, respect full XQuery specification and got support to be manipulated, optimized and then evaluated. For optimization, a search strategy is needed. It consists in generating equivalent execution plan using extensible rules and estimate cost of plan to find the better one. We propose the specification of extensible rules that can be used in heterogeneous environment, supporting XML and manipulating Tree Patterns

AN OVERVIEW OF THE OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DBPQL

Markus Kirchberg

In this paper, we present an integrated object-oriented database programming and querying language. While object-oriented programming languages and languages supported by object-relational or object-oriented database systems appear to be closely related, there are a number of significant differences affecting language design and implementation. Such issues include the degree of encapsulation, persistence, the incooperation types and classes, inheritance, concurrency, NULL values etc. In this paper, we mainly focus on those issues that affect language design.

TOURISM INFORMATION AGGREGATION USING AN ONTOLOGY BASED APPROACH

Miguel Gouveia and Jorge Cardoso

Aggregating related information, from different data sources, allows the creation of data repositories with very useful information. In the tourism domain, aggregating tourism products with related tourism attractions will add value to those products. The ability to create dynamic packages is another reason to aggregate tourism information. Defining an ontology, composed by the concepts to aggregate, is the first step to create tourism aggregation systems. In this paper we define the approach and the architecture that guides to the creation of aggregated solutions that provide valued tourism information and that allow creation of dynamic packages.

ONE-TO-MANY DATA TRANSFORMATION OPERATIONS - OPTIMIZATION AND EXECUTION ON AN RDBMS

Paulo Carreira, Helena Galhardas, João Pereira and Andrzej Wichert

The optimization capabilities of RDBMSs make them attractive for executing data transformations that support ETL, data cleaning and integration activities. However, despite the fact that many useful data transformations can be expressed as relational queries, an important class of data transformations that produces several output tuples for a single input tuple cannot be expressed in that way. To address this limitation a new operator, named data mapper has been proposed as an extension of Relational Algebra for expressing one-to-many data transformations. In this paper we study the feasibility of implementing the mapper operator as a primitive operator on an RDBMS. Data transformations expressed as combinations of standard relational operators and mappers can be optimized resulting in interesting performance gains.

REVISITING THE OLAP INTERACTION TO COPE WITH SPATIAL DATA AND SPATIAL DATA ANALYSIS

Rosa Matias and João Moura-Pires

In this paper we propose a new interface for spatial OLAP systems. Spatial data deals with data related to space and its complex and specific nature brings challenges to OLAP environments. Humans only understand spatial data through maps. Our spatial OLAP environment is compounded of the following elements: a map, a support table and a detail table. Those areas have synchronized granularity. We also extend OLAP operation to performed spatial analysis, for instance, spatial drill-down, spatial roll-up and spatial slice. We take special care in the spatial slice where we identify two main groups of operations: spatial-semantic slice and spatial-geometric slice.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ACCOUNTING SYSTEM - APPLYING THE INCREMENTALLY MODULAR ABSTRACTION HIERARCHY TO A COMPLEX SYSTEM

Kenji Ohmori and Tosiyasu L. Kunii

The new methodology for software development is introduced and applied to an accounting system. The new method is called the incrementally modular abstraction hierarchy (IMAH). IMAH has an abstraction hierarchy from abstract to concrete levels. Invariants defined on an abstract level are kept on a concrete level, which allows adding modules incrementally on each hierarchical level and avoiding combinatorial explosion of the serious problem in software engineering, while climbing down abstraction hierarchy in designing and modeling a complex system. This paper shows how IMAH is applied in developing an accounting system, which is fundamental in enterprise systems and a suitable example of complex software systems. At first, very simple example recording only journal vouches to a database system is used to describe methodologies of IMAH. Then, it is described how this simple system is incrementally developed to a conventional complex accounting system.

MODELING DIMENSIONS IN THE XDW MODEL - A LVM-DRIVEN APPROACH

R. Rajugan, Elizabeth Chang and Tharam S. Dillon

Since the introduction of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XML repositories have gained a foothold in many global (and government) organizations, where, e-Commerce and e-Business models have maturated in handling daily transactional data among heterogeneous information systems. Due to this, the amount of data available for enterprise decision-making process is increasing exponentially and are being stored and/or communicated in XML. This presents an interesting challenge to investigate models, frameworks and techniques for organizing and analysing such voluminous, yet distributed XML documents for business intelligence in the form of XML warehouse repositories and XML marts. In our previous work, we proposed a view-driven, conceptual modelling framework for the design and development of an XML Document Warehouse (XDW) model with emphasis on warehouse user requirements. There, we presented a view-driven framework to conceptually model and deploy meaningful XML FACT repositories in the XDW model. Here, in this paper, we look at the hierarchical dimensions and their theoretical semantics used to design, specify and define dimensions over an XML FACT repository in the XDW model. One of the unique properties of this view-driven approach is that the dimensions are considered as first-class citizens of the XDW conceptual model. Also, here, to illustrate our concepts, we use a real-world case study example; a logically grouped, geographically dispersed, XDW model in the context of a global logistics and cold-storage company.

AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AUDITOR’S PROFILE

Mariana Carroll and Alta van der Merwe

The increasing dependence upon Information Systems (IS) in the last few decades by businesses resulted in many concerns regarding auditing. Traditional IS auditing changed from auditing ‘around the computer’ to auditing through and with the computer. Technology is changing rapidly and so is the profession of IS auditing. As IS auditing is dependent on Information Technology (IT), it is essential that an IS auditor possesses IT and auditing knowledge to bridge the gap between the IT and auditing professions. In this paper we reflect on the auditor’s profile in this changing domain, where we first define the roles and responsibilities expected from IS auditors, describe the basic IT and audit knowledge required from IS auditors based on the roles and responsibilities identified, describe the soft skills required from IS auditors to successfully perform an IS audit assignment, define the main types of IS audit tools and techniques used most often to assist IS auditors in executing IS audit roles and responsibilities and lastly propose the IS auditor’s profile.

ON CORRECTNESS CRITERIA FOR WORKFLOW

Belinda M. Carter and Maria E. Orlowska

Exception handling during the execution of workflow processes is a frequently addressed topic in the literature. Policies describe the desired handling response to exception events in terms of the current state of process execution. In this paper, we present insights into the definition and verification of such policies for handling asynchronous, expected exceptions. In particular, we demonstrate that the definition of exception handling policies is not a trivial exercise in the context of complex processes, and, while different approaches to defining and enforcing exception handling policies have been proposed, the issue of verification of the policies has not yet been addressed. The main contribution of this paper is a set of correctness criteria which we envisage could form the foundation of a complete verification solution for exception handling policies.

PROBLEMS WITH NON-OPEN DATA STANDARDS IN SWEDISH MUNICIPALS: WHEN INTEGRATING AND ADOPTING SYSTEMS

Benneth Christiansson and Fredrik Svensson

Governments world-wide are applying information and communication technology in order to meet a broad range of citizen and organizational needs. When planning systems integration the choice should lead to the software that best suits the organizational needs, taking into account price, quality, ease of use, support, reliability, security and other characteristics considered important. This paper is based on experiences from the KOMpiere project which aims at modifying the open source licensed ERP-system Compiere for use in Swedish municipals. The overall goal of the project is to support and enhance the use of open source licensed software in the Swedish public sector and thereby enable municipals to lower their IT-related costs and gain strategic control over their own IT-environment. We discovered that at least some Swedish municipals don’t have free access to the data they are appointed to govern and protect. The software vendors have, by using non-open data standards, excluded the municipals from using their own data freely. Thereby denying Swedish municipals an open market. We have in this paper suggested the creation and usage of XML-based ODS for all systems in Swedish municipals.

USING AN INDEX OF PRECOMPUTED JOINS IN ORDER TO SPEED UP SPARQL PROCESSING

Sven Groppe, Jinghua Groppe and Volker Linnemann

SparQL is a query language developed by the W3C, the purpose of which is to query a data set in RDF representing a directed graph. Many free available or commercial products already support SparQL processing. Current index-based optimizations integrated in these products typically construct indices on the subject, predicate and object of an RDF triple, which is a single datum of the RDF data, in order to speed up the execution time of SparQL queries. In order to query the directed graph of RDF data, SparQL queries typically contain many joins over a set of triples. We propose to construct and use an index of precomputed joins, where we take advantage of the homogenous structure of RDF data. Furthermore, we present experimental results, which demonstrate the achievable speed-up factors for SparQL processing.

AN EXECUTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SECURITIES BROKER’S RISK MANAGEMENT WITH DATA WAREHOUSING AND OLAP

Yung-Hsin Wang, Shing-Han Li and Kuo-Lung Sun

With the open domestic financial market, the targets of investment and money management are toward diversity. The competition from internationalization makes the stock market no more flourishing as usual. The risk of margin trading becomes important information that securities firms try to analyze and get controlled. According to current regulations and working process, this study constructs an executive information system with the application of data warehouse and online analytical processing (OLAP) to help securities brokers make decisions in the operation of risk management for margin purchase and short sale of securities. The result solves the problem that managers of margin trading usually face when using traditional account systems.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN DATA INTEGRATION SYSTEMS

Rahee Ghurbhurn, Philippe Beaune and Hugues Solignac

In this paper, we present a flexible architecture allowing applications and functional users to access heterogeneous distributed data sources. Our proposition is based on a multi-agent architecture and a domain knowledge model. The objective of such an architecture is to introduce some flexibility in the information systems architecture. This flexibility can be in terms of the ease to add or remove existing/new applications but also the ease to retrieve knowledge without having to know the underlying data sources structures. We propose to model the domain knowledge with the help of one or several ontologies and to use a multi-agent architecture maintain such a representation and to perform data retrieval tasks. The proposed architecture acts as a single point of entry to existing data sources. We therefore hide the heterogeneity allowing users and applications to retrieve data without being hindered by changes in these data sources.

RELEVANT VALUES: NEW METADATA TO PROVIDE INSIGHT ON ATTRIBUTE VALUES AT SCHEMA LEVEL

Sonia Bergamaschi, Mirko Orsini, Francesco Guerra and Claudio Sartori

Research on data integration has provided languages and systems able to guarantee an integrated intensional representation of a given set of data sources. A significant limitation common to most proposals is that only intensional knowledge is considered, with little or no consideration for extensional knowledge. In this paper we propose a technique to enrich the intension of an attribute with a new sort of metadata: the ``relevant values", extracted from the attribute values. Relevant values enrich schemata with domain knowledge; moreover they can be exploited by a user in the interactive process of creating/refining a query. The technique is automatic, independent of the attribute domain and it is based on data mining clustering techniques and emerging semantics from data values. It is parametrized with various metrics for similarity measures and is a viable tool for dealing with frequently changing sources, as in the Semantic Web context. The technique is fully implemented in a prototype we describe together with some experimental results.

A KOREAN SEARCH PATTERN IN THE LIKE OPERATION

Sung Chul Park, Eun Hyang Lo, Jong Chul Park and Young Chul Park

The string pattern search operator LIKE of SQL has been developed based on English such that each search pattern of English of the operator works for each character in the alphabet of English. For finding Korean, search patterns of the operator can be expressed by both the alphabet and syllables of Korean. As a phonetic symbol, each syllable of Korean is composed either of a leading sound and a medial sound or of a leading sound, a medial sound, and a trailing sound. By utilizing that characteristic of Korean syllables, in addition to the traditional complete-syllable based search pattern of Korean, this paper proposes an incomplete-syllable based search pattern of Korean, as a pattern of the operator LIKE, to find Korean syllables having specific leading sounds, specific medial sounds, or both specific leading sounds and medial sounds. Formulating predicates that are equivalent with the incomplete-syllable based search pattern of Korean by way of existing SQL expressions is cumbersome and might cause the portability problem of applications depending on the underlying character set of the DBMS.

INTEGRATING ENTERPRISE DATA FOR DECISION SUPPORT IN CONSTRUCTION ORGANISATIONS

Tanko Ishaya, James Chadband and Lucy Grierson

Information integration is one of the main problems to be addressed when designing a data warehouse for decision-making support. Possible inconsistencies and redundancies between data residing at the operational data sources needs to be resolved before migrating to a data warehouse, so that the data warehouse is able to provide an integrated and reconciled view of data within the organisation. This paper presents a performance-oriented data warehouse as an integrated data for decision-making support within a construction organisation. The process is based on a conceptual representation of the enterprise, which has been exploited both in the data integration phase of the warehouse information sources and during the decision-making activity from the information stored in the data warehouse. The application of the process has been supported by prototype

A CONTINUOUS DATA INTEGRATION METHODOLOGY FOR SUPPORTING REAL-TIME DATA WAREHOUSING

Ricardo Jorge Santos and Jorge Bernardino

A data warehouse provides information for analytical processing, decision making and data mining tools. As the concept of real-time enterprise evolves, the synchronism between transactional data and data warehouses, statically implemented, has been reviewed. Traditional data warehouse systems have static structures of their schemas and relationships between data, and therefore are not able to support any dynamics in their structure and content. Their data is only periodically updated because they are not prepared for continuous data integration. For these purposes, real-time data warehouses seem to be very promising. In this paper we present a methodology on how to adapt data warehouse schemas and user-end OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) queries for efficiently supporting real-time data integration. To accomplish this, we use techniques such as table structure replication and query predicate restrictions for selecting data, managing to enable continuous data integration in the data warehouse with minimum impact in query execution time. We demonstrate the functionality of the method by analyzing its impact in query performance using benchmark TPC-H executing query workloads while simultaneously performing continuous data integration at various insertion time rates.

ACTIVITY WAREHOUSE: DATA MANAGEMENT FOR BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING

Oscar Mangisengi, Mario Pichler, Dagmar Auer, Dirk Draheim and Hildegard Rumetshofer

Nowadays tracking data from the checkpoints of business process activities of transactions becomes important data resource for business analyst and decision-makers to support tactical decisions in general and strategic decisions in particular. In the context of business process-oriented applications, business activity monitoring (BAM) systems predicted as a major role in the near future of the business-intelligence area is the most visible use of the current business needs. In this paper we address an approach to derive an activity warehouse model based on the BAM requirements. The implementation shows that data stored in activity warehouse is able to efficiently monitor the business process in real-time and provide a better real-time visibility of the business process.

LEGACY SYSTEM EVOLUTION – A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MODERNISATION AND REPLACEMENT INITIATION FACTORS

Irja Kankaanpää, Päivi Tiihonen, Jarmo J. Ahonen, Jussi Koskinen, Tero Tilus and Henna Sivula

Decisions regarding information system evolution strategy become topical as the organisation’s information systems age and start to approach the end of their life cycle. An interview study was conducted in order to compare factors influencing modernisation and replacement initiation. The results show that the most prevalent individual reason for modernisation initiative is business development, while the most typical reason for system replacement is the old age of the existing system. System age, obsolete technology and high operation or maintenance costs, were identified in both modernisation and replacement projects. Other common initiation criteria for replacement projects were end of vendor support and system’s inability to respond to company’s business needs. Typically, modernisation projects were initiated because of a system’s old age and obsolete technology.

STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK TO IMPLEMENT A TELECOMMUNICATIONS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY

D. P. du Plessis and T. McDonald

After privatisation a telecommunications company, who had exclusive rights, had to prepare itself for competition. It was of the utmost importance for the company to improve its business while there was still little competition and in so doing create a competitive advantage. A new business intelligence strategy was therefore required. A framework was developed to implement the company’s business intelligence strategy. The framework consisted of the steps that had to be followed to grow business intelligence and data warehousing in the company. These steps were supported by two modules, the data warehousing lifecycle model and the business intelligence literacy and cultural maturity model that formed part of the framework. All the components of the framework are discussed in detail.

TOWARDS INDUSTRIAL SERVICE BUSINESS: CHALLENGES IN DESIGNING ICT SUPPORT FOR THE NETWORKS OF COMPANIES

Sauli Hiippavuori, Markus Hänninen, Samuli Pekkola and Kari Luostarinen

Currently traditional manufacturing business is changing its shape and becoming a service industry. In addi-tion to products, manufacturers are also providing specialized knowledge-based services. This transforma-tion is not easy as both the manufacturers and their customers have to learn new ways of doing business to-gether. Although ICT can be perceived as an enabler for such operations, its support for the activities of the networks of companies is still more or less unknown. In these settings, ICT-related challenges are multifold in comparison to traditional intra-organizational domains. In this paper, we present our findings from a case study on constructing ICT support for industrial service business. We provide a list, derived from a study of synchronizing two organizations and their factory-floor level operations, of technological challenges to con-sider when designing and implementing systems to support daily business operations of industrial service business.

SOFTWARE COST ESTIMATION USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS WITH INPUTS SELECTION

Efi Papatheocharous and Andreas Andreou

Software development is an intractable, multifaceted process encountering deep, inherent difficulties. Especially when trying to produce accurate and reliable software cost estimates, these difficulties are amplified due to the high level of complexity and uniqueness of the software process. This paper addresses the issue of estimating the cost of software development by identifying the need for countable entities that affect software cost and using them with artificial neural networks to establish a reliable estimation method. Input Sensitivity Analysis (ISA) is performed on predictive models of the Desharnais and ISBSG datasets aiming at identifying any correlation present between important cost parameters at the input level and development effort (output). The degree to which the input parameters define the evolution of effort is then investigated and the selected attributes are employed to establish accurate prediction of software cost in the early phases of the software development life-cycle.

DQXSD: AN XML SCHEMA FOR DATA QUALITY - AN XSD FOR SUPPORTING DATA QUALITY IN XML

Eugenio Verbo, Ismael Caballero and Mario Piattini

Traditionally, data quality management has mainly focused on both data source and data target. Increasingly, data processing to get a data product need raw data typically distributed among different data sources. However, if data quality is not preserved when transmitted, resulting data product and consequent information will not be of much value. It is necessary to improve exchange methods to get a better information process. This paper focus on that issue, proposing a new approach for data quality. Using XML and related technologies, a document structure that considers quality as a main topic is defined. The resulting schema is verified using several measures and comparing it to the data source.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL VECTOR ROUTING IN A P2P NETWORK

Laurent Yeh, Georges Gardarin and Florin Dragan

P2P systems tend to be largely accepted as a common support for deploying massively distributed data management applications. Many multidimensional data P2P indexing techniques suffer from severe limitations regarding the number of data dimensions to be indexed. In this paper, we propose a new approach for indexing multidimensional data in a P2P architecture. It is based on an efficient query overlay network (the so-called routing layer) built from a new data structure named skip-zone. We index data pieces of large dimensions as vectors and we adopt the polyhedral algebra for splitting the domain of possible values into sub-domains. Every peer controls a sub-domain of values. To manage the overlay network meta-data required for tracking the network evolution or for routing data at each peer, we propose an efficient distributed meta-data layer that works in cooperation with the routing layer. An evaluation outlines the main properties of our architecture versus those of similar systems. The insensibility of the vector dimension in our data model is a key advantage of our approach.

EXPOSING WORKFLOWS TO LOAD BURSTS

Dmytro Dyachuk and Ralph Deters

Well defined, loosely coupled services are the basic building blocks of the service-orientated design-integration paradigm. Services are computational elements that expose functionality (e.g. legacy applications) in a platform independent manner and can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and consumed across language, platform and organizational borders. Using service-orientation (SO) it is fairly easy to expose existing applications/resources and to aggregate them into novel services called composite services (CS). This aggregation is achieved by defining a workflow that orchestrates the underlying services in a manner consistent with the desired functionality. Since CS can aggregate atomic and other CS they foster the development of service layers and reuse of already existing functionality. But by defining workflows, existing services are put into novel contexts and exposed to different workloads, which in turn can result in unexpected behaviours. This paper examines the behaviour of sequential workflows that experience short-lived load bursts. Using workflows of varying length, the paper reports on the transformations that loads experience as they are processed by providers.

ENABLING CSCW SYSTEMS TO AUTOMATICALLY BIND EXTERNAL KNOWLEDGE BASES

Thomas Bopp, Jonas Schulte and Thorsten Hampel

The usage of CSCW systems for teaching, training, and research collaboration increases since they offer a time- and place-independent as well as a cost-effective platform. The user’s search should not be restricted to local material; in fact users benefit from different search environments like for example digital libraries to find appropriate working material. Searching and further processing of documents imply a media breach since the search cannot be invoked in current CSCW systems directly. This paper presents the first prototype of a CSCW system which enables users to search in external sources without media breach. To provide arbitrary search environments no restrictions to data formats or search functionalities are allowed. Hence we have enhanced search environments with self description capabilities in order to realize an automatic binding of search environments in CSCW systems. By search environments we address any system offering searchable knowledge bases, such as digital libraries or the CSCW system itself. Furthermore our concept supports local search and searching in different external sources in parallel.

DOING THINGS RIGHT OR DOING THE RIGHT THINGS? PROPOSING A DOCUMENTATION SCHEME FOR SMALL TO MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

Josephine Antoniou, Panagiotis Germanakos and Andreas S. Andreou

Coping with the initial and finest systems’ functionality and performance is indeed one of the major problems nowadays, due to the rapid increase and continuous change of customer demands. Hence, it is crucial to move on with a research analysis in an attempt to identify whether documentation, the most reliable source for preserving a software system’s quality over the years, is properly created, updated and used in Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) operating in small EU markets, focusing both on the development process and the maintenance activities. Henceforth, the main objective of this paper is to propose a minimum documentation set required to fulfil both the Software Engineering principles and the SME practical needs by comparing literature suggestions with empirical findings. In further support of our documentation set suggestion, we present and discuss the results of a small survey conducted in nine IT-oriented SME in Cyprus and Greece.

OOPUS - A PRODUCTION PLANNING INFORMATION SYSTEM TO ASSURE HIGH DELIVERY RELIABILITY UNDER SHORT-TERM DEMAND CHANGES AND PRODUCTION DISTURBANCES

Wilhelm Dangelmaier, Tobias Rust, Thomas Hermanowski, Daniel Brüggemann, Daniel Kaschula, Andre Döring and Thorsten Timm

Batch-sizing and scheduling is the central decision problem in the area of production planning. A special challenge in this context is to handle the big amount of data in an adequate time interval. To aggregate and to illustrate this data clearly, appropriate techniques are required. This paper presents a new approach to integrate a Production Planning Table visualized by a Gantt chart and a cumulative quantity table for maximum information transparency in production planning. The discussed solution is realized in OOPUS, an object-oriented tool for planning and control, which became the leading production planning system in two motor assembly plants of an international automobile manufacturer.

MANAGING COMPLEX INFORMATION IN REACTIVE APPLICATIONS USING AN ACTIVE TEMPORAL XML DATABASE APPROACH

Essam Mansour, Kudakwashe Dube and Bing Wu

Some tasks in application domains, such as patient care practice, require constant monitoring of a dynamic context and environment based on best practice in the form of predefined evidence- or experience-based information or knowledge. In the most basic scenario, these applications take the form of reactive and active applications. Incorporating best practice into routines used in such domain applications is a challenging problem that requires dedicated approaches and methods for comprehensively managing complex information that is associated with these domains. This paper presents a generic framework for Complex Information Management (CIM) in domains where best practice applied to changing circumstances need to be incorporated into day-to-day work. The approach adopted uses the combined application of the event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm, a temporal mechanism, advanced DBMS features and XML technologies facilitating the support for the three key complex information management dimensions of specification, execution, and manipulation (dissemination, query and maintenance) of the complex domain information. The uniqueness of the work presented in this paper lie in supporting the multiple management dimensions for managing information under a single unified framework. The main contribution of our framework is in managing the reactive application logic within the specification and execution dimension as one object that is easy to be manipulated, queried, and disseminated within the manipulation dimension. The benefits of our approach include: the flexibility of managing the complex information as one document, and the easy incorporation of the complex information management system into other systems.

USING FUZZY DATACUBES IN THE STUDY OF TRADING STRATEGIES

M. Delgado Calvo-Flores, J. F. Nuñez Negrillo, E. Gibaja Galindo and C. Molina Fernández

A fuzzy multidimensional model can be used for exploratory analysis, modelling complex concepts that are very difficult to use in crisp ones. Some problems, as the edge problem, can be reduced using this approach. To hide the complexity of the fuzzy logic in this situation is important. In this paper we present an application of a fuzzy multidimensional model, that uses two layer representation to hide the complexity to the user, in the study of trading strategies.

ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES ON COOPETITIVE FEDERATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Mirko Cesarini and Mario Mezzanzanica

In this paper we point out the organizational issues related to the set-up of an information systems federation based on a coopetitive behavior. The joint exploitation of information owned by different, independent, even competing entities may be carried out according to a "coopetitive model". The term coopetition is used in management literature to refer to a hybrid behavior comprising competition and cooperation. We will show in this paper that the set-up of a coopetitive cenario raises organizational issues, which can be addressed by the creation of inter-firm personal relationships as well as by the firms decision makers active engagement.

ON THE SEMI-AUTOMATIC VALIDATION AND DECOMPOSITION OF TERNARY RELATIONSHIPS WITH OPTIONAL ELEMENTS

Ignacio-J. Santos, Paloma Martínez Fernandez and Dolores Cuadra

This paper analyzes the problems that concern the design of databases. CASE tools supply a resources kit for the design and creation of database in a DBMS (Database Management System). Sometimes, these tools only help to draw diagrams. Ideally, they would verify and validate DB design and transform it from Conceptual to Logical Model. In a last step, they would transform the Logical Model to a specific DBMS. Currently, commercial tools do not verify or validate the model in an optimal way. This paper is focused on the validation and checking of database schemas. This work specially analyzes the ternary or higher-order relationships when there are optional components.

STAH-TREE: HYBRID INDEX FOR SPATIO TEMPORAL AGGREGATION

Marcin Gorawski, and Michał Faruga

This paper presents new index that stores spatiotemporal data and provides efficient algorithms for processing range and time aggregation queries where results are precise values not an approximation. In addition, this technology allows to reach detailed information when they are required. Spatiotemporal data are defined as static spatial objects with non spatial attributes changing in time. Range aggregation query computes aggregation over set of spatial objects that fall into query window. Its temporal extension allows to define additional time constraints. Index name (i.e. STAH-tree) is English abbreviation and can be extended as Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Hybrid Tree. STAH-tree is based on two well known indexing techniques. R– and aR–tree for storing spatial data and MVB-tree for storing non-spatial attributes values. These techniques were extended with new functionality and adopted to work together. Cost model for node accesses was also developed.

USING SEMANTIC WEB AND SERVICE ORIENTED TECHNOLOGIES TO BUILD LOOSELY COUPLED SYSTEMS: SWOAT – A SERVICE AND SEMANTIC WEB ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE TECHNOLOGY

Bruno Caires and Jorge Cardoso

The creation of loosely coupled and flexible applications has been a challenge faced by most organizations. This has been important because organization systems need to quickly respond and adapt to changes that occur in the business environment. In order to address these key issues, we implemented SWOAT, a ‘Service and Semantic Web Oriented Architecture Technology’ based middleware. Our system uses ontologies to semantically describe and formalize the information model of the organization, providing a global and integrated view over a set of database systems. It also allows interoperability with several systems using Web Services. Using ontologies and Web services, clients remain loosely coupled from data sources. As a result, data structures can be changed and moved without having to change all clients, internal or external to the organization.

A MULTI-VIEWS REPOSITORY FOR MULTI-STRUCTURED DOCUMENTS

Karim Djemal

The diversity of use of numerical documents has created new interests on archiving, storing and accessing the numerical documents. A lot of work has been done in this perspective. This paper presents a way of treating the multi-structured documents within repositories. The use of the views is a way of managing these documents. The meta-model proposed allows a better representation of the documents through the modelling of the elements, metadata and the relations that connect them. It proposes a better management of storage space for the views storage through their overlapping also

USABILITY ISSUES IN SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

Jaroslav Král and Michal Zemlicka

Usability is of a growing importance. It is crucial for the acceptance of software systems nowadays. Software usability in its classical sense is mainly the property of the user interface of a system. Usable interface should have at least three properties: it must be easily understood and remembered and not too laborious in use. We show that in SOA systems called confederation the first two properties should have the interfaces of constituent application services. It is a precondition for the usability of user system interface. The properties are important for the software engineering aspects of confederations (scalability, modifiability, reuse of existing systems, stability) as well as for their functions, e.g. for business processes (flexibility, on-line modifiability, etc.). We discuss some standardization issues. We show that in many cases the requirement to have services with well usable interfaces is more important that the requirement that the interfaces should be based on widely used world-wide standards like SOAP. We discuss the reasons why the interfaces as well as the architecture should be coarse grained.

A XML-BASED QUALITY MODEL FOR WEB SERVICES CERTIFICATION

J. Jorge Dias Jr., J. Adson O. G. da Cunha, Alexandre Álvaro, Roberto S. M. de Barros and Sílvio Meira

Internet has made possible the development of software as services, consumed on demand and developed by third parties. In this sense, a quality model is necessary to enable evaluation and, consequently, reuse of the services by consumers. In this way, this paper proposes a quality model based on the ISO 9126 standard, defining a set of attributes and metrics for an effective evaluation of Web services. A XML-based representation model was created to support this quality model, and a security schema was proposed to guarantee integrity and authenticity of the model.

PREFERENCE RULES IN DATABASE QUERYING

Sergio Greco, Cristian Molinaro and Francesco Parisi

The paper proposes the use of preferences for querying databases. In expressing queries it is natural to express preferences among tuples belonging to the answer. This can be done in commercial DBMS, for instance, by ordering the tuples in the result. The paper presents a different proposal, based on similar approaches deeply investigated in the artificial intelligence field, where preferences are used to restrict the result of queries posed over a databases. In our proposal a query over a database DB is a triple , where q denotes the output relation, P a Datalog program (or an SQL query) used to compute the result and Phi is a set of preference rules used to introduce preferences on the computed tuples. In our proposal tuples which are "dominated" by other tuples do not belong to the result and cannot be used to infer other tuples. A new stratified semantics is presented where the program P is partitioned into strata and the preference rules associated to each stratum of P are divided into layers; the result of a query is carried out by computing one stratum at time and by applying the preference rules, one layer at time. We show that our technique is sound and that the complexity of computing queries with preference rules is still polynomial.

DIMENSION HIERARCHIES UPDATES IN DATA WAREHOUSES - A USER-DRIVEN APPROACH

Cécile Favre, Fadila Bentayeb and Omar Boussaid

We designed a data warehouse in collaboration with LCL-Le Crédit Lyonnais (LCL) meeting users’ needs regarding marketing operations decision. However, the nature of the work of users implies that their requirements are often changing and do not reach a final state. In this paper, we propose an original and global approach to achieve a user-driven schema evolution that provides answers to personalized analysis needs. Our approach is composed of four phases: (1) users’ knowledge acquisition under the form of aggregation rules, (2) knowledge integration to transform rules into mapping tables, (3) data warehouse schema update, and (4) on-line analysis. To validate our approach, we developed a prototype called WEDrik (data Warehouse Evolution Driven by Knowledge) within the Oracle 10g DBMS. Furthermore, we applied our approach on banking data of LCL and we illustrated our purpose with a simplified running example extracted from its case study.

A DATA WAREHOUSE ARCHITECTURE FOR INTEGRATING FIELD-BASED DATA

Alberto Salguero, Francisco Araque and Ramón Carrasco

Spatial DataWarehouses (SDWs) combine DWs and Spatial Data Bases (SDBs) for managing significant amounts of historical data that include spatial location. In order to manipulate spatial objects, a Spatial Database must include special data types to represent geometric characteristics of objects. Space also can be seen as a continuous field, and the information of interest is obtained at each point of a space. The previously proposed extensions of the multidimensional data model, used in Data Warehousing, only deal with spatial objects. None of them consider field-based information. Usually, the field-based data is made by interpolating the values of several sensors distributed along a surface. In Data Warehousing it is necessary to integrate semantically-related data from several data sources. This paper presents an architecture that automatically determines the best parameters for refreshing and integrating field-based data from different data sources.

TRANSACTION SERVICE COMPOSITION - A STUDY OF COMPATIBILITY RELATED ISSUES

Anna-Brith Arntsen and Randi Karlsen

Different application domains have varying transactional requirements. Such requirements must be met by an adaptable and flexible transaction processing environment. ReflecTS is such an environment providing flexible transaction processing by exposing the ability to select and dynamically compose a transaction service suitable for each particular transaction execution. A transaction service (TS) can be seen as a composition of a transaction manager (TM) and a number of involved resource managers (RMs). Dynamic service composition raises a need to examine issues regarding Compatibility between the components in a TS. In this work, we present a novel approach to transaction service composition by evaluating Property and Communication compatibility between a TM and RMs.

MONITORING WEB DATA SOURCES USING TEMPORAL PROPERTIES AS AN EXTERNAL RESOURCES OF A DATA WAREHOUSE

Francisco Araque, Alberto Salguero and Cecilia Delgado

Flexibility to react on rapidly changing general conditions of the environment has become a key factor for economic success of any company, and the WWW has become an important resource of information for this proposal. Nowadays most of the important enterprise has incorporated the Data Warehouse (DW) technology where the information retrieved from different sources, including the WWW, has been integrated. The quality of data provided to the decision makers depends on the capability of the DW system to convey in a reasonable time, from the sources to the data marts, the changes made at the data sources. If we use the data arrival properties of such underlying information sources, the DW Administrator can derive more appropriate rules and check the consistency of user requirements more accurately. In this paper we present an algorithm for data integration depending on the temporal characteristics of the data sources and an architecture for monitoring web sources on the WWW in order to obtain its temporal properties. In addition we show an example applied to tourim area where data integrated into DW can be used to schedule personalized travel as a value-added service for electronic commerce.

SEMANTIC ORCHESTRATION MERGING - TOWARDS COMPOSITION OF OVERLAPPING ORCHESTRATIONS

Clementine Nemo, Mireille Blay-Fornarino, Michel Riveill and Günter Kniesel

Service oriented architectures foster evolution of enterprise information systems by supporting loose coupling and easy composition of services. Unfortunately, current approaches to service composition are inapplicable to services that share subservices or data. In this paper, we define overlapping orchestrations, analyse the problems that they pose to existing composition approaches and propose orchestration merging, a novel, interactive approach to composition of overlapping orchestrations.

A METHOD PROPOSAL FOR ARCHITECTURAL RELIABILITY EVALUATION

Anna Grimán, María Pérez, Luis E. Mendoza and Edumilis Méndez.

Software quality characteristics, such as reliability, maintainability, usability, portability, among others, are directly determined by software architecture and, in consequence, it constitutes a very important artifact to be evaluated as soon as a general design is obtained. This article proposes a method to estimate software reliability by evaluating software architecture. Our method combines the strengths of three evaluation methods: ATAM (Kazman et al, 2000), DUSA (Bosch, 2000) and AEM (Losavio et al., 2004) obtained by identifying the main features needed in reliability architectural evaluation and studying several architectural mechanisms which promote this quality characteristic. Based on these features and the advantages of the studied methods and mechanism, we established phases, activities, roles, inputs/outputs, and artifacts; and we constructed a feasible method which can be applied in any organization interested in improving its software construction process and product.

A WEB TOOL FOR WEB DOCUMENT AND DATA SOURCE SELECTION WITH SQLFI

Marlene Goncalves and Leonid Tineo

WWW is composed of a great volume of documents that are stored by several data sources. Normally, a user is interested in those documents that include certain keywords. However, these documents might be incomplete, ancient or huge, and therefore, the user would have to discard irrelevant ones. An ideal web search tool might select the best documents in base on user criteria defined over quality parameters such as completeness, recentness, frequency of updates and granularity. Traditional query languages are very restrictive in expressing preference-based queries. Therefore new query languages, such as SQLf are needed. We present a tool that allows the selection of the best data sources and documents in terms of user preferences. Documents and data sources are described according to quality parameters. User preferences are expressed with SQLf queries. Our tool contains a wizard to retrieve the best documents and data sources. Thus, the user is oriented by a set of steps where a preference query that involve quality parameters is built.

A METRICS PROPOSAL TO EVALUATE SOFTWARE INTERNAL QUALITY WITH SCENARIOS

Anna Grimán, María Pérez, Maryoly Ortega and Luis Mendoza

Software quality should be evaluated from different perspectives; we highlight the internal and external ones (ISO/IEC, 2002). Specially, internal quality evaluation depends on the software architecture (or design) and programming aspects rather than on the product behaviour. On the other hand, architectural evaluation methods tend to apply scenarios for assessing the architecture respect to quality requirements; however, mainly scenarios aren’t effective enough to determine the level of satisfaction of the quality attributes. In practice, each scenario could need more than one measurement. Also, we need a quantitative way of comparing and reporting results. The main objective of this article is presenting a set of metrics grouped by quality characteristics and sub-characteristics, according to ISO 9126 standard, which can be applied to assess software quality based on architecture. Once selected the most important quality requirements, these metrics can be used directly, or in combination with quality scenarios, into an architectural evaluation method. Metrics proposed also consider some particular technologies, such as OO, distributed and web systems.

WFESELECTOR - A TOOL FOR COMPARING AND SELECTING WORKFLOW ENGINES

Karim Baïna

The task of selecting a workflow engine becomes more and more complex and risky. For this reason, organisations require a broad, and a clear vision of which workflow engines are, and will continue to be, suitable for changing requirements. This paper presents a workflow engines comparison model to analyse, compare, and select business process management modelling and enactment engines (Workflow Engines or WFEs) according to user specific requirements. After the description of the underlying model itself, we present the implementation of this workflow engines comparison model through our multi-criteria workflow engines comparison and selection prototype WFESelector. The later proposes two scenarios for selecting relevant WFE : either to express dynamically multi-criteria query upon a WFE evaluation database, or to browse the whole WFE classification through a reporting aggregation based dashboard. WFESelector is subsequently experimented to assess criteria satisfaction on a very large number of open source workflow engines (as numerous as 35).

INTEGRATING IDENTIFICATION CONSTRAINTS IN WEB ONTOLOGY

Thi Dieu Thu Nguyen and Nhan Le-Thanh

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in semantic integration in the Semantic Web environment, whose goal is to access, relate and combine knowledge from multiple sources. The needs of integrating the semantics from relational data sources into this environment therefore is also emerged. However, there is one important aspect of database schemas that OWL up to now has not captured yet, namely identification constraints. To address this problem, this paper introduce a decidable extension of OWL-DL, namely OWL-K, that supports such constraints.

THE HAV DATA INTEGRATION APPROACH: THE MAPPING IN HAV

Fatima Boulçane

This paper provides an overview on a hybrid approach of heterogeneous data integration which we term Hybrid As View (HAV) and it focuses on the HAV mappings between the global schema and source schemas through the partial schemas. The contribution of this approach is on two complementary axes: (i) to propose a multi-mediators architecture essentially made up of two types of components: specialized mediators and a global mediator. The specialized mediators provide each one an integrated view of sources with the same model. The global mediator integrates the partial schemas provided by the set of the specialized mediators to provide an access on a uniform view represented by a global schema. (ii) to model the relation between the global schema and the sources through the partial schemas by combining the best of the two approaches Global As View (GAV) and Local As View (LAV).

SIMPLIFIED QUERY CONSTRUCTION - QUERIES MADE AS EASY AS POSSIBLE

Brad Arshinoff, Damon Ratcliffe, Martin Saetre, Reda Alhajj and Tansel Özyer

QMAEP- Queries Made as Easy as Possible, is a new system to greatly simplify the process of query construction for statisticians and researchers. This document is focused on the usability of the Database query language and deals with visual representations of the query process, in specific the select query. Methods of integrating simple Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for building queries into pre-existing database forms will be explored as a means of providing users with an intuitive method of query construction. This paper explores data mining as it pertains to clinical research with emphasis on simplifying the data extraction process from complex databases so as to accommodate analysis of the data using important statistical software such as such as SASS, QMath and MS Excel.

AN EFFICIENT INTERFACE TO HANDLE COMPLEX STRUCTURE FOR DATABASE DESIGN

Hassan Badir and Adrian Tanasescu

The Visual design based on schema graphs simplify the design of database for technical and non-technical users who are not familiar with the database structure and don't want to use a formal language. We propose an assisting visual design interface for relational-object database called GUEDOS. The word is motivated by the successful adaptation of the interactive design paradigm in the conventional area. This graphical design system facilitates the user's tasks of formulating database schema. The adopted human-computer interaction techniques in this interactive design system and different graphical systems through a number of illustrative examples are also described. In this work we apply it in Molecular Biology, more precisely Organelle complete genome. We aim to offer biologists the possibility to access in a unified way information spread among heterogeneous genome databanks.

UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj

Information systems are in the process of undergoing significant transformations triggered by the Internet technology. However, most existing systems suffer from poor to non-existent documentation, which makes the maintenance process a daunting task even for a skilled software engineer. As a result, software engineers are often faced with the inevitable problem of understanding different aspects of the system before undertaking a simple maintenance task. This paper describes ongoing research in the area of program comprehension that aims at investigating efficient techniques for the understanding of the dynamics of software systems with a particular emphasis on information systems. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of system’s execution traces. The long-term objective is to create effective tool support for software engineers working on maintenance tasks.

PIN: A PARTITIONING & INDEXING OPTIMIZATION METHOD FOR OLAP

Ricardo Jorge Santos and Jorge Bernardino

Optimizing the performance of OLAP queries in relational data warehouses has always been a major research issue. There are various techniques which can be used in order to achieve its goals, such as data partitioning, indexing, data aggregation, data sampling, redefinition of database schemas, among others. In this paper we present a method which links partitioning and indexing based on the features present in predefined major decision making queries to optimize a data warehouse’s performance. The evaluation of this method is also presented using the TPC-H benchmark, comparing it with standard partitioning and indexing techniques, demonstrating its efficiency with single and multiple simultaneous user scenarios.

MODEL-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT USING STANDARD TOOLS

Julián Garrido, Mª Ángeles Martos and Fernando Berzal

This paper describes a model-driven software development tool suitable for the rapid development of enterprise applications. Instead of requiring new specialized development environments, our tool builds on top of a conventional programming platform so that it is suitable for the progressive adoption of modeldriven development techniques within a software development organization.

ONE-TO-MANY DATA TRANSFORMATIONS - AS RELATIONAL OPERATIONS

Paulo Carreira

Transforming data is a fundamental operation in data management activities like data integration, legacy data migration, data cleaning, and extract-transform-load processes for data warehousing. Since data often resides on relational databases, data transformations are often implemented as relational queries that aim at leveraging the optimization capabilities of most RDBMSs. However, due to the limited expressive power of Relational Algebra, several important classes of data transformations cannot be specified as SQL queries. In particular, SQL is unable to express data transformations that require the dynamic creation of several tuples for each tuple of the source relation. This dissertation proposes to address this class of data transformations, common in data management activities, by extending Relational Algebra with a new relational operator named data mapper. A starting contribution of this work consists of studying the formal aspects of the mapper operator focusing on its formal semantics and expressiveness. A further contribution consists of supporting a cost-based optimization of data transformations expressions combining mappers with standard relational operators. To that end, a set of algebraic rewriting rules and different physical execution algorithms are being developed.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS PROCESS INNOVATION: TOWARDS A RESEARCH PROGRAM ON GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN INTELLIGENCE

Charles Møller

Most industrial supply chains today are globally scattered and nearly all organizations rely on their Enterprise Information Systems (ES) for integration and coordination of their activities. In this context innovation in a global supply chain must be driven by advanced information technology. This position paper proposes a research program on Global Supply Chain Intelligence. The paper argues that a conceptual framework for Business Process Innovation is required to approach innovations in a global supply chain. A research proposal based on five interrelated topics is derived from the framework. The research program is intended to establish and to develop the conceptual framework for business process innovation further and to apply this framework in a global supply chain context.

A DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM KERNEL FOR IMAGE COLLECTIONS

Liana Stanescu, Dumitru Burdescu, Cosmin Stoica and Marius Brezovan

The paper presents a single-user, relational DBMS kernel, for managing visual information. The functions of this multimedia DBMS are: creating/deleting databases and tables, adding constrains, inserting, updating, deleting records, text based querying and content based visual querying using the color characteristics. The originality character of this DBMS is given by two aspects: the first aspect refers to the Image data type that permits binary storage of images and extracted color information, represented by the color histogram with maximum 166 colors; the second aspect refers to the visual interface for building content-based visual query using color characteristics, that generates a modified SELECT command that will be sent to kernel for execution. This DBMS has as advantages the low cost and easiness in usage, being recommended in medical or art domains where there are used large amounts of visual information.

MEDIATION FRAMEWORK FOR ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEM INFRASTRUCTURES: APPLICATION-DRIVEN APPROACH

Leonid Kalinichenko, Dmitry Briukhov, Dmitry Martynov, Nikolay Skvortsov and Sergey Stupnikov

This position paper provides a short summary of results obtained so far on a mediation-based application-driven approach for EIS development. This approach has significant advantages over the conventional, information resource driven approach. Basic methods for the application-driven approach are discussed including synthesis methods of canonical information models, unifying languages of various kinds of heterogeneous information sources in one extensible model, methods of identification of sources relevant to an application and their registration at the mediator applying GLAV techniques as well as ontological contexts reconciliation methods. Methodology of EIS application development according to the approach is briefly discussed emphasizing importance of a mediator consolidation phase by the respective community, application problem formulations in canonical model and their rewriting into the requests to the registered information sources. The technique presented is planned to be used in various EIS and information systems. The work reported was partially supported by the RFBR grants 06-07-08072 and 06-07-89188.

AN INSERTION STRATEGY FOR A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPATIAL ACCESS METHOD

Wendy Osborn and Ken Barker

We present work in progress on the 2DR-tree, a novel approach for accessing spatial data. The 2DR-tree uses nodes that are the same dimensionality as the data space. Therefore, all relationships between objects are preserved and different searching strategies such as binary and greedy are supported. A validity test ensures that every node preserves the spatial relationships among its objects. The proposed insertion strategy adds a new object by recursively partitioning the space occupied by a set of objects. A performance evaluation shows the advantages of the 2DR-tree and identifies issues for current and future consideration.

TIMING BEHAVIOR ANOMALY DETECTION IN ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Matthias Rohr, Simon Giesecke and Wilhelm Hasselbring

Business-critical enterprise information systems (EIS) have to satisfy high dependability requirements. There is a need for automatic failure detection and diagnosis in order to achieve the required availability. A major cause of failures in EIS are software faults in the application-layer. In this paper we propose to use anomaly detection to diagnose failures in the application layer of EIS. Anomaly detection aims to identify “unusual” system behavior in monitoring data. These anomalies can be valuable indicators for availability or security problems, and support failure diagnosis. In this paper we outline the basic principles of anomaly detection, present the state of the art, and typical application challenges. We propose a new approach for anomaly detection in Enterprise Information Systems that addresses some of these challenges.

SPECIALIST KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION

Mounir Kehal

Formats to handle knowledge of innovative organizations may prove to be complex, as such is assumed to be one of the main variables whilst a distinguishing factor of such organizations to survive within a marketplace. Their main asset is the knowledge of certain highly motivated individuals that appear to share a common vision for the continuity of the organization. Satellite technology is a good example of that. From early pioneers to modern day mini/micro satellites and nanotechnologies, one can see a large amount of risk at every stage in the development of a satellite technology, from inception to design phase, from design to delivery, from lessons learnt from failures to those learnt from successes, and from revisions to design and development of successful satellites. In their groundbreaking book The Knowledge Creating Company (1995), Nonaka et al laid out a model of how organisational knowledge is created through four conversion processes, being from: tacit to explicit (externalisation), explicit to tacit (internalisation), tacit to tacit (socialisation), and explicit to explicit (combination). Key to this model is the authors’ assertion that none are individually sufficient. All must be present to fuel one another. However, such knowledge creation and diffusion was thought to have manifested and only applied within large organizations and conglomerates. Observational (questionnaire-based) and systematic (corpus-based) studies – through case study elicitation experiments and analysis of specialist text, can support research in knowledge management. Organizations that manufacture, use, and maintain satellites depend on a continuous exchange of ideas, criticisms, and congratulations. One can regard such organisations from NASA to SSTL as amongst a class of knowledge-based organizations. Through selective use of the previously stated approaches, and concise reporting for the purposes of this paper we are to show how knowledge flows in a finite organisational setting and could be modelled by specialist text. We aim to describe in this paper our understanding of the nature of a specialist organization in a quantifiable manner, and the constructs of a knowledge management audit conducted through the observational study within a satellite manufacturing SME, based in the UK. We have examined how knowledge flows and is adapted between commercial and research types of corpora. One of the major results deduced from the observational study was that knowledge diffusion is paramount within the lifetime of an organization, and could be supported by information systems. Leading us to investigate on how knowledge diffusion takes place, in an empirical way. Our analysis shows that research papers (created within educational institution) and commercial documents (created within spin-offs of such higher education institution) can be distinguished rather on the basis of single word and compound terms. These two lexical signatures show the potential for identifying points of mutual interest in the diffusion of knowledge from the research institution to the commercialization process, thus to application(s) within a domain.

LSGENSYS - AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM FOR PATTERN RECOGNITION AND SUMMARISATION OF MULTI-BAND SATELLITE IMAGES

Hema Nair

This paper presents a new system developed in Java® for pattern recognition and pattern summarisation in multi-band (RGB) satellite images. The system design is described in some detail. Patterns such as land, island, water body, river, fire in remote-sensed images are extracted and summarised in linguistic terms using fuzzy sets. Some elements of supervised classification are introduced in the system to assist in the development of linguistic summaries. Results of testing the system to analyse and summarise patterns in SPOT MS images and LANDSAT images are also discussed.

A NEW FUZZY LOGIC CONTROLLER FOR TRADING ON THE STOCK MARKET

Francesco Maria Raimondi, Salvatore Pennacchio, Pietro Via and Marianna Mulè

A common problem that financial operators often meet in their own work is to make, at the right moment, the operational choices on the Stock Market. Once the Market to act on has been chosen, the financial operator has to decide when and how to operate on it, in order to achieve a profit. The problem that we are going to deal with is the planning of an automatic decisional system for the management of long positions on bull market. First, a trading system (TS) will be implemented pointing its features out. Then a fuzzy logic implementation of the TS will be introduced (FTS). The fuzzy system will be optimized by the genetic algorithms. Finally, the two different implementations of the trading system will be compared using some performance indexes.

EXPLANATION GENERATION IN BUSINESS PERFORMANCE MODELS - WITH A CASE STUDY IN COMPETITION BENCHMARKING

Hennie Daniels and Emiel Caron

In this paper, we describe an extension of the methodology for explanation generation in financial knowledge-based systems. This offers the possibility to automatically generate explanations and diagnostics to support business decision tasks. The central goal is the identification of specific knowledge structures and reasoning methods required to construct computerized explanations from financial data and business models. A multi-step look-ahead algorithm is proposed that deals with so-called cancelling-out effects, that are a common phenomenon in financial data sets. The extended methodology was tested on a case-study conducted for Statistics Netherlands involving the comparison of financial figures of firms in the Dutch retail branch. The analysis is performed with a diagnostic software application which implements our theory of explanation. Comparison of results of the method described in with the results of the extended method clearly improves the analyses when cancelling-out effects are present in the data.

A CONNECTIONIST APPROACH IN BAYESIAN CLASSIFICATION

Luminita State, Catalina Cocianu, Panayiotis Vlamos and Viorica Stefanescu

The research reported in the paper aims the development of a suitable neural architecture for implementing the Bayesian procedure in solving pattern recognition problems. The proposed neural system is based on an inhibitive competition installed among the hidden neurons of the computation layer. The local memories of the hidden neurons are computed adaptively according to an estimation model of the parameters of the Bayesian classifier. Also, the paper reports a series of qualitative attempts in analyzing the behavior of a new learning procedure of the parameters an HMM by modeling different types of stochastic dependencies on the space of states corresponding to the underlying finite automaton. The approach aims the development of some new methods in processing image and speech signals in solving pattern recognition problems. Basically, the attempts are stated in terms of weighting processes and deterministic/non deterministic Bayesian procedures.

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN VIA DECLARATIVE PROGRAMMING

Luís Moniz Pereira and Ruben Duarte Viegas

Problem solving by declarative theory building can be an extremely effective method for porting concepts and knowledge from the problem domain to the solution domain, by allowing the implementation of complete procedural constructs and enabling to produce sound solutions. If conveniently expressed, such a theory may be directly coded into a declarative programming language. To wit, if expressed within the paradigm of logic programming, then the theory itself represents the very procedure to obtain its desired solutions. The illustrative case study considered here is the obtention of architectural layouts from an adjacency graph: Given a list of imposed adjacencies among a set of planar rectangular spaces (represented by the graph's nodes), the goal is to generate all permissible layouts schemas on the plane which respect the adjacencies, and to determine the minimal modular dimensions of such a set of spaces. Another aim of this article is also to show the guidelines of an effective translation of the theory constructed to solve the proposed problem in Logic Programming, making use of the combined power of two different semantics and their implementations, namely the Well Founded Semantics and the Stable Models one.

A MULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT: INFORMATION FUSION, DATA MINING AND DECISION MAKING

Marina V. Sokolova and Antonio Fernández-Caballero

The paper introduces an approach to creating a multi-agent architecture for environmental impact assessment upon human health. As the indicators of the environmental impact we assume water pollution, indexes of traffic and industrial activity, wastes and solar radiation; and as the human health indicator we take morbidity. All the data comprise multiple heterogeneous data repositories. The general structure of the architecture is represented. Thus, the proposed system is logically and functionally divided into three layers, solving the tasks of information fusion, pattern discovery through data mining, and decision support making, respectively. The main steps of data processing and maintenance, and principles of data fusion, which are used in the system, are discussed. The discovered patterns will be used as a foundation for real-time decision making, which should be of great importance for adequate and effective management by responsible municipal and state government authorities.

HEAVYWEIGHT ONTOLOGY MATCHING - A METHOD AND A TOOL BASED ON THE CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS MODEL

Frédéric Furst and Francky Trichet

Managing multiple ontologies is now a core question in most of the applications that require semantic interoperability. The Semantic Web is surely the most significant application of this report: the current challenge is not to design, develop and deploy domain ontologies but to define semantic correspondences among multiple ontologies covering overlapping domains. In this paper, we introduce a new approach of ontology matching named axiom-based ontology matching. As this approach is founded on the use of axioms, it is mainly dedicated to heavyweight ontologies (an heavyweight ontology is a lightweight ontology, i.e. an ontology simply based on a hierarchy of concepts and a hierarchy of relations, enriched with axioms used to fix the semantic interpretation of concepts and relations), but it can also be applied to lightweight ontologies as a complementary approach to the current techniques based on the analysis of natural language expressions, instances and/or taxonomical structures of ontologies. This new matching paradigm is defined in the context of the Conceptual Graphs model (CG), where the projection (i.e. the main operator for reasoning with CG which corresponds to homomorphism of graphs) is used as a means to semantically match the concepts and the relations of two ontologies through the explicit representation of the axioms in terms of conceptual graphs. We also introduce an ontology of representation dedicated to the reasoning of heavyweight ontologies at the meta-level.

NEW LOCAL DIVERSIFICATION TECHNIQUES FOR THE FLEXIBLE JOB SHOP PROBLEM WITH A MULTI-AGENT APPROACH

Meriem Ennigrou and Khaled Ghédira

The Flexible Job Shop problem is among the hardest scheduling problems. It is a generalization of the classical Job Shop problem in that each operation can be processed by a set of resources and has a processing time depending on the resource used. The objective is to assign and to sequence the operations on the resources so that they are processed in the smallest time. In our previous works, we have proposed two Multi-Agent approaches based on the Tabu Search (TS) meta-heuristic. Depending on the location of the optimisation core in the system, we have distinguished between the global optimisation approach where the TS has a global view on the system and the local optimisation approach (FJS MATSLO) where the optimisation is distributed among a collection of agents, each of them has its own local view. In this paper, firstly, we propose new diversification techniques for the second approach in order to get better results and secondly, we propose a new promising approach combining the two latter ones. Experimental results are also presented in this paper in order to evaluate these new techniques.

RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS APPROACH TO THE DETECTION OF SQL ATTACKS

Jaroslaw Skaruz, Franciszek Seredynski and Pascal Bouvry

In the paper we present a new approach based on application of neural networks to detect SQL attacks. SQL attacks are those attacks that take advantage of using SQL statements to be performed. The problem of detection of this class of attacks is transformed to time series prediction problem. SQL queries are used as a source of events in a protected environment. To differentiate between normal SQL queries and those sent by an attacker, we divide SQL statements into tokens and pass them to our detection system, which predicts the next token, taking into account previously seen tokens. In the learning phase tokens are passed to recurrent neural network (RNN) trained by backpropagation through time (BPTT) algorithm. Teaching data are shifted by one token forward in time with relation to input. The purpose of the testing phase is to predict the next token in the sequence. All experiments were conducted on Jordan and Elman networks using data gathered from PHP Nuke portal. Experimental results show that the Jordan network outperforms the Elman network predicting correctly queries of the length up to ten.

SOLVING THE MULTI-OBJECTIVE MIXED MODEL ASSEMBLY LINE PROBLEM USING A FUZZY MULTI-OBJECTIVE LINEAR PROGRAM

Iraj Mahdavi, Babak. Javadi and S.S.Sabet

This paper develops a fuzzy multi-objective linear program (FMOLP) model for solving the multi-objective mixed model assembly line problem. In practice, vagueness and imprecision of the goals, constraints and parameters in this problem make the decision-making complicated. The proposed model attempts to simultaneously minimize total utility work cost, total production rate variation cost, and total setup cost. In this paper, an asymmetric fuzzy-decision making technique is applied to enable the decision-maker to assign different weights to various criteria in a real industrial environment. The model is explained by an illustrative example.

INTELLIGENT DATA BASES FOR AN EFFECTIVE INDUSTRIAL MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT - THE AUTONOMOUS AGENTS CONWORM OF CONRAD SYSTEM

Benlazaar Sid Ahmed Nadjib and Belbachir Hafida

The goal of this paper is to introduce a model of information system management dedicated to the industrial maintenance and represented by an "intelligent" data base where autonomous agents will transform information to strategic knowledge referring to space-time. Their first role is to allow through a “reversed feedback” to analyze information in entry of the system and to propose a control ensuring system protection against not representative or erroneous information. Their second role is to make it possible to propose at exit strongly correlated strategic variables regroupings and through these last the regrouping of management tasks per "management categories". Lastly, we will describe the information system which we called CONRAD and the autonomous agents that we called ConWorm dedicated to the task of transformation and control.

THE IMPORTANCE OF AGGREGATION OPERATOR CHARACTERISTICS IN MARKETING RESEARCH

Kris Brijs, Benoît Depaire, Koen Vanhoof, Tom Brijs and Geert Wets

Our paper demonstrates that aggregation operator characteristics count as a promising avenue for applied fuzzy set research. It is shown by means of two cases that these characteristics are particularly valuable as proxies for hard to measure domain knowledge within the fields of customer satisfaction and country-of-origin. More in detail, the uninorm's neutral element could be identified as a useful asset for representing customers' expectations while the OWA operator's orness contributes to the quantification of consumers' degree of optimism when evaluating products coming from abroad. Both theoretical and empirical validation is provided to support the basic assumption that aggregation operator characteristics enable us to obtain superior consumer information with substantial managerial relevance.

IMPLEMENTING PRIORITIZED REASONING IN LOGIC PROGRAMMING

Luciano Caroprese, Irina Trubitsyna and Ester Zumpano

Prioritized reasoning is an important extension of logic programming and is a powerful tool for expressing desiderata on the program solutions in order to establish the best ones. This paper discusses the implementation of the case of preference relation among atoms and introduces a system, called CHOPPER, realizing choice optimization recently proposed. CHOPPER supports the ASO_Ch and ASO_FCh semantics based on the concept of choice, as a set of preference rules describing common choice options in different contexts, and the ASO semantics, which valuates each preference rule separately. This paper outlines the architecture of the system, discusses aspects of the choice identification strategies and of the feasibility of choice options. Moreover, the comparison of the proposed approach with the other implementation approaches proposed in the literature is provided.

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF SIGNIFICANT VARIABLES FOR TRADING STRATEGIES

M. Delgado Calvo-Flores, J. F. Núñez Negrillo, E. Gibaja Galindo and C. Molina Férnandez

Nowadays, stock market investment is governed by investment strategies. An investment strategy consists in following a fixed philosophy over a period of time, and it can have a scientific, statistical or merely heuristic base. No method currently exists which is capable of measuring how good an investment strategy is either objectively or realistically. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining tools we have studied the different investment strategies of an important Spanish management agency and extracted a series of significant characteristics to describe them. Our objective is to evaluate and compare investment strategies in order to be able to use those which produce a peak return in our investment.

MOBILE DECISION MAKING AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: SUPPORTING GEOARCHAEOLOGISTS IN THE FIELD

Martin Blunn, Julie Cowie, David Cairns, Clare Wilson and Donald Davidson

There is a professional responsibility placed upon archaeologists to record all possible information about a particular excavated site of which soil analysis is one important but frequently marginalised aspect. This paper introduces SASSA (Soil Analysis Support System for Archaeologists), whose primary goal is to promote the wider use of soil analysis techniques through a selection of ‘web based’ software tools. A description is given of the field tool developed which supports both the recording of soil related archaeological data in a comprehensive manner and provide a means of inferring information about the site under investigation. Insight is gained through a user evaluating numerous decision trees relating to pertinent archaeological questions. Whilst the field tool is capable of working in isolation, it offers a superior experience when operated in unison with two additional software tools; a Wiki and Forum. A brief discussion of the use of the Wiki application within the SASSA project is also presented.

THE RETRIEVAL PROCESS IN THE SAFRS SYSTEM WITH THE CASE-BASED REASONING APPROACH

Souad Demigha

The paper presents the retrieval process in the SAFRS system (system supporting the training of radiologists-senologists) with the case-based reasoning approach (CBR, which is adopted to represent the experience of expert radiologists-senologists under the form of cases) and modelized with the MAP concept. The retrieval process relies on a procedure of case-based reasoning for retrieval of similar cases formalized using a MAP, a re-use methodology named the retrieval MAP. The model of the MAP is an intentional representation system. It is based on concepts of intention and strategy. The concept of intention (or a goal) aims to capture the objective to be achieved. A strategy is the manner an intention is achieved. The retrieval process with the MAP is a multi-step/multi-algorithm process, which permits to retrieve similar cases in various modes and strategies. It is achieved according to three complex strategies: global strategy (or global retrieval strategy), elementary strategy (or elementary retrieval strategy) and mixed strategy (or mixed retrieval strategy). First, this work is presented by introducing the architecture and working principles of the system, then, we describe briefly the case representation model and we describe in details the retrieval process model. Finally, our conclusions and future plans are further described.

INTEGRATION OF A FUZZY SYSTEM AND AN INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE TERRITORIAL UNITS RANKING

Miroslav Hudec and Mirko Vujošević

For ranking and classification of the territorial units, up-to-date and precise data as well as ranking tool are needed. The advantage of fuzzy systems (FS) in these tasks is in definition of a problem by linguistic terms. The disadvantage is in universality and complexity of the fuzzy systems for end users. This disadvantage comes from usage of FS to solve a wide area of different tasks. The advantages and the disadvantages, as well as constraints of FS are analyzed. The aim of this paper is to show the information systems about territorial units of the Slovak Republic and possibilities of integration fuzzy system for ranking territorial units with these information systems. This approach enables creation of the model, importing the input data, processing of the rules and presentation of the solution in a usable and understandable form. In this case solution is presented on a thematic map too.

DYNAMIC WEB DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATION IN E-CRM USING NEURO-FUZZY APPROACH

Iraj Mahdavi, Babak Shirazi, Namjae Cho, Navid Sahebjamnia and Meysam Aminzadeh

Internet technology enables companies to capture new customers, track their performances and online behavior, and customize communications, products, services, and price. The analysis of customers and customer interactions for electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) can be performed by data-mining (DM), optimization methods, or combined approaches. Web mining is defined as the discovery and analysis of useful information from World Wide Web (WWW). Some of web mining techniques include analysis of user access patterns, web document clustering and classification. Most existing methods of classification are based on a model that assumes a fixed-size collection of keywords or key terms with predefined set of categories. This assumption is not realistic in large and diverse document collections such as World Wide Web. We propose a new approach to obtain category-keyword sets with unknown number of categories. On the basis of the training set of Web documents, the approach is used to classify test documents into a set of initial categories. Finally evolutionary rules are applied to these new sets of keywords and training documents to update the category-keyword sets to realize dynamic document classification.

POLICY-BASED AGENT GRID COLLABORATION FOR C-COMMERCE

Maoguang Wang, Ke Zhang, Zhongzhi Shi and Lida Xu

Collaborative commerce is expected to effectively coordinate production and work together across the organizations, which emphasizes comprehensive information collaboration at all levels among participants. Our research goal is to establish an intelligence agent grid platform to share the resources, eliminate the information islands and provide the intelligent collaboration making full use of the agent technologies. This paper studies the complex collaboration model and specifies the goal policy, utility policy, action policy etc. for collaborative commerce process. Then this paper studies the hierarchical collaboration scheme from the behaviour layer, agent layer to society collaboration layer based on policy. And based on policy-driven we develop an intelligent agent grid platform AGrIP to provide support for C-Commerce.

MODELLING HUMAN REASONING IN INTELLIGENT DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

V. N. Vagin and A. P. Yeremeyev

Methods of analogy-based solution searches in intelligent decision support systems are considered. The special attention is drawn to methods based on a structural analogy that use the analogy of properties and relations and take the context into account. Besides the problem of concept generalization is viewed. Several algorithms based on the rough set theory are compared and the possibility to use them for generalization of data stored in real-world databases is tested.

AGENT-BASED APPROACH FOR ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Kimmo Salmenjoki, Yaroslav Tsaruk, Vagan Terziyan and Marko Viitala

This paper describes how semantic web and agent technologies could be used in enhancing the electricity distribution systems. The paper starts by a brief overview of functioning of electricity distribution systems. The introduced approaches aim at improving functionality of electricity distribution network systems and assisting the experts by supporting automating routine tasks in daily operations. We focus on GUN (Global Understanding Environment) framework proposed by IOG (Industrial Ontologies Group) for intelligent services on industrial resources. The resources and infrastructure of the electricity power network are distributed. The interoperability, automation and integration features of GUN allow us to joint and arrange cooperation among heterogeneous resources of electricity network domain. The interaction and cooperation among resources in GUN platform are realized via resource agents. Based on discussions held with the domain expert we also decided to use agent approach for automated collection of additional information from heterogeneous resources and integrate this information to the operator interface (Dashboard). The context information supports expert in decision making process.

NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION IN BIOMEDICAL LITERATURE USING TWO-LAYER SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES

Feng Liu, Yifei Chen and Bernard Manderick

In this paper, we propose a named entity recognition system for biomedical literature using two-layer support vector machines. In addition, we employ a post-processing module called a boundary check module to eliminate some boundary errors, which can lead to improved system performance. Our system doesn’t make use of any external lexical resources and hence it is a fairly simple system. Furthermore, with carefully designed features and introducing a second layer, our system can recognize named entities in biomedical literature with fairly high accuracy, which can achieve the precision of 83.5%, recall of 80.8% and balanced Fb=1 score of 82.1%, an approximate state of the art performance for the moment.

DEVELOPMENT OF A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR COMPUTER AIDED PROCESS PLANNING SYSTEM

Manish Kumar

A decision support system for Computer Aided Process Planning system has been designed, developed and implemented. The need to introduce decision support system for Computer Aided Process planning (CAPP) system arises specifically to solve the poorly structured stages in process planning such as determination of blank size, setup planning, operations planning in each setup, selection of machine tools, calculation of machining time etc. Decision Support System (DSS) is capable to support operations like turning, facing, tapering, arcing, grooving, filleting, chamfering, knurling, threading etc. The proposed system is capable to generating process plans for different types of rotational parts.

MULTI-AGENT BUILDING CONTROL IN SHARED ENVIRONMENT

Bing Qiao, Kecheng Liu and Chris Guy

Multi-agent systems have been adopted to build intelligent environment in recent years. Among previous projects, it was often claimed that energy efficiency and occupants’ comfort were the most important factors for evaluating the performance of a modern work environment, and multiagent systems presented a viable solution to handling the complexity of dynamic building environment. Experiments have been carried on to gather expertise from both building construction and agent technology society to create such a work/residential environment, where energy efficiency is achieved without compromising occupants’ comfort. While many researches have made significant advance in some aspects, their researches failed to perform when it comes to providing a satisfactory system or model for a “shared environment”, which, from our opinion, is the main reason that stops the development or even idea of Multi-agent building control system in building construction industry. This paper introduces an ongoing project on multi-agent for building control, which aims to achieve both energy efficiency and occupants’ comfort by using learning mechanisms that meet the requirements of personal profile and preferences in a shared environment.

HOLONIC ARCHITECTURE FOR A MULTIAGENT-BASED SIMULATION TOOL

Nancy Ruiz, Adriana Giret and Vicente Botti

Based on an investigation related to the User requirements for 21st century manufacturing systems, the Holonic approach has been applied successfully in the manufacturing area. In the last few years Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) have been used to improve some areas such as control systems, monitoring and diagnosis systems, and Computer Integrated Manufacturing architectures. This paper presents an application of the holonic approach together with the Multi-agent Systems (MAS) to develop a Simulation Tool for manufacturing systems. The architecture for this tool is related to functionalities that support the Manufacturing Model created by the User. This proposal allows the User to take advantage of these two approaches to simulate a manufacturing environment according to the manufacturing requirements.

A QUALITATIVE EXPERT KNOWLEDGE APPROACH TO RENDERING OPTIMIZATION

D. Vallejo-Fernandez, C. Gonzalez-Morcillo and L. Jimenez-Linares

The rendering process allows the developer to obtain a raster 2D image from the definition of a 3D scene. This process is computationally intensive if the source scene has a certain complexity or high-quality images are required. Therefore, a lot of time is spent and many computational resources are needed. In this paper, a novel approach called QUEKARO (standing for a QUalitative Expert Knowledge Approach to Rendering Optimization) is presented for adjusting some relevant parameters involved in the rendering process by using expert systems. This way, the developer can obtain optimizated results which reduce the time spent in the rendering process and, in most cases, do not affect the final quality of the raster 2D image. These results will be exposed on the result section, in which different optimizations will be studied. As we discuss on the final section of this paper, the use of expert systems in the rendering process involves a novel approach which reduces drastically the resources used and provides us with a high-scalable system. Using these arguments, we will justify the inclusion of expert systems in this area and will study future works.

APPLYING INTEGRATED EXPERT SYSTEM IN NETWORK MANAGEMENT

Antonio Martín, Carlos León, Juan I. Guerrero and Francisco J. Molina

The management of modern telecommunications networks is becoming an increasingly demanding task that is difficult to implement using present traditional methods even assisted by conventional automation techniques. Integration of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into existing and future network management system may resolve some of the difficulties. The goal of this research is to develop an integrated expert system for management network applications. The emphasis of this research is to provide a broad view of intelligent systems by capturing the knowledge of human experts and using a modular approach that integrates the knowledge management and network resources specifications. For this purpose, an extension of OSI management framework specifications language has been added and investigated. The advantage of integrating both is that a large problem can be broken down into smaller and manageable sub-problems/modules. Through modification of existing resources or addition of new resources, the integrated expert system can be conveniently expanded in the future to cover the latest research findings and updated standards of network communications.

AN ATTITUDE BASED MODELING OF AGENTS IN COALITION

Madhu Goyal

One of the main underpinning of the multi-agent systems community is how and why autonomous agents should cooperate with one another. Several formal and computational models of cooperative work or coalition are currently developed and used within multi-agent systems research. The coalition facilitates the achievement of cooperation among different agents. In this paper, a mental construct called attitude is proposed and its significance in coalition formation in a dynamic fire world is discussed. This paper presents ABCAS (Attitude Based Coalition Agent System) that shows coalitions in multi-agent systems are an effective way of dealing with the complexity of fire world. It shows that coalitions explore the attitudes and behaviors that help agents to achieve goals that cannot be achieved alone or to maximize net group utility.

IMPROVING CONTENT-ORIENTED XML RETRIEVAL BY APPLYING STRUCTURAL PATTERNS

Philipp Dopichaj

XML is the perfect format for storing (mostly) textual documents in a knowledge management system; its flexibility enables users to store both highly structured data and free text in the same document. For knowledge management, it is important to be able to search the free-text parts effectively; users need to find the information that helps them solve their problem without having to wade through much information that is not relevant for their problem. Content-oriented XML retrieval addresses this challenge: In contrast to traditional information retrieval, documents are not considered atomic units, that is, elements such as sections or paragraphs can be returned. One implication of this is that results can overlap (for example a paragraph and the surrounding section). Although overlapping results are undesirable in the final retrieval result as presented to the user, they can help to improve the quality of the final result: We take advantage of overlaps by applying patterns to small subtrees of the retrieval result (result contexts); matching patterns adjust the retrieval status values of the involved node in order to promote the best results. We demonstrate on the INEX 2005 test collection that this postprocessing can lead to a significant improvement in retrieval quality.

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AS AN ICEBREAKER: MOTIVATING CONTRIBUTIONS TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Harald Kjellin and Terese Stenfors-Hayes

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) includes a set of techniques that individuals can use to acquire, create and share knowledge without relying on technical or financial support from the employer. The purpose of this study is to find indications of detectable value from experimental implementations of PKM in a number of organisations. The study includes 75 implementations of PKM in 75 different organisations and evaluations of them all. The results from interviewing all employees that participated in the study showed that: 1) The implementation of PKM does not require extensive resources 2) The effects can be measured from a personal level, and 3) The employees assessed the positive value of the descriptions of personalised knowledge.

PAIRWISE COMPARISONS, INCOMPARABILITY AND PARTIAL ORDERS

Ryszard Janicki

A new approach to "Pairwise Comparisons" (Saaty, 1977) is presented. We start with an abstract model based on the concept of partial order (as originally suggested in (Janicki and Koczkodaj, 1996)) instead of numerical scale. The number are added later, if some quantative values can be assign to the attributes.

GU METRIC - A NEW FEATURE SELECTION ALGORITHM FOR TEXT CATEGORIZATION

Gulden Uchyigit and Keith Clark

To improve scalability of text categorisation and reduce over-fitting, it is desirable to reduce the number of words used for categorisation. Further, it is desirable to achieve such a goal automatically without sacrificing the categorisation accuracy. Such techniques are known as automatic feature selection methods. Such techniques are called automatic feature selection. Typically this is done in the way that each word is assigned a weight (using a word scoring metric) and the top scoring words are then used to describe the user's profile. The choice of the word scoring metric is important for the overall performance of the system. There are several popular word scoring metrics which have been employed in literature. In this paper we present these word scoring metrics, along with two other metrics which are employed in feature selection in the context of gene categorisation but have not been employed in textual domains, we also present a novel feature selection metric, the GU metric. The details of a comparative evaluation of all the other methods is given. This shows that our new algorithm outperforms or compares favourbly with the other older algorithms.

CONTEXT-BASED INTELLIGENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM FOR CAR DRIVERS

Juliette Brezillon, Patrick Brezillon, Thierry Artieres and Charles Tijus

Although initial training is concluded by a driving license, such learning is insufficient because new drivers do not know how to contextualize the learned procedures into effective practices. Our goal is to improve the drivers' situation awareness, in which the drivers perceive the environment’s events, the projection of their status in a close future. To achieve this goal, we aim to make an educational system for the drivers, which help them to become aware of their driving errors. This educational system aims to identify and correct drivers' drawbacks. In this paper, we discuss the reasons for associating two approaches: a local approach (resulting from cognitive sciences) and a global approach (resulting from machine learning), and we show the key role that context plays in the driving activity.

CREATING A BILINGUAL PSYCHOLOGY LEXICON FOR CROSS LINGUAL QUESTION ANSWERING, A PILOT STUDY

Andrea Andrenucci

This paper introduces a pilot study aimed at investigating the extraction of word relations from a sample of a medical parallel corpus in the field of Psychology. Word relations are extracted in order to create a bilingual lexicon for cross lingual question answering between Swedish and English. Four different variants of the sample corpus were utilized: word inflections with and without POS tagging, lemmas with and without POS tagging. The purpose of the study was to analyze the quality of the word relations obtained from the different versions of the corpus and to understand which version of the corpus was more suitable for extracting a bilingual lexicon in the field of psychology. The word alignments were evaluated with the help of reference data (gold standards), which were constructed before the word alignment process.

ENERGY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF IMPLEMENTATIONS USING ADAPTIVE STRUCTURATION THEORY

Orla Kirwan, Willie Golden and Padraig Molloy

This research is focusing on the implementation of an Information System (IS), more specifically a building energy management system (BEMS) within several organisations. One of the EU’s 7th Framework Programme’s (FP7) objectives is to “transform the current fossil fuel based energy system into a more sustainable one combined with enhanced energy efficiency (EE)”. This research is concerned with the use of information systems to achieve the latter of these objectives: enhanced energy efficiency. The research is being undertaken using a multi methodological approach incorporating case study methodology and grounded theory. Advanced structuration theory (AST) will provide a conceptual model that will help to capture the longitudinal change process. A modified AST model is proposed which will provide a theoretical framework that further investigates and explains the implementation process, using two organisations at different stages of BEMS implementation. The researcher has confirmed access to these organisations and data collection commenced on October 1st 2006. The paper concludes with an overview of how the research will progress.

OBTAINING AND EVALUATING GENERALIZED ASSOCIATION RULES

Veronica Oliveira de Carvalho, Solange Oliveira Rezende and Mário de Castro

Generalized association rules are rules that contain some background knowledge giving a more general view of the domain. This knowledge is codified by a taxonomy set over the data set items. Many researches use taxonomies in different data mining steps to obtain generalized rules. So, this work initially presents an approach to obtain generalized association rules in the post-processing data mining step using taxonomies. However, an important issue that has to be explored is the quality of the knowledge expressed by generalized rules, since the objective of the data mining process is to obtain useful and interesting knowledge to support in the user's decisions. In general, what researches do to help the users to select these pieces of knowledge is to reduce the obtained set by pruning some specialized rules using a subjective measure. In this context, this paper also presents a quality analysis of the generalized association rules. The quality of the rules obtained by the proposed approach was evaluated. The experiments show that some knowledge evaluation objective measures are appropriate only when the generalization occurs on one specific side of the rules.

HUMAN SKIN DETECTION - AN ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH

Adriano Martins Moutinho and Antonio Carlos Gay Thomé

Skin detection is a computational method that is able to identify areas inside an image that may contain human skin. Skin detection can be used on several biometric image applications such as face detection, presence detection systems, adult content filters and others. In order to implement skin detection, an artificial neural network appoach is proposed, combined with image processing methods such as illumination correction, histogram equalization and morphological operators.

DATA MINING CLUSTERING TECHNIQUES IN ACADEMIA

Vasile Paul Breşfelean, Mihaela Breşfelean, Nicolae Ghişoiu and Călin-Adrian Comes

In the present paper the authors exemplify the connections among the undergraduate studies, continuing education and professional refinement on the foundations required by Romania’s integration in EU’s structures. The study was directed to a number of senior undergraduate students and master degree students at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, using questionnaires in a collaborative manner, and the resulting data was processed using data mining clustering techniques through Weka workbench, graphical and percentage representations.

NEURAL NETWORKS FOR DATA QUALITY MONITORING OF TIME SERIES

Augusto Cesar Heluy Dantas and José Manoel de Seixas

Time series play an important role in most of large data bases. Much of the information come in temporal patterns which is often used for decision taking. Problems with missing and noisy data arise when data quality is not monitored, generating losses in many fields such as economy, customer relationship and health management. In this paper we present a neural network based system used to provide data quality monitoring for time series data. The goal of this system is to continuously adapt a neural model for each monitored series, generating a corridor of acceptance for new observations. Each rejected observation may be substituted by its estimated value. A group of four diverse time series was tested and the system proved to be able to detect the induced outliers.

FORECASTING OF CHANGES OF COMPANIES FINANCIAL STANDINGS ON THE BASIS OF SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS

Egidijus Merkevičius, Gintautas Garšva, Stasys Girdzijauskas and Vitolis Sekliuckis

This article presents the way how creditor can predict the trends of debtors financial standing. We propose the model for forecasting changes of financial standings. Model is based on the Self-organizing maps as a tool for prediction, grouping and visualization of large amount of data. Inputs for training of SOM are financial ratios calculated according any discriminate bankruptcy model. Supervised neural network lets automatically increase accuracy of performance via changing of weights of ratios.

NEURALTB WEB SYSTEM: SUPPORT TO THE SMEAR NEGATIVE PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS DIAGNOSIS

Carmen Maidantchik, José Manoel de Seixas, Afrânio Kritski, Fernanda C. de Q Mello, Rony T. V. Braga, Pedro H. S. Antunes and João Baptista de Oliveira e Souza Filho

The World Health Organization estimates that one third of the world population is infected by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. TB affects mainly poor health places in developing countries. Therefore, it became mandatory to develop more efficient, fast, and inexpensive analysis methods. This paper presents a decision support system that uses neural networks to sustain the disease diagnosis. The output is the probability that a patient has or not the illness and the risk group. The NeuralTB system encapsulates the knowledge needed during an anamnesis interview integrated to demographic and threat factors typically known for tuberculosis diagnosis. It was developed with the Web technology and all data was described with a markup language to enable an efficient communication and information exchange among specialists. The data that is collected during the whole process can be used to identify new factors or symptoms, since the infection transmission may evolve. This information can also support tuberculosis control governmental entities to define effective actions to protect the health and safety of the population.

AN INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR ENABLING PRODUCT MASS CUSTOMIZATION

Haifeng Liu, Wee-Keong Ng, Bin Song, Xiang Li and Wen-Feng Lu

We propose to develop an intelligent design decision-support system to enable mass customization through product configuration using intelligent computational approaches. The system supports customer-driven product development throughout the product's life cycle and enables rapid assessment and changes of product design in response to changes in customer requirements. The overall system consists of four subsystems: customer requirement analysis subsystem, product configuration subsystem, product lifecycle cost estimation subsystem and product data management subsystem. Various challenging issues for developing the system are investigated, and a number of methodologies and techniques to resolve the issues are presented. The proposed system will allow SMEs to effectively compete with larger companies who command superior resources.

FEEDFORWARD NEURAL NETWORKS WITHOUT ORTHONORMALIZATION

Lei Chen, Hung Keng Pung and Fei Long

Feedforward neural networks have attracted considerable attention in many fields mainly due to their approximation capability. After Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization transformation, single-hidden-layer feedforward neural networks(SLFNs) are transformed into two-hidden-layer feedforward neural networks(TLFNs). The TLFNs do not need recomputation of network weights already calculated, therefore the orthonormal neural networks can reduce computing time. In this paper, we will show that it is equivalent between neural networks without orthonormal transformation and the orthonormal neural networks, thus we can naturally conclude that such orthonormalization transformation is not necessary for neural networks. Moreover, the neurons of the orthonormal neural networks are only suitable for kernel function. In this paper, we will extend such orthonormal neural networks into additive neurons by using the theories of Extreme Learning Machine(ELM). The experimental results based on many benchmark regression and classification applications further verify that neural networks without orthonormalization transformation, i.e., ELM, may achieve faster training speed while retaining the same generalization performance.

NETWORK ALIGNMENT TOOL FOR NOVEL INSIGHT IN CELLULAR MACHINERY

Shailja Singh, Anup Bhatekar and Ashwini Gupta

Molecular networks represent the backbone of molecular activity within the cell. Recent studies have taken a comparative approach toward interpreting these networks, contrasting networks of different species and molecular types, and under varying conditions.In this review, we survey the field of comparative biological network analysis and describe its applications to elucidate cellular machinery and to predict protein function and interaction. We highlight the open problems in the field as well as propose some initial mathematical formulations for addressing them. Many of the methodological and conceptual advances that were important for sequence comparison will likely also be important at the network level, including improved search algorithms, techniques for multiple alignment, evolutionary models for similarity scoring and better integration with public databases.

INTERCONNECTING DOCUMENTATION - HARNESSING THE DIFFERENT POWERS OF CURRENT DOCUMENTATION TOOLS IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Christian Prause, Julia Kuck, Stefan Apelt, Reinhard Oppermann and Armin B. Cremers

Current software documentation tools (like text processors, email, documentation generators, reporting, configuration management, wikis) have different strengths in supporting the software engineering process. But one weakness they all have in common is their inability to combine the advantages of the various techniques. Integrating documentation with diverse origins would enhance the force of expression and compensate individual failings of the different techniques. In this paper, we present a new brand of documentation utilities --- exemplified by the Dendrodoc-system --- that overcomes current problems with documentation. By processing information at negligible cost that common tools ignore, our system represents an efficient way of improving software documentation.

ATTRIBUTE CONSTRUCTION FOR E-MAIL FOLDERING BY USING WRAPPERED FORWARD GREEDY SEARCH

Pablo Bermejo, José A. Gámez and José M. Puerta

E-mail classification is one of the outstanding tasks in text mining, however most of the efforts in this topic have been devoted to the detection of spam or junk e-mail, that is, a classification problem with only two possible classes: spam and not-spam. In this paper we deal with a different e-mail classification problem known as e-mail foldering that consists on the classification of incoming mail into the different folders previously created by the user. This task has received less attention and is quite complex due to the (usually large) cardinality of the class variable (the number of folders). In this paper we try to improve the classification accuracy by looking for new attributes that are derived from the existing ones by using a data-driven approach. The attribute is constructed by taking into account the type of classifier to be used later and following a wrapper approach guided by a forward greedy search. The experiments carried out show that in all the cases the accuracy of the classifier is improved when the new attribute is added to the original ones.

APPLICATION OF A GENETIC ALGORITHM TO A REAL WORLD NURSE ROSTERING PROBLEM INSTANCE

Özgür Kelemci and A. Sima Uyar

The nurse rostering problem involves assigning shifts to qualified personnel using a given timetable under some hard and soft constraints. In this study, the nurse rostering problem instance of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Hospital is being attempted to be solved using a standard genetic algorithm. Currently, the rosters are being prepared by a head nurse who performs this tedious task by hand. Due to the existence of many constraints, usually the resulting schedules are suboptimal. The aim is this study is to generate better schedules automatically for this specific real world instance of the nurse rostering problem. This paper reports the results of the preliminary experiments conducted to understand the properties of a good genetic algorithm for this problem. The results are very promising and they promote further study.

INVESTIGATIONS ON OBJECT-CENTERED ROUTING IN DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS: ALGORITHMIC FRAMEWORK AND INITIAL NUMERICAL RESULTS - SUPPORT FOR DISTRIBUTED DECISION MAKING IN TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

Bernd-Ludwig Wenning, Carmelita Görg, Andreas Timm-Giel, Jörn Schönberger and Herbert Kopfer

Dynamics in logistics are a subject of increasing importance in logistic processes. The more detaild dynamics are considered, the more complicated it becomes to handle them in centralized planning. Therefore, decentralized approaches with autonomous cooperating entities might become more efficient. This paper introduces some aspects of decentralized approaches, mainly focussing on the process of information acquisition which enables the autonomous entities to decide about the handling of routes and orders.

TREND ANALYSIS BASED ON EXPLORATIVE DATA AND TEXT MINING: A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR THE EUROPEAN HOME TEXTILE INDUSTRY

Andreas Becks and Jessica Huster

Trend-related industries like the European home-textile industry have to quickly adapt to evolving product trends and consumer behaviour in order to avoid economic risks generated by misproduction. Trend indicators are manifold, reaching from changes in ordered products and consumer behaviour to ideas and concepts published in magazines or presented at trade fairs. In this paper we report on the overall design of the Trend Analyser, a decision support system that helps designers and product developers of textile producers to perform market basket analyses as well as mining trend-relevant fashion magazines and other publications by trend-setters. Our tool design brings together explorative text and data mining methods in an ontology-based knowledge flow system, helping decision-makers to perform a better planning of their production.

LEARNING GREEK PHONETIC RULES USING DECISION-TREE BASED MODELS

Dimitrios P. Lyras, Kyriakos N. Sgarbas and Nikolaos D. Fakotakis

This paper deals with the use of decision-tree based induction techniques in order to achieve automatic extraction of phonetic knowledge. In particular, we compare the ID3 divide-and-conquer decision tree algorithm and Quinlan’s C4.5 decision tree learner model by applying them to two Greek pronunciation databases. The extracted knowledge is then evaluated quantitavely (i.e. measuring accuracy). In the ten cross-fold validation experiments that are conducted in our study, the decision tree models are shown to produce an accuracy higher than 99.96% when trained and tested on each one of the two aforementioned datasets. This extracted knowledge allows the better adaptation of speech processing and natural language processing systems to the variants of the Greek language and may be useful to various applications such as automatic bi-lingual dictionary construction, Grapheme-to-Phoneme and Phoneme-to-Grapheme converters, speech recognition etc.

DELINEATING TOPIC AND DISCUSSANT TRANSITIONS IN ONLINE COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Xavier Llorà, David E. Goldberg, Yuichi Washida and Hiroshi Tamura

In this paper, we propose some methodologies for delineating topic and discussant transitions in online collaborative environments, more precisely, focus group discussions for product conceptualization. First, we propose KEE (Key Elements Extraction) algorithm, an algorithm for simultaneously finding key terms and key persons in a discussion. Based on KEE algorithm, we propose approaches for analyzing two important factors of discussions: discussion dynamics and emerging social networks. Examining our approaches using actual network-based discussion data generated by real focus groups in a marketing environment, we report interesting results that demonstrate how our approaches could effectively discover knowledge in the discussions.

A NICHE BASED GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR IMAGE REGISTRATION

Giuseppe Pascale and Luigi Troiano

Image registration is a task of fundamental importance in many applications of image analysis. It aims to find the unknown set of transformations able to reduce two or more images to a common reference frame. Image registration can be regarded as an optimization problem, where the goal is to maximize a measure of image similarity (e.g. the images cross-correlation). The measure of similarity on the overall image can be computationally expensive, leading to measure the similarity of smaller subimages. However, the reduction of subimage size results into a higher multi-modality for the optimizing function. Recent investigations have shown that genetic algorithms can address this problem. However, the simple scheme of genetic algorithms can still fall in local optima. In this paper, we explore the application of niche-oriented genetic algorithms, showing their strengths in providing a more effective image registration algorithm.

PROBLEMS AND FEATURES OF EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS TO BUILD HYBRID TRAINING METHODS FOR RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS

M. P. Cuéllar, M. Delgado and M. C. Pegalajar

Dynamical recurrent neural networks are models suitable to solve problems where the input and output data may have dependencies in time, like grammatical inference or time series prediction. However, traditional training algorithms for these networks sometimes provide unsuitable results because of the vanishing gradient problems. This work focuses on hybrid proposals of training algorithms for this type of neural networks. The methods studied are based on the combination of heuristic procedures with gradient-based algorithms. In the experimental section, we show the advantages and disadvantages that we may find when using these training techniques in time series prediction problems, and provide a general discussion about the problems and cases of different hybridations based on genetic evolutionary algorithms.

THE JUMP PROJECT: PRACTICAL USE OF SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES IN EPSS SYSTEMS

Giovanni Semeraro, Ignazio Palmisano, Nicola Abbattista and Silverio Petruzzellis

The JUMP project aims at bringing together the knowledge stored in different systems in order for the needs of a user to be fulfilled. EPSS systems are meant to support a user in taking decisions, leveraging different information sources that are available. The JUMP framework is designed to offer multiple ways for the user to request information or advice to the central knowledge and document base; the knowledge and document base itself is the result of the integration of indipendent systems. In order to simplify communication and maximize knowledge sharing and standardization of languages and protocols, Semantic Web languages and technologies are used throughout the framework to represent, exchange and query the knowledge stored in each part of the framework. The basic assumption is that the user is knowledgeable w.r.t. the IT infrastructure and already has the background knowledge necessary to achieve most of the parts of the task he/she is involved into, but he/she is not an expert of the domain in which the task is to be achieved. The task that the JUMP system has to accomplish, in this situation, is to help the user find the relevant information (e.g. the email address of someone who’s already accomplished the same task, or of people that can relay relevant pointers, or documents and self- instruction courses that contain references to the current activity). All the available material has then to be ranked according to the user profile, i.e. on the base of what the JUMP system knows about the user or about the category the user falls in.

AN APPROACH FOR ASSESSING DESIGN SYSTEMS: DESIGN SYSTEM SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS FOR PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Richard Sohnius, Eyck Jentzsch, Wolf-Ekkehard Matzke and Vadim Ermolayev

This position paper presents our work in assessing engineering design systems in the field of microelectronics with respect to their performance and, more specifically, to productivity. Current mainstream process assessment systems show deficiencies of the representation and analysis when dealing with dynamic, self-optimizing processes. To overcome this, a project called PRODUKTIV+ has been created with the goal to develop a new approach. This approach is to create a model of a design system and simulate the colaborative behavior of the involved engineers using a system of cooperating, intelligent software agents. The assessment of a design system is then done based on the detailed simulation results.

DAY OF THE WEEK EFFECT IN SMALL SECURITIES MARKETS

Virgilijus Sakalauskas and Dalia Kriksciuniene

In this article statistical investigation of the day of the week effect was explored for the case of small securities market. Though this effect has already been widely examined in numerous research articles, its influence to such type of markets has not been sufficiently explored. By applying statistical analysis of the return index data (Vilnius Stock OMX Index return) we found out, that the first and last trading day’s effect was not observed. We constructed the subset of return variable which indicated the influence of day of the week effect. For this variable we proved the effect of higher moments of return and concluded that the hypothesis of equality of the higher moments across days of the week can be rejected, indicating that a weekly pattern on the higher moments exists.

EMPLOYING SOFTWARE MULTI-AGENTS FOR SIMULATING RADIOLOGICAL ACCIDENTS

Tadeu Augusto de Almeida Silva and Oscar Luiz Monteiro de Farias

Through agent based systems we can build scenarios of radiological accidents that enable us to evaluate the consequences of accidental contaminations. The incidental release of radionuclides in an environment might cause the contamination of areas and people. So, it is necessary to make use of tools that allow us to foretell the effects of the exposition of the population and to evaluate the consequences and to suggest measures of protection. In this paper we introduce the use of software multi-agents systems immersed in a geographical representation of the world, as a viable option to simulate radiological accidents and assess doses.

GENERALIZED MULTICRITERIA OPTIMIZATION SOFTWARE SYSTEM MKO-2

Mariana Vassileva, Vassil Vassilev, Boris Staykov and Danail Dochev

The paper describes a generalized multicriteria decision support system, called MKO-2, which is designed to model and solve linear and linear integer multicriteria optimization problems. The system implements the innovative generalized classification-based interactive algorithm for multicriteria optimization with variable scalarizations and parameterizations, which is applicable for different types of multicriteria optimization problems (i.e., linear, nonlinear, mixed variables). It is also applicable for different ways of defining preferences by the decision maker. It can apply different scalarizing problems and strategies in the search for new Pareto optimal solutions. The class of the problems solved, the structure, the functions and the user interface of the generalized multicriteria decision support system MKO-2 are described in the paper. The graphical user interface of this system enables decision makers with different degrees of qualification concerning methods and software tools to operate easily with the system. The MKO-2 system can be used both for education and for solving real-life problems. Because of its nature, the system contains specific expert knowledge of the field of multicriteria optimization and knowledge-based (expert) subsystems can be included in it concerning different levels of expertise.

INTEGRATING AGENTS INTO COOPERATIVE INTELLIGENT DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Abdelkader Adla

In this paper, we propose to integrate agents in a cooperative intelligent decision support system. The resulting system, ACIDS (Agent-based Cooperative Intelligent Decision-support System) is a decision support system designed to support operators during contingencies by giving them detailed, real-time information, allowing them to integrate and interpret it and then transmit and monitor their decisions through the chain of incident command. During the contingency, the operator using the ACIDS should be able to: gather information about the incident location; access databases related to the incident; activate predictive modelling programs; support analyses of the operator, and monitor the progress of the situation and action execution. The decision making process, applied to the boilers management system, relies in ACIDS on a cycle that includes recognition of the causes of a fault (diagnosis), plan actions to solve the incidences and, execution of the selected actions.

GROUP DECISION SYSTEMS FOR RANKING AND SELECTION - AN APPLICATION TO THE ACCREDITATION OF DOPING CONTROL LABORATORIES

Xari Rovira, Núria Agell, Mónica Sánchez, Francesc Prats and Montserrat Ventura

This paper presents a qualitative approach for representing and synthesising evaluations given by a team of experts involved in selection or ranking processes. The paper aims at contributing to decision-making analysis in the context of group decision making. A methodology is given for selecting and ranking several alternatives in an accreditation process. Patterns or alternatives are evaluated by each expert in an ordinal scale. Qualitative orders of magnitude spaces are the frame in which these ordinal scales are represented. A representation for the different patterns by means of k-dimensional qualitative orders of magnitude labels is proposed, each of these standing for the conjunction of k labels corresponding to the evaluations considered. A method is given for ranking patterns based on comparing distances against a reference k-dimensional label. The proposed method is applied in a real case in External Quality Assessment Schemes (EQAS) for Doping Control Laboratory contexts.

A PLATFORM DEDICATED TO KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS

Arnaud Renouf, Régis Clouard and Marinette Revenu

In this paper, we propose a platform dedicated to the knowledge extraction and management for image processing applications. The aim of this platform is a knowledge-based system that generates automatically applications from problem formulations giving by inexperienced users. We also present a new model for the formulation of such applications that covers all the image processing tasks and that is independent of any particular application domain. We show the contribution of this model to the platform performance and to the realization of the knowledge-based system.

SELF-LEARNING PREDICTION SYSTEM FOR OPTIMISATION OF WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT IN A MAINFRAME OPERATING SYSTEM

Michael Bensch, Dominik Brugger, Wolfgang Rosenstiel, Martin Bogdan, Wilhelm Spruth and Peter Baeuerle

We present a framework for extraction and prediction of online workload data from a workload manager of a mainframe operating system. To boost overall system performance, the prediction will be incorporated into the workload manager to take preventive action before a bottleneck develops. Model and feature selection automatically create a prediction model based on given training data, thereby keeping the system flexible. We tailor data extraction, preprocessing and training to this specific task. Using error measures suited to our task, we show that our approach is promising. To conclude, we discuss our first results and give an outlook on future work.

SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS FOR CLASSIFICATION OF THE RIO DE JANEIRO STATE CITIES BASED ON ELECTRICAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Luiz Biondi Neto, Pedro Henrique Gouvêa Coelho, João Carlos Soares de Mello and Lidia Angulo Meza

The purpose of the present work is to classify the 31 cities of Rio de Janeiro State in Brazil based on their energy consumption. The point is to search new criteria to cluster the users in order to establish, in a more homogeneous way, indices of energy quality. Moreover, it aims to bring about a framework from which it will be possible to determine the relative efficiency among the cities of all Brazilian states. Traditionally this classification task is carried out using a statistical technique known as K-means, in which only five variables are considered: the size of the main network in Kilometres, the offered power , the number of users, the average monthly consumption and the covered area. This paper uses the Kohonen Self Organizing Maps technique applied to 21 variables, including the residential, industrial, public and rural consumptions in order to seek a better classification.

IMPRECISE EMPIRICAL ONTOLOGY REFINEMENT - APPLICATION TO TAXONOMY ACQUISITION

Vít Novácek

The significance of uncertainty representation has become obvious in the Semantic Web community recently. This paper presents new results of our research on uncertainty incorporation into ontologies created automatically by means of Human Language Technologies. The research is related to OLE (Ontology LEarning)\footnote{The project's web page can be found at URL: \url{???}.}%\url{http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/ole/}.} -- a project aimed at bottom-up generation and merging of ontologies. It utilises a proposal of expressive fuzzy knowledge representation framework called {\sf ANUIC} (Adaptive Net of Universally Interrelated Concepts). We discuss our recent achievements in taxonomy acquisition and show how even simple application of the principles of {\sf ANUIC} can improve the results of initial knowledge extraction methods.

SIMILARITY ASSESSMENT IN A CBR APPLICATION FOR CLICKSTREAM DATA MINING PLANS SELECTION

Cristina Wanzeller and Orlando Belo

We implemented a mining plans selection system founded on the Case Based Reasoning paradigm, in order to assist the development of Web usage mining processes. The system’s main goal is to suggest the most suited methods to apply on a data analysis problem. Our approach builds upon the reuse of the experience gained from prior successfully mining processes, to solve current and future similar problems. The knowledge acquired after successfully solving such problems is organized and stored in a relational case base, giving rise to a (multi-) relational cases representation. In this paper we describe the similitude assessment devised within the retrieval of similar cases, to cope with the adopted representation. Structured representation and similarity assessment over complex data are issues relevant to a growing variety of application domains, being considered in multiple related lines of active research. We explore a number of different similarity measures proposed in the literature and we extend one of them to better fit our purposes

LEARNING TO RANK FOR COLLABORATIVE FILTERING

Jean-Francois Pessiot, Tuong-Vinh Truong, Nicolas Usunier, Massih-Reza Amini and Patrick Gallinari

Up to now, most contributions to collaborative filtering rely on rating prediction to generate the recommendations. We, instead, try to correctly rank the items according to the users' tastes. First, we define a ranking error function which takes available pairwise preferences between items into account. Then we design an effective algorithm that optimizes this error. Finally we illustrate the proposal on a standard collaborative filtering dataset. We adapted the evaluation protocol proposed by (Marlin, 2004) for rating prediction based systems to our case, where pairwise preferences are predicted instead. The preliminary results are between those of two reference rating prediction based methods. We suggest different directions to further explore our ranking based approach for collaborative filtering.

PROVISION OF CONTEXT-SENSITIVE ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE FOR DECISION SUPPORT: AN APPROACH BASED ON ENTERPRISE MODELS AND INFORMATION DEMAND CONTEXTS

Tatiana Levashova, Michael Pashkin and Magnus Lundqvist

In this paper an approach for deriving abstract and operational context for context-sensitive decision support, and thereby also parts of information demand contexts, from enterprise models is presented together with some thoughts on how this can be utilised in the efforts of trying to provide users with current, correct, and relevant information with respect to the tasks such users perform within organisations. The different steps involved in the process of deriving context from enterprise models is explained by means of different representations of an example model produced in earlier research done by the authors.

RULE BASED STABILITY CRITERIA FOR COALITION FORMATION UNDER UNCERTAINTY

Chi-Kong Chan and Ho-Fung Leung

Efficiency and stability are two important concepts in coalition formation analysis. One common assumption in many well-known criteria such as the core and Pareto Efficiency is that there exists a publicly known value for each coalition or sub-coalition. However, in software agent applications, this assumption is often not true as the agents rarely know the exact coalition values for certain. Instead, agents have to rely on whatever evidence they can observe, and evaluate those evidence according to their private information base on past experience. There are two sources of uncertainty here. First, such private information is often uncertain in nature or may even be self-conflicting. Second, the agents, which are heterogeneous and autonomous, may have different conflict resolution strategies. Such uncertainties make the traditional approaches unfit for many real-world problems, except perhaps, in idealized scenarios. In this paper, we extend the Core and Pareto Optimality criteria by proposing a new rule based stability concepts under uncertain environment: the CU-Core.

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR PREDICTING THE RELIABILITY OF A ROBOTIC DISPENSING SYSTEM

J. Sturek, S. Ramakrishnan, P. Nagula and K. Srihari

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are information systems designed to support individual and collective decision-making. This research presents the development of a DSS to facilitate the prediction of the reliability of a Robotic Dispensing System (RDS). While it is extremely critical for design teams to identify the potential defects in the product before releasing them to the customers, predicting reliability is extremely difficult due to the absence of actual failure data. Design teams often adopt tools such as Failure Mode Effects and Analysis (FMEA) to analyze the various failure modes in the product. There are commercial softwares that facilitate predicting reliability and conducting FMEA. However, there are limited approaches that combine these two critical aspects of product design. The objective of this research is to develop a DSS that would help design teams track the overall system reliability, while concurrently using the data from the alpha testing phase to perform the FMEA. Hence, this DSS is capable of calculating the age-specific reliability value for a Robotic Dispensing System (RDS), in addition to storing the defect information, for the FMEA process. The Risk Priority Number (RPN) calculated using the data gathered serves as the basis for the design team to identify the modifications to the product design. The tool, developed in Microsoft Access®, would be subsequently utilized to track on-field performance of the RDS. This would facilitate continuous monitoring of the RDS from the customer site, especially during its “infant mortality” period.

INTELLIGENT E-LEARNING SYSTEMS - AN INTELLIGENT APPROACH TO FLEXIBLE LEARNING METHODOLOGIES

Sukanya Ramabadran and Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan

The evolution of the educational industry from adoption of classroom training methods to e-learning systems has been remarkable and has satisfied its purpose of existence. But it has not been able to address issues faced by students who do not want to be constricted with a set pattern of progress. We conducted a detailed study to analyze preferences of students with respect to features of an Intelligent e-Learning system. Based on results of the study,a framework of IeLS, that facilitates flexibility and maximum learners’ satisfaction, is developed.The framework consists of components like presentation, data mining, business logic, content management and database. The data mining component uses techniques such as association rule discovery and conceptual clustering to generate recommendations for students, course coordinators as well as the institute. This framework is implemented using PHP and MySQL with various modules such as registration, entry test, tutorials, guestbook and bulletin boards. This system allows flexibility in terms of choice of learning path,change in direction of learning path and change of learning approach. It also allows students to choose the levels of difficulty at which they would pursue the course. In this paper we discuss the role that such an Intelligent e-Learning system plays in satisfying the diverse needs of students.

FUZZY INTERVAL NUMBER (FIN) TECHNIQUES FOR MULTILINGUAL AND CROSS LANGUAGE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Theodoros Alevizos, Vassilis G. Kaburlasos, Stelios Papadakis, Christos Skourlas and Petros Belsis

Fuzzy Interval Numbers (FINs) could be seen as a set of techniques applied in Fuzzy System applications. In this paper, we propose a series of techniques to solve multi-Lingual and Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) problems, based on Fuzzy Interval Numbers (FINs). Some experiments showing the importance of these techniques in the CLIR-systems are briefly described and discussed. Our method is evaluated using monolingual and bilingual public bibliographic data extracted from the National Archive of the Greek National Documentation Centre. All the experiments were conducted with and without the use of stemming, stop-words and other language dependent (pre-) processing techniques. It seems that a main advantage of our approach is that the method is language independent and there is also no need for any text pre-processing or higher level processing, avoiding thus the use of taggers, parsers, feature selection strategies, or the use of other language dependent NLP tools.

A DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE BASED APPROACH FOR SIMILARITY RETRIEVAL IN BRAIN IMAGES

Haiwei Pan, Qilong Han, Xiaoqin Xie, Wei Zhang and Jianzhong Li

The high incidence of brain disease, especially brain tumor, has increased significantly in recent years. It is becoming more and more concernful to discover knowledge through mining medical brain image to aid doctors’ diagnosis. Image mining is the important branch of data mining. It is more than just an extension of data mining to image domain but an interdisciplinary endeavor. Image clustering and similarity retrieval are two basilic parts of image mining. In this paper, we introduce a notion of image sequence similarity patterns (ISSP) for medical image database. ISSP refer to the longest similar and continuous sub-patterns hidden in two objects each of which contains an image sequence. These patterns are significant in medical images because the similarity for two medical images is not important, but rather, it is the similarity of objects each of which has an image sequence that is meaningful. We design the new algorithms with the guidance of the domain knowledge to discover the possible Space-Occupying Lesion (PSO) in brain images and ISSP for similarity retrieval. Our experiments demonstrate that the results of similarity retrieval are meaningful and interesting to medical doctors.

INTELLIGENT SYSTEM FOR IMAGE COMPRESSION

Adnan Khashman and Kamil Dimililer

The parallel processing capability of neural networks provides efficient means for processing images with large amount of data. Image compression using Discrete Cosine Transforms (DCT) is a lossy compression method where at higher compression ratios the quality of the compressed images is reduced, thus the need for finding an optimum compression ratio that combines high compression and good quality. This paper suggests that the image intensity can affect the choice of an optimum compression ratio. A neural network will be trained to establish the non-linear relationship between the image intensity and its compression ratios in search for an optimum ratio. Experimental results suggest that a trained neural network can relate image intensity or pixel values to its compression ratio and thus can be successfully used to predict optimum DCT compression ratios for different images.

MRE-KDD+: A MULTI-RESOLUTION, ENSEMBLE-BASED MODEL FOR ADVANCED KNOLWEDGE DISCOVERY

Alfredo Cuzzocrea

The problem of supporting advanced decision-support processes arise in many fields of real-life applications ranging from scenarios populated by distributed and heterogeneous data sources, such as conventional distributed data warehousing environments, to cooperative information systems. Here, data repositories expose very different formats, and knowledge representation schemes are very heterogeneous accordingly. As a consequence, a relevant research challenge is how to efficiently integrate, process and mine such distributed knowledge in order to make available it to end-users/applications in an integrated and summarized manner. Starting from these considerations, in this paper we propose an OLAM-based framework for advanced knowledge discovery, along with a formal model underlying this framework, called Multi-Resolution Ensemble-based Model for Advanced Knowledge Discovery in Large Databases and Data Warehouses (MRE-KDD+), and a reference architecture for such a framework. Another contribute of our work is represented by the proposal of KBMiner, a visual tool that supports the editing of even-complex KDD processes according to the guidelines drawn by MRE-KDD+.

A DISTRIBUTED MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM TO SOLVE AIRLINE OPERATIONS PROBLEMS

Antonio Castro and Eugenio Oliveira

An airline schedule very rarely operates as planned. Problems related with aircrafts, crew members and passengers are common and the actions towards the solution of these problems are usually knows as operations recovery or disruption management. The Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC) tries to solve these problems with the minimum impact in the airline schedule, with the minimum cost and, at the same time, satisfying all the required safety rules. Usually, each problem is treated separately and some tools have been proposed to help in the decision making process of the airline coordinators. In this paper we present the implementation of a Distributed Multi-Agent System (MAS) that represents the several roles that exist in an AOCC. This MAS deals with several operational bases and for each type of operations problems it has several specialized software agents that implements heuristic solutions and other solutions based in operations research mathematic models and artificial intelligence algorithms. These specialized agents compete to find the best solution for each problem. We present a real case study taken from an AOCC where a crew recovery problem is solved using the MAS. Computational results using a real airline schedule are presented, including a comparison with a solution for the same problem found by the human operators in the Airline Operations Control Center. We show that, even in simple problems and when comparing with solutions found by humans operators in the case of this airline company, it is possible to find valid solutions, in less time and with a smaller cost.

IMPROVED FACE RECOGNITION USING KERNEL DIRECT DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS IN COMBINATION WITH SVM CLASSIFIER

Seyyed Majid Valiollahzadeh, Abolghasem Sayadiyan and Mohammad Nazari

Applications such as Face Recognition (FR) that deal with high-dimensional data need a mapping technique that introduces representation of low-dimensional features with enhanced discriminatory power and a proper classifier, able to classify those complex features .Most of traditional Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) suffer from the disadvantage that their optimality criteria are not directly related to the classification ability of the obtained feature representation. Moreover, their classification accuracy is affected by the “small sample size” (SSS) problem which is often encountered in FR tasks. In this short paper, we combine nonlinear kernel based mapping of data called KDDA with Support Vector machine (SVM) classifier to deal with both of the shortcomings in an efficient and cost effective manner. The proposed here method is compared, in terms of classification accuracy, to other commonly used FR methods on UMIST face database. Results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is overall superior to those of traditional FR approaches, such as the Eigenfaces, Fisherfaces, and D-LDA methods and traditional linear classifiers.

FACE DETECTION USING ADABOOSTED SVM-BASED CMPONENT CLASSIFIER

Seyyed Majid Valiollahzadeh, Abolghasem Sayadiyan and Mohammad Nazari

Boosting is a general method for improving the accuracy of any given learning algorithm. In this paper we employ combination of Adaboost with Support Vector Machine (SVM) as component classifiers to be used in Face Detection Task. Proposed combination outperforms in generalization in comparison with SVM on imbalanced classification problem. The proposed here method is compared, in terms of classification accuracy, to other commonly used Adaboost methods, such as Decision Trees and Neural Networks, on CMU+MIT face database. Results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is overall superior to previous adaboost approaches.

USING DECISION TREE LEARNING TO PREDICT WORKFLOW ACTIVITY TIME CONSUMPTION

Liu Yingbo, Wang Jianmin and Sun Jiaguang

Activity time consumption knowledge is essential to successful scheduling in workflow applications. However, the uncertainty of activity execution duration in workflow applications makes it a non-trivial task for schedulers to appropriately organize the ongoing processes. In this paper, we present a K-level prediction approach intended to help workflow schedulers to anticipate activities' time consumption. This approach first defines K levels as a global measure of time. Then, it applies a decision tree learning algorithm to the workflow event log to learn various kinds of activities' execution characteristics. When a new process is initiated, the classifier produced by the decision tree learning technique takes prior activities' execution information as input and suggests a level as the prediction of posterior activity's time consumption. In the experiment on three vehicle manufacturing enterprises, 896 activities were investigated, and we separately achieved and average prediction accuracy of 80.27%, 70.93% and 61.14% with K = 10. We also applied our approach on greater values of K, however the result is less positive. We describe our approach and report on the result of our experiment.

USING GRAMMARS FOR TEXT CLASSIFICATION

P. Kroha and T. Reichel

In this contribution we present our experiments with using grammars for text classification. Approaches usually used are based on statistical methods working with term frequency. We investigate short texts (stock exchange news) more deeply in that we analyze the structure of sentences and context of used phrases. Results are used for predicting market movements coming from the hypotheses that news move markets.

A EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO SOLVE SET COVERING

Broderick Crawford, Carolina Lagos, Carlos Castro and Fernando Paredes

In this paper we apply a new evolutive approach for solving the Set Covering Problem. This problem is a reasonably well known NP-complete optimization problem with many real world applications. We use a Cultural Evolutionary Architecture to maintain knowledge of Diversity and Fitness learned over each generation during the search process. Our results indicate that the approach is able to produce very competitive results in compare with other approximation algorithms solving a portfolio of test problems taken from the ORLIB.

REACTIVE COMMONSENSE REASONING - TOWARDS SEMANTIC COORDINATION WITH HIGH-LEVEL SPECIFICATIONS

Michael Cebulla

In contemporary distributed applications questions concerning coordination became increasingly urgent. There is a tradeoff however to be made between the need for a highly reative behavior and the need for semantically rich high level abstractions. Especially w.r.t. context-aware applications where various systems have to act together and come to coordinated conclusions the need for powerful semantic abstractions is evident. In our argument we start with a calculus for highly reactive behavior. Then we introduce stepwise two extensions w.r.t. the representation of semantic relationships. The first extension concerns the integration of description logics in order to represent statements about the current situation. The main extension however concerns the integration of classifications (also known as formal contexts). By integrating these highly abstract notions into our membrane-based calculus we make a proposal for the support of common sense reasoning during runtime. We claim that this proposal is a contributation for the robustness of systems behavior and context-awareness.

MISUSE DETECTION - AN ITERATIVE PROCESS VS. A GENETIC ALGORITHM APPROACH

Pedro A. Diaz-Gomez and Dean F. Hougen

With the explosion of the internet and its use, the development of security mechanims are quite important in order to preserve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data stored in computers. However, the growth of intrusions can make such mechanims almost unusable, in the sense that the computation time, or space needed in order to mantain them can grow exponentially. This position paper present an iterative process for doing misuse detection, and compares it with other approach for doing that: a Genetic Algorithm.

MISUSE DETECTION - A NEURAL NETWORK VS. A GENETIC ALGORITHM APPROACH

Pedro A. Diaz-Gomez and Dean F. Hougen

Misuse detection can be addressed as an optimization problem, where the problem is to find an array of possible intrusions x that maximizes a function f (·) subject to a constraint r, impose by a user’s actions performed in a computer. This positional paper presents and compare two ways of finding x, in audit data, by using neural networks and genetic algorithms.

AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO SUPPORT PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT FOR DYNAMIC AND COLLABORATIVE WORK

Nora Houari and Behrouz H. Far

This paper describes a comprehensive multiagent based modelling approach for collaborative and dynamic organizational roles support. The method is a role centred one, where agents collaborate to assist human users through collaboration within the same role, with other roles of the same team, as well as roles of different teams that share tasks dependencies. Agents in the system are not restricted by predefined schemes they can join and/or leave the coalition. We identify the key elements of the role model as rules, agents, and relationships. Our role model integrates both the operational functionalities and the performance management towards specific goals, the former involve human individuals in the loop, whereas the later are performed by software agents to assist in monitoring, control, and adaptation of the performance in dynamic organizations.

AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF THE QUANTITATIVE SEISMOCARDIOGRAM

Z. Trefny, J. Svacinka, S. Trojan, J. Slavicek, P. Smrcka and M. Trefny

The device for quantitative seismocardiography (Q-SCG) detects cardiac vibrations caused by the heart activity, the measuring sensor is usually placed in the plate of the chair – additional instruments applied on the proband’s body are not required. The results of the Q-SCG analysis are usable in various clinical fields. The first and most important step in the process of detection of significant characteristics of measured Q-SCG curves is to detect pseudo-periods in the signal regardless of the initial pseudo-period position. Other characteristics can be acquired by a relatively simple process over the appointed pseudo-period. The experimental equipment for the Q-SCG measuring and analysis was developed and also special algorithms for preprocessing, segmentation and interactive analysis of the Q-SCG signal were developed. In this contribution technical principles of the quantitative seismocardiography are introduced; the method is easy, robust and is appropriate for real-time Q-SCG processing.

TRUST AND REPUTATION ONTOLOGIES FOR ELECTRONIC BUSINESS

Stefan Schmidt, Tharam Dillon, Robert Steele and Elizabeth Chang

The emergence of social networks in centralized and distributed virtual communities is one of the hottest topics in today’s research communities. Trust and reputation ontologies which capture the social relationships and concepts among interacting parties offer a standardized and common under-standing of a problem domain such as electronic business in autonomous environments. To improve interoperability, on-tologies can be shared among interacting agents and form the basis for many of the autonomous activities of intelligent agents. The ontologies presented in this paper concentrate on the formalisation of business discovery, business selection, and business interaction QoS review concepts. Special focus is put on trust and reputation relationships which form among the entities involved.

CONSTRUCTING CONSISTENT USER REQUIREMENTS - LESSONS LEARNT FROM REQUIREMENTS VERIFICATION

Petra Heck

The user requirements specify what functions an information system has to fulfil. The user requirements serve as the basis for system implementation and test specification. In this paper we present a number of guidelines that improve the quality of the user requirements. In order to be able to reason about requirements in general we first present a structure that indicates the elements that requirements consist of and how these elements interrelate. Based on the general structure we have performed a number of case studies in the area of requirements verification. In the requirements that we have verified we have found many inconsistencies. If the guidelines we present are obeyed during requirements construction, certain types of inconsistencies will not be present in the resulting requirements. Better quality requirements lead to fewer errors in the other system development phases and during system changes.

THE NEED OF ‘INFORMATION ANALYSIS? FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND OUTLINE OF A HERMENEUTIC APPROACH TO IT

Sufen Wang, Junkang Feng and Binyong Tang

Requirement analysis for information systems development (ISD) results in a specification that should represent a central reference point for subsequent stages of the development. But this stage is seen characterized by informality and uncertainty. One essential element in this is how the information that is required by the agents in a domain is identified and formulated. In this paper, we will look at how well-known information systems methodologies handle it. Then we will identify a number of problems with them, based on which we will argue that an information analysis stage would seem to be needed and useful for overcoming these problems. Such a stage would require a certain perspective. We suggest adopting Hermeneutics as such a perspective. We describe how Hermeneutics might enable us to look at the mechanism whereby information is created and information flow takes place.

COMPUTATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF ACTIVITIES

Peter Bøgh Andersen

Social simulations, pervasive computing, and business process research all require principled, scientifically based methods for representing actions and activities digitally. The paper uses findings from ethnography, linguistics and philosophy to make a list of features that need representation and suggests methods for rep-resenting these features in an object-oriented framework. The paper makes a sharp distinction between the representation and the represented. The representations are not activities, they only represent them.

RISK PROFILING OF MONEY LAUNDERING AND TERRORISM FUNDING - PRACTICAL PROBLEMS OF CURRENT INFORMATION STRATEGIES

B. H. M. Custers

In order to track money laundering and terrorist funding, banks have to create risk profiles of their clients. Banks that want to do business in the United States have to implement a world wide Know Your Customer (KYC) program, partially based on the Patriot Act. Implementing a KYC policy, however, raises several problems and does not seem to be effective and efficient to tracking money laundering and terrorist funding. Particularly because of problems regarding the identification of individuals it is not too difficult for criminals and terrorists to avoid being noticed during these types of screening. This contribution will discuss how risk profiling strategies are implemented in practical environments and which problems this may cause.

COMPARISON OF FIVE ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGES ON DESIGN FOCUS, SECURITY AND STYLE

Csaba Egyhazy

With the increasing complexity and size of software systems, defining and specifying software architectures becomes an important part of the software development process. In the past, many software architectures have been described and modeled in an ad hoc and informal manner. For the past 20 years, Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) have been proposed to facilitate the description and modeling of software architectures. This paper reviews the history of ADLs, selects five of them, and compares them based on their design focus, security modeling, and styles modeling.

AN ADAPTIVE P2P WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - FLEXIBILITY AND EXCEPTION HANDLING SUPPORT IN P2P BASED WORKFLOW

A. Aldeeb, K. Crockett and M. J. Stanton

Workflow processes are moving from long-lasting, well-defined, centralised business processes to dynamically changing, distributed business processes with many variants. Existing research concentrates on decentralisation and on adaptability but there is more to be done on adaptability in decentralised workflow systems. The aim of this research is to overcome the limitation of current workflow management systems by moving from a centralised workflow to a flexible decentralised P2P workflow system. A P2P workflow management architecture is proposed which offers flexibility, exception handling and dynamic changes to both the workflow process definition and process instance level by applying a range of AI techniques. An Exception Handling Peer (EHP) captures exceptions, from the workflow peers, characterises the exceptions and applies a recovery policy. Initial prototyping of the system has been carried out using JBoss jBPM whilst the P2P network environment of this prototype is based on Sun MicroSystem’s JXTA.

GENERATING COLLABORATIVE WORK PROCESSES

Igor Hawryszkiewycz

The paper describes ways to support collaboration in business processes. Collaborative processes are different from predefined processes in the sense that they can change dynamically as the situation emerges. Such changes can be time consuming as they require users to continually adapt the system to changing contexts. The solution proposed here to support process evolution is to provide generic work objects and use software agents to assist users to dynamically change the process by quickly adding or changing work objects. The paper outlines a way of describing work processes in terms of generic work objects. The structure of the generic work objects is based on a metamodel, which provides the fundamental concepts to define generic objects. A prototype implementation is then described.

CP4WS - A METHOD FOR DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING SYSTEMS BASED ONWEB SERVICES

Zakaria Maamar, Djamal Benslimane and Chirine Ghedira

This paper presents $\mathcal{CP}$4$\mathcal{WS}$ (standing for $\mathcal{C}$ontext and $\mathcal{P}$olicy for $\mathcal{W}$eb $\mathcal{S}$ervices), which is a context-based and policy-driven method for the design and development of Web services-based systems. Although Web services constitute an active area of research, very little has been achieved for the benefit of those who are responsible for modeling and developing such systems. To address this lack of support, we developed $\mathcal{CP}$4$\mathcal{WS}$ that consists of several steps ranging from user needs identification to Web services behavior specification. A running scenario that illustrates the use of~$\mathcal{CP}$4$\mathcal{WS}$ is also discussed in the paper

SOFTWARE USABILITY EVALUATION - AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Tereza G. Kirner and Alessandra V. Saraiva

This article presents an empirical study performed to evaluate the usability of a software applied to the agri-livestock area. The evaluation plan was prepared with basis on the Goal-Question-Metrics paradigm. The research was performed in a government department of São Paulo state, in Brazil, and the subjects were professionals that give assistance to small rural properties in the planning, execution and control of agri-livestock activities, which can be supported by software systems. Usability is concerned with the suitability of the software for its users, defined in this work through the following attributes: easiness of understanding, easiness of learning, operationability, software attractiveness and user satisfaction, and usefulness and accomplishment of the goals. The preparation and execution of the empirical study are described and the data analysis and conclusions are presented. The obtained results indicate a satisfactory level of usability for the considered software. Besides evaluating the software, the study aim to contribute to the detailing of a process, based on GQM, to perform usability evaluations. The work also represents a contribution to the software quality improvement, primarily to those systems applied to agri-livestock tasks.

EXPLORATIVE UML MODELING - COMPARING THE USABILITY OF UML TOOLS

Martin Auer, Ludwig Meyer and Stefan Biffl

UML tools are used in three main ways: (1) to exploratively sketch key system components during initial project stages; (2) to manage large software systems by keeping design and implementation synchronized; and (3) to extensively document a system after implementation. Professional tools cover (3) to some extent, and attempt to cover (2), but the vast number of languages, frameworks and deployment procedures makes those tasks all but impossible. By aiming at these two goals, tools must enforce formal UML language constructs more rigorously and thus become more complicated. They can become unsuitable for (1). This paper looks at explorative modeling with the leading UML tool Rational Rose and the open-source sketching tool UMLet. We define usability measures, assess both tools’ performance for common UML design tasks, and comment on the consequences for the application of UML tools.

A REFERENCE MODEL FOR ENTERPRISE SECURITY - HIGH ASSURANCE ENTERPRISE SECURITY

David W. Enström, D’Arcy Walsh and Siavosh Hossendoust

This paper describes a reference architecture, in UML, for enterprise IT security. It defines a PIM level enterprise security model, but more importantly provides a cohesive structure for the definition and implementation of security services. The complete framework is described, but with a focus on subjects, and protected objects and how access is controlled. Multiple layers of security are defined, building upon the “defence in depth” concept, augmented with “domain” and “zone” concepts and associated protections. The dynamic use of roles is described, a concept that along with user self–service provides a practical approach for the management and use of roles for access control. This model may also be used as a reference architecture for the definition and integration of a set of security services that permit multiple vendor implementations to work together, and to establish the level of compliance of specific systems.

AN ONTOLOGY SUPPORTING THE DAILY PRACTICE REQUIREMENTS OF RADIOLOGISTS-SENOLOGISTS WITH THE STANDARD BI-RADS

Souad Demigha

This paper presents concepts and relationships allowing the development of an ontology that supports the daily practice requirements of radiologists-senologists with the standard BI-RADS (Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System). This ontology aims at describing the radiologic-senologic knowledge shared by the community of technicians, practitioners, gynecologists, radiologists, surgeons and anatomo-pathologists. It represents a unifying scope for reducing and eliminating ambiguities as well as conceptual and terminological disarrays. It also ensures the understanding of the concerned community. It allows communication and dialogue between members of the scientific community even though they are working in different fields having different requirements and viewpoints. This ontology allowed us to obtain a conceptual model of the domain. Details concerning the development of the ontology and the generalization of the conceptual scheme that leads to the design of the conceptual model are described.

MODELLING OF MESSAGE SECURITY CONCERNS WITH UML

Farid Mehr and Ulf Schreier

Service oriented computing is increasingly accepted as a cross-disciplinary paradigm to integrate distributed application functionality through service interfaces. Integration through services as entry points for inter-organisational collaboration can be achieved by exchanging data in messages. In this architectural style, the security of sensitive exchanged data is essential. Security needs to be carefully considered during the entire life-cycle (Devanbu, 2000). Unfortunately, current UML-based modelling approaches do not support the adequate integration of message security concerns. In this paper, we investigate various integration options with UML systematically. The evaluation encompasses most of the options that are proposed today in science and industry as UML profiles. We conclude that neither of those approaches is sufficient for the systematic and comprehensive treatment of message security during modelling. To this end, we propose a new approach that is based on UML and very minor extensions of OCL.

AN EVALUATION OF CASE HANDLING SYSTEMS FOR PRODUCT BASED WORKFLOW DESIGN

Irene Vanderfeesten, Hajo A. Reijers and Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Case handling systems offer a solution to the lack of flexibility and adaptability in workflow management systems. Because they are data driven they potentially provide good support for Product Based Workflow Design (PBWD). In this paper we investigate to which degree current case handling systems (FLOWer and Activity Manager) are able to support PBWD. This is done by elaborating the design process of a case from industry in both systems. From this evaluation we concluded that current case handling systems are not yet completely ready for supporting PBWD. Therefore, we recognize that better tool support is needed to make PBWD more suitable for practical use.

DESIGNING AN E-BASED REAL TIME QUALITY CONTROL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTED MANUFACTURING SHOPS

Iraj Mahdavi, Babak Shirazi, Maghsud Solimanpur and Shahram Ghobadi

Advanced manufacturing shops need to be developed for an enterprise to survive in the increasingly competitive global market. Statistical e-based quality control approach combines statistical quality analyses and reporting capabilities with web technology to deliver process optimization solutions. In this paper we develop a structured profile for statistical e-based quality information system to provide the capacity to access required data from distributed manufacturing shops. It helps enterprises to develop customized quality information systems, create and distribute reports via the internet, and to provide real-time display of quality profiles for processes monitoring. Statistical e-based quality profile is designed to bridge the gap between raw data and genuine quality improvement efforts by providing a powerful web-based solution for real-time quality process. A prototype information system (eQIS-DMS) has been also developed, and the results indicate that quality information system can control distributed manufacturing system to improve the efficiency.

AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH FOR BUSINESS PROCESS REDESIGN - TOWARDS AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM

Mariska Netjes, Selma Limam Mansar, Hajo A. Reijers and Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Although extensive literature on BPR is available, there is still a lack of concrete guidance on actually changing processes for the better. It is our goal to provide a redesign approach which describes and supports the steps to derive from an existing process a better performing redesign. In this paper we present an evolutionary approach towards business process redesign and explain its first three steps: 1) modelling the existing process, 2) computing process measures, and 3 evaluating condition statements to find applicable redesign “best practices”. We show the applicability of these steps using an example process and illustrate the remaining steps. Our approach has a formal basis to make it suitable for automation.

REPRESENTING AUTHOR’S INTENTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC DOCUMENTS

Kanso Hassan, Soulé-Dupuy Chantal and Tazi Said

The existing structures of documents are not ample for nowadays user’s needs in terms of search and processing. The Intentional Structure (IS) is a model that maps author’s intentions to the segments of documents. It is defined to enhance documents process in terms of goals, means and reasons. The main objective of this work is to provide a methodology of recognizing intentions of communication of scientific documents associated to segments. This article focuses on the representational aspect of the author’s intention, by providing a graphical representation of intentions.

A SEMIOTIC APPROACH FOR FLEXIBLE E-GOVERNMENT SERVICE ORIENTED SYSTEMS

Rodrigo Bonacin, M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas and Thiago Medeiros dos Santos

E-Government is a multidisciplinary field which addresses many issues ranging from the social sciences to the technological ones. One of the big challenges of the e-Government field is the underlying complexity to elicit and model requirements. In practice it is quite hard to encompass the requirements of all citizens or organizations involved in the project. To deal with this challenge we propose a flexible distributed systems approach, which allies tailoring concepts to Organisational Semiotics methods in a SOA based architecture. The proposed approach is based on two Organisational Semiotics methods: the Semantic Analysis, which delivers a stable ontology of the context, and the Norm Analysis, that can be used to specify the volatile individual and collective requirements. The paper shows how norms changes in high level interfaces can have effect on different components of the software architecture. The architecture is experimented in a proof of concept for an e-Government project.

DESIGNING AN APPROPRIATE INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY FOR DIFFERENT SITUATIONS

David Avison and Jan Pries-Heje

The number of information systems development methodologies has proliferated and practitioners and researchers alike have struggled to select a ‘one best’ approach for all applications. Several books and consultants have claimed to have found this ‘philosophers stone’, but there is no single methodology that will work for all development situations. The question then arises: ‘when to use which methodology?’ To address this question we used the design research approach to develop a radar diagram consisting of eight dimensions. Using three action research cycles, we attempt to validate our design in three projects that took place in a large administrative organization and elsewhere with groups of IT project managers.

MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN OF CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS

Boris Shishkov and Marten van Sinderen

In many cases, in order to be effective, applications need to allow sensitivity to context changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for adaptability. Being adaptable means to have the capability of capturing context, interpreting it and (based on this) reacting on it. Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications. Firstly, at the enterprise (business) modeling level, it is considered crucial that the different possible context states can be properly captured and modeled, which (in turn) correspond to certain desirable behaviors. Secondly, it must be known what are the dependencies between the two, namely between states and behaviors. And finally, business needs are to be aligned to application solutions. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by approaching the notion of context and extending from this perspective a previously reported business-software alignment approach. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be useful as an additional result concerning the alignment between business modeling and software design.

BUILDING, AND LOSING, CONSUMER TRUST IN B2C E-BUSINESS

Phil Joyce and Graham Winch

Trust is emerging as a key element of any successful offering for B2C eBusiness. This has prompted practitioners and academics to develop better models of understanding of trust in the on-line environment. Many trust models are developed either from a firm basis in traditional research disciplines or from attempts to be multi-disciplinary. However most, if not all, such models are essentially descriptive and static, while the building and losing of trust is a dynamic process. This paper brings some new insights to this dynamics process by presenting a four-element model that offers pictorial representations of how different contributing factors drive trust to be gained or lost. Hence, this approach offers practical support in strategy formation for developing and understanding consumer trust in B2C eBusiness.

RELEVANCE FEEDBACK AS AN INDICATOR TO SELECT THE BEST SEARCH ENGINE: EVALUATION ON TREC DATA

Gilles Hubert and Josiane Mothe

This paper explores information retrieval system variability and takes advantage of the fact two systems can retrieve different documents for a given query. More precisely, our approach is based on data fusion (fusion of system results) by taking into account local performances of each system. Our method considers the relevance of the very first documents retrieved by different systems and from this information selects the system that will perform the retrieval for the user. We found that this principle improves the performances of about 9%. Evaluation is based on TREC ad-hoc collections (TREC 3, 5, 6 and 7) and on participant runs. It considers the two and five best systems that participate to TREC the corresponding year.

MAKING INCOMPLETE INFORMATION VISIBLE IN WORKFLOW SYSTEMS

Georg Peters and Roger Tagg

After a bumpy start in the nineties of the last century workflow systems have recently re-gained the focus of attention. Today they are considered as a crucial part of the recently introduced middleware based ERP systems. One of the central objectives and hopes for this technology is to make companies more process-orientated and flexible to keep up with the increasing speed of change of a global economy. This requires sophisticated instruments to optimally manage workflow systems, e.g. to deal with incomplete information effectively. In this paper we investigate the potential of rough set theory to make missing or incomplete information visible in workflow systems.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING IT GOVERNANCE APPROACHES

Bruno Claudepierre and Selmin Nurcan

The Enron and Worldcom scandals showed the weaknesses of the organisations in their ability to prove the reliability of their financial information. The corporate governance and, related to our purpose, the information technology (IT) governance ensure that the enterprise strategies are properly applied. The information systems (IS) have a role of support and information processing. While IS activities are performed, information is created, updated or removed: it is advisable to set up a good IT process management and to be able to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the IS. Our study considers, and situates in a structural framework, the contributions of IT governance approaches (e.g.: CoBIT and ITIL) to an IS engineering method. The comprehension of these contributions anticipates innovating research projects whose objective is to work out an engineering method allowing us to build governable IS.

THE BUSINESS PROCESS KNOWLEDGE FRAMEWORK

Janez Hrastnik, Jorge Cardoso and Frank Kappe

Organizations today are confronted with huge problems regarding following and implementing their own business process models. On the one hand, due to a lack of planning and requirements analysis, process models are often unfeasible or difficult to execute in practice. On the other hand, process designers often ignore the importance of studying the different roles and their perspectives on a business process when constructing a process model. This leads to the deployment of process models that do not “satisfy” process stakeholders. This paper addresses those two problems and proposes a business process knowledge framework as a possible solution. Our framework for business process knowledge management integrates three elements that we consider fundamental to correctly model business processes: stakeholders’ perspectives, knowledge types and views. It is shown how the business process framework can contribute to the improvement of the process knowledge acquisition phase of process design, and how it can support process knowledge communication to stakeholders. Finally, we argue that the latest developments in the Semantic Web are an interesting solution to support the integration of information and knowledge represented within our framework.

AN INSTRUMENT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE PRACTICE

Marlies van Steenbergen, Martin van den Berg and Sjaak Brinkkemper

In this paper we introduce an architecture maturity model for the domain of enterprise architecture. The model differs from other existing models in that it departs from the standard 5-level approach. It distinguishes 18 factors, called key areas, which are relevant to developing an architectural practice. Each key area has its own maturity development path that is balanced against the maturity development paths of the other key areas. Two real-life case studies are presented to illustrate the use of the model. Usage of the model in these cases shows that the model delivers recognizable results, that the results can be traced back to the basic approach to architecture taken by the organizations investigated and that the key areas chosen bear relevance to the architectural practice of the organizations.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING BUSINESS/INFORMATION SYSTEM ALIGNMENT REQUIREMENTS

Islem Gmati and Selmin Nurcan

In order to provide a competitive advantage to the enterprise, business and information system (IS) strategies need to be aligned. Achieving strategic alignment continues to be a major concern for business executives and becomes more difficult to handle in an evolving environment. The literature provides conceptual frameworks dividing a company representation in independent and exchanging layers and aiming at the strategic alignment. In this paper, we describe ten among these works. Aiming a better understanding of the Business/IS alignment requirements, we propose an analysis framework, in which we position the studied approaches, and we bring out the most important results related to the forces and weaknesses of these approaches.

KEY-PROBLEMS AND MULTI-SCREEN VIEW: A FRAMEWORK TO PERFORM THE ALIGMENT OF MANUFACTURING IS

Virginie Goepp and François Kiefer

In today highly competitive environment, the complete alignment of information systems (IS) that is to say not only with the strategy, but also with the environment and with the uncertain evolution is crucial. For manufacturing IS these alignments take specific shapes due to the heterogeneity of facilities to be integrated and the variety of the stakeholders, which are not IS specialists. The state of the art concerning IS alignment shows that the existing frameworks mainly concern managers and do not fit to the IS manufacturing context. On the one hand, B-SCP tends to operationalize these frameworks by coupling them to requirements engineering. However, only the alignment with the strategy is tackled. On the other hand, the dialectical analysis based approach of manufacturing IS development tries to integrate multiple alignments through the “multi-screen” view tool. However, the underlying concepts of this tool remain fuzzy. Therefore, this paper addresses the formalisation of the “multi-screen” view, in order to work out a framework for analysing mechanisms of multiple alignments of manufacturing IS. To do this, the contributions of coupling dialectics and “multi-screen” view to manufacturing IS are detailed through UML class diagrams. Moreover, to better grasp these contributions, its similarities and differences with the B-SCP are outlined.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL REFERENCE MODELS FOR DATA WAREHOUSE DEVELOPMENT

Matthias Goeken and Ralf Knackstedt

In the area of Data Warehousing the importance of conceptual modelling increases as it gains the status of a critical success factor. Nevertheless the application of conceptual modelling in practice often remains un-done, due to time and cost restrictions. Reference models seem to be a suitable solution for this problem as they provide generic models which can be easily adapted to specific problems and thus decrease the model-ling outlay. This paper identifies the requirements for multidimensional modelling techniques whose ful-fillment are a prerequisite for the construction of reference models. Referring to the ME/RM, the concrete implementation of these requirements will be illustrated.

METHODOLOGY FOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS IMPLEMENTATION IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES

Matilla Magali and Chalmeta Ricardo

Performance Measurement Systems enable enterprises to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of their decisions and operations by means of a set of indicators related to the vision and strategy of the company. Nevertheless, and despite the important role these systems play in improving competitiveness, their implementation in small and medium-sized enterprises is scarce. In this paper we describe the PMS-IRIS methodology for designing and implementing performance measurement systems in small and medium-sized enterprises. The methodology embraces activities that concern the planning of the project, designing the strategy, the definition of the system of indicators, process improvement, monitoring, and the design of the computer system required to support the implementation of a performance measurement system.

A SYSTEM ON WEB-BASED CONTINUOUS SOFTWARE PROCESS ASSESSMENT (CONTINUOUS SPA)

Xian Chen, Paul Sorenson and John Willson

Software process assessments are now recognized as important quality improvement activities in the software industry. Although there are many types of assessment applications, they are all generally regarded as infrequent, expensive and disruptive for the workplace. Hence, it is advantageous to find alternative ways to the current status of software processes and monitor the implementation of improvement activities. In this paper, we focus on process capability monitoring and continuous process improvement. A web-based prototype system is developed to perform a practical study on continuous software process assessment in one process area: project management. The study results are positive and show that features such as global management, well-defined responsibility and visualization may help improve the efficiency and continuity of software process management.

A THEORETICAL MODEL TO EXPLAIN EFFECTS OF INFORMATION QUALITY AWARENESS ON DECISION MAKING

Mouzhi Ge and Markus Helfert

Making high quality decision is dependent upon the quality of the information that is used to support the decision. In most cases, decision makers are not aware of information quality issues. Decision makers frequently believe the information they use is of high quality. However often the decision relevant information is inaccurate and incomplete. With increasing intensity on decision making, information quality awareness is becoming important. In order to analyse the effects of information quality awareness has on decision making, in this paper, we propose a theoretical model to address the relationship between information quality awareness and decision quality. Our results show the effects of information quality awareness on decision making and the importance of building IQ culture in organizations.

DEVELOPING EXECUTABLE MODELS OF BUSINESS SYSTEMS

Joseph Barjis

Traditionally, business processes models are based on graphical artifacts that do not lend to model checking or simulation, e.g., any Flow Chart like representation or UML diagrams. To check whether business process models are syntactically correct, the models are either translated to other diagrams with formal semantics or the validation is carried out manually. This approach poses two issues: first, models not lending to execution (simulation) will hardly allow thorough insight into the dynamic behavior of the system under consideration; second, when manual checking for small models may not be too difficult, it is almost impossible for complex models. In this paper we investigate two research questions that result in a method allowing build executable business process models based on formal semantics of Petri net. The proposed method is theoretically based on the Transaction Concept. The two questions further studied in this paper concern graphical extension of Petri nets towards business process modeling, and developing a framework (guidelines) applying the proposed method. As a marginal contribution, this paper introduces a compact modeling approach.

A NEW APPROACH FOR WORKFLOW PROCESS DELTA ANALYSIS BASED ON SYN-NET

Xingqi Huang, Wen Zhao and Shikun Zhang

Many of today's information systems are driven by explicit process models. Creating a workflow design is a complicated process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Delta analysis aims at improving this by comparing process models obtained by process mining from event logs and predefined ones, to measure business alignment of real behaviour of an information system with the expected behaviour. Syn-net is a new workflow model based on Petri-net, with the conceptual foundation synchronizer and suggesting a three-layer perspective of workflow process. In this paper, we propose a new delta analysis approach based on the reduction rules of Syn-net, to examine the discrepancies between the discovered processes and the predefined ones.

ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS CONFIGURATION AS AN INFORMATION LOGISTICS PROCESS - A STUDY

Mats Apelkrans and Anne Håkansson

In this paper we suggest using rule-based descriptions of customer’s requirements for Enterprise Systems implementing Information Logistics. The rules are developed from the users’ requirements and inserted as schedules to the Enterprise System. The output, from testing these rules, is a list of modules and parameter setting to configure the system. By using rules, we can, at least partly, automate the configuration process for traverse the several modules and thousands parameters there are in an Enterprise System. We can select the modules and the parameters that meet the customer’s requirements. These selected modules and parameters are visually presented through a kind of Unified Modeling Language diagrams, to support the user investigation and then to configure the system either manually or automatically. Every attempt to match a customer’s requirement to the contents of the knowledge base within the Enterprise system can be thought of as an Information Logistics Process. The output from such a process must be examined by the user, which can give rise to a new call to the Information Logistics process. In other words the configuration work is done through a dialogue between the customer and the knowledge base of the Enterprise system.

USE CASE BASED REQUIREMENTS VERIFICATION - VERIFYING THE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN USE CASES AND ASSERTIONS

Stéphane S. Somé and Divya K. Nair

Use cases and operations are complementary requirements artefacts. A use case refers to operations and imposes their sequencing. Use cases templates usually include assertions such as preconditions, postconditions and invariants. Similarly operations are specified using contracts consisting in preconditions and postconditions. In this paper, we present an approach aiming at checking the consistency of each description against the other. We attempt to answer questions such as the following. Is the use case postcondition guaranteed by the operations ? Are all operations possible according to their preconditions ? We provide answers to these questions by deriving state predicates corresponding to each step in a use case, and by showing the satisfaction of assertions according to these predicates.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORK ENTERPRISES

Sara Alves da Silva, Patrícia Macedo and Pedro Antunes

Enterprises are nowadays faced with increasing levels of flexibility and customer-orientation. As enterprises react to this challenge, they intensify their engagement in collaborative networks. Recent studies have shown that these networks must share goals, have some level of mutual trust, and agree with some practices and values. Value systems are considered as the ordering and prioritization of the ethical and ideological values held by collaborative networks. Conciliating different values and priorities may depend on a mediation process. From an information systems point of view, the mediation process is highly complex because of the informal and tacit nature of values systems. In this paper we propose using storytelling, an old technique used to reconstruct past events, to support conflict resolution. The paper presents an analysis of conflict resolution in collaborative network enterprises supported by the storytelling technique.

ON GROUPING OF ACTIVITIES INSTANCES IN WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Dat C. Ma, Joe Y.-C. Lin and Maria E. Orlowska

Current research in the flexibility of workflow management systems covers many aspects of this technology. The focus of this paper is primarily on the practical capabilities of workflow management systems in handling preferred work practice while dealing with many short duration activities. It is motivated by the requirement of merging or grouping work items by one performer to achieve work performance enhancements by avoiding unnecessary communication with the system but still executing the required activities. The paper proposes a new function to group activity instances for a given process, investigates the impact, benefits, and potential implementation of such of extended functionality.

EML:A TREE OVERLAY-BASED VISUAL LANGUAGE FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MODELLING

Lei Li, John Hosking and John Grundy

Visual business process modelling can fulfil an important role to enable high-level specification of system interactions, improving system integration and supporting performance analysis. Existing modelling approaches typically use a workflow based method. Cobweb and labyrinth problems appear quickly when this type of notation is used to model a complex enterprise system with users having to deal with either very complex diagrams or many cross-diagram implicit relationships. In contrast, a tree based presentation can be very efficient for handling visual relationships. We present an overview of EML (Enterprise Modelling Language), a novel tree overlay-based visual specification for enterprise process modelling and its support tool. The highlight is its flexibility in modelling business processes using different layers. A service-oriented tree structure represents the system functional architecture. Business process modelling is constructed as an overlay on top of this service tree. By using a multi-layer structure, an enterprise system can be modelled with a variety of early aspects to satisfy design requirements. An Eclipse based software tool, MaramaEML has been developed to edit EML diagrams integrated with existing modelling languages such as BPMN and supports automatic generation of BPEL code.

MODELLING DATA TRANSFORMATION PROCESSES USING HIGH-LEVEL PETRI NETS

Li Peng

Data heterogeneity is one of the key problems in integrating multiple data sources, data warehousing, legacy data migration, etc. For integrating databases or information systems, the data need to be transformed from a source representation into a target representation. The foundation for developing efficient data transformation tools and automating data transformation processes is a data transformation process model. In this paper, I propose a CPN based data transformation process model. This model provides rich constructs to represent various data structures, transformation functions and rules; allows parallelization, composition and decomposition of data transformations. Furthermore, as the extension of the model, the CPNs are combined with high-order Petri nets. The components of the CPNs can be reused. This improves the efficiency of data transformations.

CODE INSPECTION - A REVIEW

Robson Ytallo Silva de Oliveira, Paula Gonçalves Ferreira, Alexandre Alvaro, Eduardo Santana de Almeida and Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira

The software inspection process is generally considered a software engineering best practice. For a long time, the code inspection had the goals of finding and fixing defects as soon as possible. For this reason, code inspection technique is suggested for use in a software reuse process in order to improve the quality of the assets developed and reused. Thus, the code become easier to understand and changeable, and improving the maintainability of the code, minimizing redundancies and improving language proficiency, safety and portability. In this way, looking for analyzing this area, this paper presents a survey of code inspection research.

SERVICE ORIENTED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT - IN ASSOCIATION WITH BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGRATION

Vikas S. Shah

Organization’s distributed and evolving enterprises demands an integrated approach providing consolidated control and secure information sharing among users and applications in support of business processes. Businesses faced considerable challenges due to unawareness of setting an integration infrastructure with specific business context. Recent industry trend is inclined to investigate rapid and cost effective BPI platform with indisputable business benefits in terms of Real-Time Enterprise Content Management (RT-ECM). RT-ECM ensures consistency among users and infrastructure. The perception also provides secure access to necessary and valid content in real-time. Modern RT-ECM architectures are focused to assist content sharing across multiple resources as well as enterprise applications. SOA, a distributed computing environment, is poised at the intersection of business and technology. SOA enables enterprises to seamlessly and rapidly adapting altering environment. Service-Oriented RT-ECM approach offers integration specific, flexible, and featured BPI platform. The contribution of this paper is an RT-ECM architecture framework illustrating most prominent technical challenges during establishment of business process perceptive integration and time sensitive content flow management. Real-time content management engines, business process engines, and service provisioning are at the centre of presented framework. Initiative behind the research effort is to capture and estimate generic aspects of BPI such that organizations may exclusively focus on unique business characteristic. Eventually, the paper discusses advantages and consequences of service oriented RT-ECM besides outstanding issues for further research.

A MODELING LANGUAGE FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING EDUCATIONAL UNITS - SUPPORTING THE COORDINATION OF COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITIES

Manuel Caeiro-Rodríguez

This paper introduces a modeling language to support the computational modeling of collaborative learning educational units. The languages supporting the computational modeling educational units are named as Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs). EMLs have been proposed to facilitate the development of complex and large e-learning applications. The introduced language is proposed as an EML specially oriented towards collaborative learning. A main goal is to enable the modeling of the variety of ways in which human interaction can be supported (e.g. well-structured and ill-structured, synchronous and asynchronous, strict-coordination and free-collaboration). To do it, a separation of concerns approach is followed. The proposal, named as Perspective-oriented EML (PoEML), involves several parts (named as perspectives) where all the modeling issues are arranged and separated. Each perspective focuses on a certain concern enabling to center the attention and efforts on it while abstracting from the concerns of other perspectives. The paper introduces the ideas and constructs of the main PoEML perspectives towards the modeling of the variety of forms for collaboration support.

GRID WORKFLOWSCHEDULING WITH TEMPORAL DECOMPOSITION

Fei Long and Hung Keng Pung

Grid workflow scheduling is very important system function issue in current Grid Systems, as an NP hard problem. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling method-- ``temporal decomposition'' -- which divides a whole grid workflow into some sub-workflows. By dividing a large problem~(workflow) into some smaller problems~(sub-workflows), the ``temporal decomposition'' achieves much lower computation complexity. Another motivation for the design of the idea behind ``temporal decomposition'' is at the availability of the dynamic grid resources which is always dynamically varying with time. Furthermore, we propose an efficient scheduling algorithm for scheduling sub-workflows. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme is more efficient in comparison with an well known existing grid workflow scheduling method.

VISUALISATION AND ANALYSIS OF RELATIONNAL DATA BY CONSIDERING TEMPORAL DIMENSION

Eloïse Loubier and Bernard Dousset

Visualization based on graph drawing allows the identification, the evaluation of passed and present structures between actors and concepts. It also allows the deduction of future ones. VisuGraph is developed in order to offer to the users the visualization and the interactive classification of relational data. We propose to complete this prototype with a morphing algotihm which animates with fluidity the representation between different time periods, emphasizing major elements and significant tendencies.

META MODEL FOR TRACING IMPACT OF CONTEXT INFORMATION EVOLUTION IN WEB-BASED WORKFLOWS

Jeewani Anupama Ginige and Athula Ginige

Environment that shapes a business process consists of various regulations, policies, guidelines, goals, values, etc., which are both external and internal to the organisation. In today’s global and competitive business world, constituents of this process environment changes rapidly. This Context Information (CI) evolution forces organisational processes to change. When processes are supported through web-based workflows, CI evolutions are required to be reflected in already automated systems, via process models. Current process modelling techniques are focused towards capturing implementation aspects only. As a result these models fail to encapsulate CI that associates process elements to its environment. This creates inconsistencies and errors when trying to change the implemented system to reflect high-level CI changes. To address this problem, we propose a model which allows tracing high-level CI changes down to the implementation level artefacts. Such a model needs to map the complex correlation between context information (CIs), all process elements (object, participants, actions and process flow rules), various web-based workflow artefacts (data repository, function code and UIs) to a types of changes (modify, add and delete). This holistic view of the proposed model makes this research standout among other research work in process evolution area.

AN ESTIMATION OF ATTACK SURFACE TO EVALUATE NETWORK (IN)SECURITY

Andrea Atzeni and Antonio Lioy

A measurement system is a natural requirement for every scientific work, otherwise extremely subjective and incomparable results may be claimed. In spite of this, measurement methods dealing with security are unusual in practice, leaving security assessment in the hands of security experts' judgment, with poor formal argumentations on the security level of the underlying system, and with the consequent difficulty to distinguish among security alternatives or justify possible security changes or improvements. Since network security is an aggregate concept, composed by many different aspects, in this work we focus on a limited but important set of security indicators, suitable to estimate the attack surface a system exposes, thus introducing a simple and objective metric for a fast evaluation of an important security facet.

OPTING FOR INNOVATION IN MOBILE APPLICATIONS

Jens H. Hosbond, Peter A. Nielsen and Ivan Aaen

In this paper we are concerned with innovation in the development of mobile applications. In particular, we address how we may come to think systematically about innovative aspects of mobile applications. We suggest that there is not enough support for this in the mobile systems literature and we hence suggest a framework that supports the thinking about the possible innovative features of a mobile application in a systemic and systematic way. The framework is inspired by the theory on scenario planning. In this framework we see mobile social arrangements of node, dyad, and group as fundamental units of analysis. We apply the framework to a case where the mobile users are truck drivers in a long-distance haulage business. Our use of the framework illustrates how we can arrive at a consistent and systemic view of a possible scenario for innovative mobile applications. We continue with a discussion of to what extent and in which ways the framework gives rise to innovative thinking by relating to a common theory of types of innovation and innovation processes.

REDUCING REQUIREMENTS TO EIS SPECIFICATIONS GAP USING RM-ODP ENTERPRISE VIEWPOINT

Christophe Addinquy and Bruno Traverson

As a reference model for distributed systems, RM-ODP (Open Distributed Processing) standard prescribes architectural viewpoint specifications, but does not address traceability with requirement expression. In this article, we propose a three-layer approach to requirements modeling, from the system high level goals, to the detailed business rules and non-functional requirements. This approach is built on top of well-recognized requirements process and connects to key elements of RM-ODP viewpoints.

A FRAMEWORK FOR QUALITY EVALUATION IN DATA INTEGRATION SYSTEMS

J. Akoka, L. Berti-Équille, O. Boucelma, M. Bouzeghoub, I. Comyn-Wattiau, M. Cosquer, V. Goasdoué-Thion, Z. Kedad, S. Nugier, V. Peralta and S. Sisaid-Cherfi

Ensuring and maximizing the quality and integrity of information is a crucial process for today enterprise information systems. It requires a clear understanding of the interdependencies between the dimensions characterizing quality of data (QoD), quality of conceptual data model (QoM) of the database, keystone of the EIS, and quality of data management and integration processes (QoP). The improvement of one quality dimension (such as data accuracy or model expressiveness) may have negative consequences on other quality dimensions (e.g., freshness or completeness of data). In this paper we briefly present a framework, called QUADRIS, relevant for adopting a quality improvement strategy on one or many dimensions of QoD or QoM with considering the collateral effects on the other interdependent quality dimensions. We also present the scenarios of our ongoing validations on a CRM EIS.

BUSINESS PROCESS VALIDATION: TESTING BEFORE DESIGNING

Cornelis G.F. [Kees] Ampt

Rather than waiting with testing until (nearly) the end of software project, and subsequent need to redesign major parts, the Business Process Validation (BPV) method aims at using systematic testing from the start of a project in the requirements phase, up to the final delivery. The method embraces three phases: a Transformation Model, a Service Model, and an IT/AO Model. A prototype of a software tool to automate the construction of classification trees, being the core of the Service Model – based on the initial wishes as laid down in the Transformation Model – has been developed as part of a Masters Thesis project. First real life tests of the prototype resulted for small projects in no significant time reduction. However for larger ones a time reduction of 50% is achieved, compared to development of the classification trees by hand, while for all projects several automated consistency checks can be performed.

EXTENDING THE EPC AND THE BPMN WITH BUSINESS PROCESS GOALS AND PERFORMANCE MEASURES

Birgit Korherr and Beate List

The Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC) and the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) are designed for modelling business processes, but do not yet include any means for modelling process goals and their measures, and they do not have a published metamodel. We derive a metamodel for both languages, and extend the EPC and the BPMN with process goals and performance measures to make them conceptually visible. The extensions based on the metamodels are tested with example business processes.

EXTENDING BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING TOOLS WITH WORKFLOW PATTERN REUSE

Lucinéia Heloisa Thom, Jean Michel Lau, Cirano Iochpe and Jan Mendling

For its reuse advantages, workflow patterns (e.g., control flow patterns, resource patterns, activity patterns) are increasingly attracting the interest of both researchers and vendors. However, actual workflow modeling tools do not provide functionalities that enable users to define, query, and reuse workflow patterns properly. In this paper we gather a set of requirements for process modeling to aim to support pattern reuse in a direct way. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of these requirements we present a respective implementation project that extends the process modeling tool EPC Tools with pattern reuse functionality.

A CHANGE STRATEGY FOR ORGANISATIONAL SECURITY: THE ROLE OF CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

Sue Foster, Kate Lazarenko, Paul Hawking and Andrew Stein

The focus for any organization should be in securing the critical components that are important to business survival This can be accomplished by adopting technical and non technical approaches. The non technical approaches however tend to be more problematic and include changing the way employees perceive enterprise security. People issues have always posed problems when implementing new systems, and an enterprise security strategy is no exception. The identification and adoption of critical success factors to support a sound security strategy could provide a successful security outcome. In this paper a security framework is developed from the literature and each part of the framework provides the opportunity to identify critical success factors. It is contended that by using this framework organizations are able to build a strong security base for their enterprise.

BUSINESS PROCESS PRIORISATION WITH MULTICRITERIA METHODS: CASE OF BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING

Elena Kornyshova and Camille Salinesi

Business process (BP) engineering is used nowadays in many methods, techniques and tools. In domains such as change management, enterprise architecture, security analysis, or performance analysis one particular concern is the identification of key BPs, i.e. the BPs that should be dealt primarily. In practice, the number of BPs is often very large and it justifies the creation of a priorisation mechanism. However, the number of approaches available to prioritise BPs specifically is very limited. This paper presents a comparison of multicriteria (MC) decision-making methods, and an approach to guide the selection and application of the MC method found as the most appropriate for BP priorisation. The approach is illustrated with the case of selecting and applying a BP priorisation in the view of BP reengineering.

A FLEXIBLE PERSPECTIVE FOR SOFWARE PROCESSES - SUPPORTING FLEXIBILITY IN THE SOFTWARE PROCESS ENGINEERING METAMODEL

Ricardo Martinho, Dulce Domingos and João Varajão

The lack of flexibility in software process modeling is an important drawback pointed out as the main cause for the low adoption of Process-centered Software Engineering Environments (PSEEs). The Object Management Group (OMG) has been working on the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) in order to provide a uniform object-oriented metamodel for building software process models, like the Rational Unified Process (RUP). Nevertheless, the SPEM neither takes into account flexibility aspects nor provides a flexibility metamodel for derived software process models. PSEEs that comply with the SPEM specification cannot benefit from a uniform flexibility metamodel, which is essential to build process models that capture complex software development processes, and also to manage the evolution of their models and related instances. This paper proposes a flexibility metamodel for building flexible SPEM-based software process models. This metamodel has its foundations on several flexibility aspects previously identified and classified. SPEM compliant PSEEs that implement the proposed flexibility metamodel will provide the ability to build flexible software process models, and to associate distinct flexible mechanisms to their corresponding components.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN WEB SERVICE AND GRID SERVICE DEVELOPMENTS IN A MDA FRAMEWORK

Marcos López Sanz, Valeria de Castro, Esperanza Marcos and José Luís Bosque

The application of the MDA approach to the development of service-oriented systems facilitates the system migration over different platforms. The specific features of each platform are reflected in the PSM level of MDA. In this paper a comparison between the development of systems based on Web services and the development of systems based on Grid services is presented. The comparative study is carried out through a case study implemented on both a standard Web Service platform and a Grid platform based on the Globus Toolkit 4 middleware. After the study we conclude that a subdivision of the MDA’s PSM level in two layers is needed: an upper layer with the characteristics shared by any service-based platform (a WSDL model and a model of the service code) and a lower layer with all the elements required to deploy the services successfully over the concrete execution platform.

CONVERTING RELATIONAL DATABASE INTO OWL ONTOLOGY BY MULTI-WAY SEMANTICS EXTRACTION

Sohee Jang, Insuk Park, Hoyun Cho And Soon Joo Hyun

Semantic Web provides means to share well-defined meaning of terms with semantically annotated information. In the current Web, most of the Web applications generate Web contents dynamically at the time of user request from underlying relational databases. To represent the relational data to the Semantic Web environment, the relational data should be transformed into the ontology form. In this paper, we propose a Semantic Web technique to convert relational database into ontology in OWL using multi-way semantics extraction technique. Extracted from E/R modeling components, schema descriptions and stored data, the generated ontology will provide application developers with rich semantics so as to quickly build a knowledge base for advanced Semantic Web services. Extracting the semantic information out of the traditional databases will provide enterprises with more opportunities for many value-added services.

BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL TRANSFORMATION ISSUES - THE TOP 7 ADVERSARIES ENCOUNTERED AT DEFINING MODEL TRANSFORMATIONS

Marion Murzek and Gerhard Kramler

Not least due to the widespread use of meta modeling concepts, model transformation techniques have reached a certain level of maturity (Czarnecki and Helsen, 2006). Nevertheless, defining transformations in some application areas in our case business process modeling is still a challenge because current transformation languages provide general solutions but do not support issues specific to a distinct area. We aim at providing generic solutions for model transformation problems distinct to the area of horizontal business process model transformations. As a first step in this endeavor, this work reports on the most pressing problems encountered at defining business process model transformations.

ONTOLOGY CONSTRUCTION IN PRACTICE - EXPERIENCES AND RECOMMENDATIONS FROM INDUSTRIAL CASES

Kurt Sandkuhl, Annika Öhgren, Alexander Smrinov, Nikolay Shilov and Alexey Kashevnik

Significant progress in ontology engineering during the last decade resulted in a growing interest in using ontologies for industrial applications. Based on case studies from different industrial domains, this paper presents experiences from ontology development and gives recommendations for industrial ontology construction projects. The recommendations include (1) using defined roles in a matrix project organisation, (2) perspectives on generalisation/specialisation strategy and ontology lifecycle phases, and (3) aspects of user participation in ontology construction

FUTURE COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS BETWEEN PEER-TO-PEER AND MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES

Markus Heberling, Robert Hinn, Thomas Bopp and Thorsten Hampel

Current CSCW architectures rely on a central server and offer only limited scalability. With the emergence of distributed hash tables as a comprehensive peer-to-peer infrastructure a wealth of new applications can be developed. In this paper we propose a new DHT-based CSCW architecture using existing systems and technologies. The resulting CSCW overlay network offers both robustness against network failures and scalability to support large numbers of users simultaneously.

ASPECT-ORIENTED ANALYSIS APPLIED TO THE SPACE DOMAIN

André Marques, Ricardo Raminhos, Ricardo Ferreira, Rita Ribeiro, Sérgio Agostinho, João Araújo and Ana Moreira

This paper presents an aspect metadata approach, which has been developed in the scope of the “Aspect Specification for the Space Domain” project, of the European Space Agency (ESA). This approach is based on XML and XML Schema technologies, enabling a rigorous knowledge representation. The proposed approach has been applied to a real complex system, the “Space Environment Support System for Telecom/Navigation Missions”, enabling a comparison and evaluation between the proposed approach and the “traditional” requirements analysis methods used during the development of the original version of the system. This paper presents a full description of both the identified metadata concepts and their relationships. The metadata concepts and associated instances have been stored in a Metadata Repository that provides simple navigation facilities between concepts. The Metadata Repository also enables the automatic generation of documentation.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE VALID TIME FOR SPATIO-TEMPORAL DATABASES

Jugurta Lisboa Filho, Gustavo Breder Sampaio, Evaldo de Oliveira da Silva and Alexandre Gazola

Three different types of time are identified in the literature on Temporal Database Management Systems: valid time, transaction time and existence time. This paper describes the design of the valid time for Spatial-Temporal Databases in Geographic Information Systems, based on the UML-GeoFrame conceptual data model. It is also presented two translation rules of the valid time from the conceptual to logical level, implemented for the TerraLib Spatial Components Library.

DYNAMIC ARCHITECTURE BASED EVOLUTION OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Sorana Cîmpan, Herve Verjus and Ilham Alloui

Enterprise Information Systems have to co-evolve with the enterprise they support. Their evolution is the one of an important software system. Software evolution should be addressed at all developpement phases in order to notably reduce costs (Lehman, 1996). The issue of software systems evolution has been addressed mainly at the code level. In this paper we present how evolution of enterprise information systems can take place at higher abstraction levels, when using an architecture-centred development process. The evolutions addressed are dynamic, i.e. they take place at runtime and concern both planned and unplanned evolutions of the enterprise information system

CONCEPTS OF MODEL DRIVEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN PRACTICE - GENERIC MODEL REPRESENTATION AND DSL INTERPRETATION

Christian Erfurth, Wilhelm Rossak, Christian Schachtzabel, Detlef Hornbostel and Steffen Skatulla

This paper discusses the possibilities to realize the constructs of a domain specific model (DSL) on the concrete development and runtime platform Ibykus AP. Here the software engineering takes advantage of a combination of generative techniques and stable so-called DSL interpreters. These techniques to implement model driven software development (MDSD) concepts can improve the flexibility, the quality and the performance of the development of large application systems. Presenting the DSL interpreter approach the underlying techniques of generic repository structures to hold the software model as well as runtime configuration information are discussed. The importance of an associated clear and well structured interface and tuning alternatives for the repository are pointed out. Finally the paper concludes with an outlook to future research work.

MODELING OF A DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP COMMUNITY TO FACILITATE THE CONSULTATIVE AND DELIBERATIVE PROCESS IN THE WEB

Cristiano Maciel and Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia

Electronic democracy should facilitate the debate and participation of citizens as well as electronic voting in governmental issues. Governmental applications available in the Web have not evolved significantly toward real participation of citizens. The implementation of an e-democracy system can benefit from incorporating features from distinct information channels, especially television. This paper discusses an Interactive Government-Citizen Model that allows and stimulates the decision-making process between government and citizens, facilitating citizen participation through a virtual community and through integrated management of information in the Web environment. In this Model we identify the phases of an advisory and deliberative process as carried out through a Democratic Citizenship Community, the debate of which is structured in a Government-Citizen Interaction Language known as DemIL. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the processes in a community is therefore discussed, ultimately seeking to conceive an environment capable of promoting a high degree of deliberative participation.

TOWARDS THE DYNAMIC ADAPTABILITY OF SOA

Mehdi Ben Hmida, Céline Boutrous Saab, Serge Haddad, Valérie Monfort and Ricardo Tomaz Ferraz

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) aim to give methodological and technical answers to achieve interoperabilty and loose coupling between heterogeneous Information Systems (IS). Currently, Web Services are the fitted technical solution to implement such architectures. However, both Web Services providers and clients are faced to some important difficulties to dynamically change their behaviours. From one side, Web Services providers have no mean to dynamically adapt an existing Web Service to business requirements changes. From the other side, Web Services clients have no way to dynamically adapt themselves to the service changing in order to avoid execution failures. In this paper, we show how we achieve a dynamic adaptable SOA by introducing the Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm and Process Algebra (PA). We propose a Process Algebra formalism to specify a change-prone BPEL process (base service and aspect services) and demonstrate how to generate a client which dynamically adapt its behaviour to the service changes. We illustrate our approach through a concrete case study and present the Aspect Service Weaver (ASW) tool which implements our concepts.

INFORMATION SYSTEM REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS AND SPECIFICATION IN FOREST MANAGEMENT PLANNING PROCESS

Salvis Dagis

Forests cover up to 45% of the territory of Latvia and forestry is the most significant export sector in Latvia. In total forestry provides up to 14% of Gross Domestic Product. In order to manage the forests economically efficiently it is necessary to plan the management activities several periods in advance. The forecasting of tree growth takes an important place within the forest management planning process. In order to develop IT solution for the process of forest management planning, it is necessary to perform the analysis of forestry sector, as a result of which there are precedent models and also corresponding static structure developed. For the development of precedent models and static structure the Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification and notation is used.

GIS QUALITY MODEL - A METRIC APPROACH TO QUALITY MODELS

Willington Libardo Siabato Vaca and Adriana P. Rangel Sotter

In the past few years organizations and companies have developed new standards those have demonstrated highly efficacious both in the public sector and the private sector as a product of their work. The most important of them is the Quality Management System regulated by the standard ISO 9001. This standard evidences how its implementation represents sensitive improvements of the production system, optimizing the product and increasing his quality for the companies that decide to implement it. This phenomenon is not isolated within software engineering's frame. Many works have been published, like Boehm [BOEHM'78, BOEHM'76, BOEHM'73] and McCall [MCCALL'77], has given rise to standards among which the ISO/IEC 9126 is highlighted. Regarding this fact, it has been possible to create different solutions for multiple problems related with the Information Technologies. Nowadays, the Geographic Information Systems' projects managers does not have a tool for neither to select the software to implement their projects nor to support this selection in technical criteria. The question is which one of the commercial software is appropriate to my project? Which one of the commercial software follows the requests of the project out? Which one of the commercial software supports the needs of the users? This article presents a quality model to support this kind of decisions. This way, projects managers can take their decisions based on a set of metrics product of the deep evaluation of characteristics, sub-characteristics and attributes of the software. These elements allow that user knows which one of the software package is the best through a GIS Quality Indicator, generated from model. Eventually this indicator allows GIS’ projects managers to take decisions supported in a well constructed technical criterion and model based and supported in international standards related with product quality in software engineering such as ISO/IEC 9126-1.

BORM POINTS – NEW CONCEPT PROPOSAL OF COMPLEXITY ESTIMATION METHOD

Zdeněk Struska and Vojtěch Merunka

This paper contains an introduction of new method BORM points from the area of complexity estimation in object environment. In the first part of the paper there is a BORM description (Business and Object Relation Modelling). In the second part there is a world-wide premiere of BORM points' concept. It is the suggestion of estimation method using for the BORM environment. At the end of the article there is list of next steps to finish the methods and promote it to the wide scientific communities.

TOWARDS ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Stamatis Karnouskos and Patrik Spiess

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have become a hot issue in research, and significant progress has been achieved in the past few years. Recently, the topic has gained lot of momentum and has become increasingly attractive for industry paving the way for new applications of sensor networks which go well beyond tradi-tional sensor applications. Sensor Networks is seen as one of the most promising technologies that will bridge the physical and virtual worlds enabling them to interact. Expectations go beyond the research vi-sions, towards deployment in real-world applications that would empower business processes and future business cases. In this paper we look at WSNs from the business software perspective, including business model, service-oriented architecture, integration with enterprise software systems as well as benefits and les-sons learned. As an example use-case we demonstrate the use of WSNs for hazardous goods management in the chemical industry. Finally, based on our experiences we depict some directions that can be followed in order to pave the road to real business applications for WSNs.

EVENT-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEM MODELS

Lars Bækgaard

Business events play important roles in information systems and their environments. We introduce and discuss a general notion of business events that cover a wide range of more specialized event concepts. We use the general event concept to analyze a set of modeling langauges that support the modeling of information about events and a set of modeling languages that support the modeling of event-based activities. Finally, we outline a set of general requirements that a modeling language must satisfy in order to support the modeling of events in a conceptually rich manner.

OPERATIONALIZING THEORY - MOVING FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION IN A SME

Lars-Olof Johansson, Björn Cronquist and Harald Kjellin

This paper presents a method for operationalizing theory. The method has its basis in the empirical findings arising from collaboration between the researchers and a research partner, Flower Systems Ltd. The research partner is a software company characterized as a SME. The presented method is exemplified with theories from learning organizations, usability, and visualization – which are all connected to the problem articulated by our partner. The method is an iterative process characterized by a systemic and holistic long-term view that incorporates feedback. The method takes as its point of departure the problematic area described by Flower Systems ltd; the researchers both intervene and interpret in this problematic area, so the method is both described and verified.. The paper combines the case study and action research methods in what is sometimes referred to as a “hybrid” method, the action case method. The view of innovation presented in this paper is that innovation entails supporting change processes in order to create purposeful and focused change.. The underlying research question has been: How usable is our method for operationalizing theory in solving the problem of adapting to changes in an SME?

ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING AND HEIDEGGER’S ONTOLOGY - DOES PHILOSOPHY MATTER FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS DESIGN?

Angela Lacerda Nobre

Organisational Learning has built-in an intrinsic tension between the formal, formalised and procedural aspects of management and the flexible, innovative and informal processes that sustain and nurture each organisations’ own dynamism and action capacity. The present article revises certain key influences and main theoretical perspectives that are constitutive of the organisational learning field of study. These theories and influences, in turn, are then related to certain schools of thought, world-views, paradigms and epistemic shifts that help to highlight the complexity as well as the relevance of this area of study.

R-TOOL: A SUPPORTING TOOL FOR A QUALITY ORIENTED REUSE STRATEGY

Maryoly Ortega, Anna Grimán, María Pérez and Luis Eduardo Mendoza

The quality of reusable elements must be rigorously monitored and guaranteed before they can be reused, this is known as Certification. High levels of certification of these elements generate trust and stimulate reuse. In this paper we describe the development of a tool (Beta version) based on quality oriented reuse strategies. To this end, we take as starting point an ontology that rigorously correlates the essential concepts of systematic reuse to quality. This ontology reinforces the proposed strategy, which in turn is supported by the tool. The methodology used is based upon Methodological Systemic Framework for Information Systems Research proposed by Pérez et al. (2004). In addition, for the development of the tool, we used the iterative incremental development process Rational Unified Process (RUP.) We took into account the inception and elaboration phases, and developed an iteration of the construction phase. As a result of the development process we built a tool which supports the main activities of the proposed strategy. These activities are Certify Domain Models, Requirement Specifications, Architectural Designs and Code, through checklists, allowing to store, classify, search and recovery the reusable elements and its properties.

EXTRACTION OF SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS STARTING FROM SIMILARITY MEASUREMENTS

Mohamed Frikha, Mohamed Mhiri and Faiez Gargouri

Current applications’ modelling becomes increasingly complex. Indeed, it requires a hard work to study the particular domain in order to determine its main concepts and its relationships. The designers can have, in certain case many ambiguities concerning the comprehension of the domain to be modelled and the concepts to be used. In order to solve these ambiguities, we used an ontology like a reference to give more semantics to conceptual schemas. For that, we used an approach for an ontology building to represent the pertinent concepts for a domain. In this paper, we propose a set of allowing determining the resemblance between the concepts of a conceptual schema and the ontology. Then, we propose an algorithm using these similarity measurements to determine the semantic relationships.

SYNCHRONIZATION ISSUES IN UML MODELS

Marco Costa and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva

Information systems have been changing regarding not only technologies but also notations and methodologies till now. As the complexity of the implemented systems is growing steadily, the need for ways of systematically develop applications increase. A multitude of tools appear to help in the development process. Tools are supporting and generating a large number of artefacts but development teams still have a difficult task: how to manage the coherence of that information in a context of highly dinamic changes. We discuss some important questions regarding synchronization, not only traceability, namely how to develop a fully customizable and extensible application in this field, wich will instantiate a new class of applications.

BPEL PATTERNS FOR IMPLEMENTING VARIATIONS IN SOA APPLICATIONS

Samia Oussena, Dan Sparks and Balbir Barn

The main purpose of the COVARM research project is to define a candidate reference model utilizing a framework of web services to support a key UK Higher Education business process. Any given business domain may offer a level of complexity such that process activities, terminology (the ontology) and business rules may vary between organizations belonging to same domain. A reference model to support a domain requires a significant level of adaptability and customization in order to fully address the domain. Our approach to reference modelling was to define a generic (or canonical) business process for the domain, recognising that this canonical process needed to be adapted to support the “variability” required by different users of the domain. While a generic process can and has been built as part of the reference model, the flexibility (or variability) is afforded by the implementation strategy for the canonical model / generic process. We have implemented the following variations: activity ordering, cross-site terminology harmonization, and specific business rules to address the variability requirements. This paper presents our experience with explicitly managing the variability within the implementation technology. With the use of BPEL patterns, we describe how the management of these variations can be dealt with in an SOA application implementation.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGICAL STANDARDIZATION OF BUSINESS PROCESS CONTENT

Maya Lincoln, Reuven Karni and Avi Wasser

One of the main challenges currently facing the world of enterprise information technology in general and ERP/SCM/CRM systems in particular, is visibility into the business of organizations. The prevalent approach utilizes conceptual business process modelling as the foundation for creating and managing this visibility, aiming to connect business activity and its supporting information technology. While the phenomena of devising structural execution frameworks is widespread in academia, there have been few attempts to develop theory, empirical studies and supporting methods for the structured generation and customization of complete business process models that also include an actual content layer. These models move beyond structural data Modelling in the sense that they add semantics and relationships of actual business data. The research suggests an framework and set of methods for the organization and structured construction of business process content.

PROCESS USE CASES: USE CASES IDENTIFICATION

Pedro Valente and Paulo N. M. Sampaio

The identification of use cases is one key issue in the development of interactive information systems. User participation in the development life cycle can be seen as critical to achieve usable systems and has proven its efficacy in the improvement of systems appropriateness. Indeed, the involvement of users in the requirements definition can add a signification improvement in both consecutive/interleaved tasks of: (i) understanding and specifying the context of use, and, (ii) specifying the user and organizational requirements as defined in Human-Centered Design (HCD) (ISO, 1999). Existing solutions provide a way to identify business processes and/or use cases in order to achieve system definition, but they don’t do it in an agile and structured way that helps to efficiently bridge Business Process Management and Software Engineering. Process Use Cases is a methodology, defined in the Goals software construction process, for the identification of use cases and information entities during the modeling and reorganization of business processes focusing the results in the identification of the functional requirements for the correct development of an interactive information system.

REFINEMENT PROPAGATION - TOWARDS AUTOMATED CONSTRUCTION OF VISUAL SPECIFICATIONS

Irina Rychkova and Alain Wegmann

Creation and transformation of visual specifications is driven by modeler's design decisions. After a design decision has been made, the modeler needs to adjust the specification to maintain its correctness. The number of adjustments might make the design process tedious for large specifications. We are interested in technique that will reduce the modeler's obligation to control specification correctness. Every single transformation of the visual specification can be captured by the notion of refinement used in formal methods. In this work we present the technique that supports a stepwise refinement of visual specifications based on calculations. We use refinement calculus as a logic for reasoning about refinement correctness. When a design decision is made by the modeler, the necessary adjustments are calculated based on rules of refinement propagation. Refinement propagation can automate the specification adjustment and enforce its correctness.

TOWARDS UML-RT BEHAVIOURAL CONSISTENCY

Kawtar Benghazi Akhlaki, Manuel I. Capel Tuñón, Juan A. Holgado Terriza and Luis E. Mendoza Morales

Having an objective of achieving a formal characterisation of Sequence Diagrams (SD) as a means for ERTS development and validation, this paper introduces a CSP+T-based timed trace semantics for most concepts of SD. A trace is sequence of events, which gives the necessary expressiveness to capture the standard interpretation of UML SD. Timed SD (TSD) depict work flow, message passing and gives a general view of how system’s components cooperate over time to achieve a result. Such sequence, often called an scenario, also represents a part of the system behaviour and a possible execution of a state diagram. State diagrams and SD are used as complementary models for describing system behaviour. To demonstrate temporal consistency between SD and timed state diagrams, we propose a systematic transformation of both into a formal semantics timed traces of events. Finally, the application example consists of carrying out the dynamic modelling of key components of a well known manufacturing-industry paradigmatic case.

CHECKING BEHAVIOURAL CONSISTENCY OF UML-RT MODELS THROUGH TRACE-BASED SEMANTICS

Luis E. Mendoza Morales, Manuel I. Capel Tuñón and Kawtar Benghazi Akhlaki

Starting from a methodological approach intended to obtain a correct system specification in CSP+T from a UML--RT model of an RTS, we develop now a systematic procedure to check whether the obtained design is consistent with other vistas of the same system, such as the ones given by class digrams, collaboration diagrams and state charts. To achieve this objective, a formal semantics of the notational elements of UML--RT according to CSP+T process terms is presented, which guarantees that system requirements are preserved from their initial UML--RT modelling to the final system implementation. As a consequence, the formal support given by the compositional refinement of CSP+T process terms will allow performing the system's software compositional verification. In addition, the derived formal semantic definitions are applied to the Production Cell case study.

MATRIX BASED PROBLEM DETECTION IN THE APPLICATION OF SOFTWARE PROCESS PATTERNS

Chintan Amrit and Jos Van Hillegersberg

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers. Such collaborations require proper communication and regular coordination among the team members. In addition, coordination is required to sort out problems due to technical dependencies that exist when components of one part of the architecture requires services or data input from components of another part of the architecture. The dynamic allocation of the different tasks to people results in various socio-technical structure clashes (STSCs). These STSCs become more pronounced in an Agile Software Development environment and managerial intervention is constantly required to alleviate problems due to STSCs. In this paper we propose a technique based on dependency matrices that detects STSCs in the organizational process structure. We illustrate this technique using two examples from Organizational and Process Pattern literature.

AUTHORS’ INSTRUCTIONS - OSS FACTORY: DEVELOPMENT MODEL BASED AT OSS PRACTICES

Ana Isabella Muniz and José Augusto de O. Neto

In this paper we present OSS Factory (Open Source Software Factory), an ecosystem aligning software demands, undergraduation Computing students qualification and Open Software practices in a collaborating relation, dedicated to produce open software applications to cope with market demands, using students codification potential. A contest among students attending software engineering courses (or volunteers), guided by professors and coordinated by a central entity is the force to move OSS Factory. To validate elements and interaction proposed, experiments applying the structure described in the paper have been performed, and positive results were achieved.

SIMULATION BASED PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF THE MVB MAC LAYER

Yongxiang Wang, Lide Wang and Xiaobo Nie

This paper describes the design and validation of a CPN (Colored Petri Net) model for the MVB's (Multifunction Vehicle Bus) MAC layer based on the IEC61375-1 standard. A MVB Network has been modeled. The model comprises a MVB bus controller and three MVB Class-1 devices and a common channel which connects them all. By means of this model it is aimed to analyze the transmission performance under different conditions. Most works are done using CPN Tools which permits visual modeling, simulating and analyzing CPN. The simulation result and the performance comparison are presented. The author points out that the MVB network's reliability greatly depends on the data link layer and the redundant communication lines is necessary.

INTEROPERABILITY IN PERVASIVE ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS - A DOUBLE-FACED COIN BETWEEN SECURITY AND ACCESSABILITY

Dana Al Kukhun and Florence Sèdes

As transparency becomes a key requirement for assuring user satisfaction, Enterprise Information Systems are seeking to become pervasive in order to resolve the heterogeneity problems that face them while integrating their dynamic sub components or while interacting with customers or other business partners. In this article, we introduce the difficulties that face Enterprise Information Systems while trying to provide interoperable data exchange. We highlight the importance of applying adaptive access control policies that provides interoperability by differentiating between providing local system users full data accessibility or providing multi level security controls to external users. Pervasive Systems need to manage data integration and processing in highly dynamic environments where data, software, hardware and connectivity constraints are changing over time and should adapt automatically and proactively to user needs.

INCENTIVE-BASED AND PEER-ORIENTED DESIGN OF UBIQUITOUS COMMERCE

Kyoung Jun Lee and Jeong-In Ju

Seamlessness is the keyword of U-Commerce which may be defined as the commercial interaction among providers, consumers, products, and services, enabled and supported especially by the real-world seamless communication of each entity and object's digital information. However, the possibility of the seamless transactions increases the privacy risk of the entities involved. Therefore, the core issue of U-Commerce is how to promote seamless transactions while protecting the privacy. For the seamlessness, the role of incentive-emphasized business model is important since the seamlessness makes clear which economic entities contribute to a commercial transaction. Economic entities will reject the seamless transactions unless the sufficient incentives are given to them. In order to consider the privacy issue, we suggest an alternative U-Commerce architecture based on Hybrid P2P Model and Personal Information Base.

TOWARDS A FORMAL VERIFICATION OF PROCESS MODEL'S PROPERTIES SIMPLEPDL AND TOCL CASE STUDY

Benoît Combemale, Pierre-Loïc Garoche, Xavier Crégut, Xavier Thirioux and François Vernadat

More and more, models, through Domain Specific Languages (DSL), tend to be the solution to define complex systems. Expressing properties specific to these metamodels and checking them appears as an urgent need. Until now, the only complete industrial solutions that are available consider structural properties such as the ones that could be expressed in OCL. There are although some tentatives on behavioural properties for DSL. This paper addresses a method to specify and then check temporal properties over models. The case study is \textsc{SimplePDL}, a process metamodel. We propose a way to use a temporal extension of OCL, TOCL, to express properties. We specify a model transformation to Petri Nets and LTL formulae for both the process model and its associated temporal properties. We check these properties using a model checker and enrich the model with the analysis results. This work is a first step towards a generic framework to specify and effectively check temporal properties over arbitrary models.

A REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR MANAGING BUSINESS PROCESS VARIANTS

Ruopeng Lu and Shazia Sadiq

Business process management systems (BPMS) have been prevalent in current business information systems for a substantial period of time. However, BPMS is still striving to vanquish emerging demands from current business environments. The most dominant challenge is supporting the dynamism of business processes, where requirements and process goals are constantly changing. This is particularly challenging in managing knowledge intensive business processes and has partially led to the demand for more complex BPMS functionality such as instance adaptation and streamlined process evolution. On the other hand, various process analysis and discovery techniques have been developed as an important component in BPMS. In this paper, we present a technology framework that supports process discovery from preferred work practices in a flexible process management system. The framework supports instance adaptation and a systematic approach towards process evolution/improvement.

MODELLING EXTERNAL INTERACTION CONTEXT FOR ENHANCED BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGERATION IN MOBILE ENTERPRISES

Subodh Sohi

Today, with increasing mobility, Enterprises proactively are looking to mobilize solutions and want to leverage on wireless knowledge for enhanced business processing. In mobile enterprises, knowledge about information flow across mobile devices can be controlled and interaction context can be leveraged to enable better decisions capabilities both by human and systems thereby leading to enhanced business processes integration. In current state of art we lack in modeling the appropriate interaction context for information flow across mobile devices. In this paper, we present a framework for deriving and leveraging interaction context in health care Enterprise.

DYNAMIC INTERACTION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS - WEAVING ARCHITECTURAL CONNECTORS ON COMPONENT PETRI NETS

Nasreddine Aoumeur, Gunter Saake and Kamel Barkaoui

Advances in networking over heterogenous infrastructures are boosting market globalization and thereby forcing most software-intensive information systems to be fully distributed, cooperating and evolving to stay competitive. The emerging composed behaviour in such interacting components evolve dynamically/rapidly and unpredictably as market laws and users/application requirements change on-the-fly both at the coarse- type and fine-grained instance levels. \noindent Despite significant proposals for promoting interactions and adaptivity using mainly architectural techniques (e.g. components and connectors), rigorously specifying / validating / verifying and dynamically adapting complex communicating information systems both at type and instance levels still remains challenging. In this contribution, we present a component-based Petri nets governed by a true-concurrent rewriting-logic based semantics for specifying and validating interacting distributed information systems. For runtime adaptivity, we enhance this proposal with (ECA-business) rules Petri nets-driven behavioral connectors, and demonstrate how to dynamically weaving them on running components to reflect any emerging behavior.

ON THE LOGIC UNDERLYING COMMON SENSE

Janos J. Sarbo

In order to endow computers with common sense with respect to specific domains we need to have a representation of the world and make commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. This paper is an attempt to introduce such a representation and underlying `naive' logic on the basis of an analysis of the properties of cognitive activity. This paper is of interest to those engaged in the development of user interfaces and ontologies, as well as to those interested in the semiotic aspects of problem specification and requirement engineering. The focus of this paper is on the theory, applications are briefly mentioned due to lack of space.

TEXT CATEGORIZATION USING EARTH MOVER'S DISTANCE AS SIMILARITY MEASURE

Hidekazu Yanagimoto and Sigeru Omatu

We propose a text categorization system using Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) as similarity measure between documents. Many text categorization systems adopt the Vector Space Model and use cosine similarity as similarity measure between documents. There is an assumption that each of words included in documents is uncorrelated because of an orthogonal vector space. However, the assumption is not desirable when a document includes a lot of synonyms and polysemic words. The EMD does not demand the assumption because it is computed as a solution of a transportation problem. To compute the EMD in consideration of dependency among words, we define the distance between words, which needs to compute the EMD, using a co-occurrence frequency between the words. We evaluate the proposing method with ModApte split of Reuters-21578 text categorization test collection and confirm that the proposing method improves a precision rate for text categorization.

DEVELOPMENT OF ALGORITHMS TO SOLVE COMBINATORIAL PROBLEMS

Broderick Crawford, Carlos Castro and Eric Monfroy

This paper captures our experience developing Algorithms to solve Combinatorial Problems using different techniques. Because it is a Software Engineering problem, then to find better ways of developing algorithms, solvers and metaheuristics is our interest too. Since software development is a creative and knowledge intensive activity, an understanding from a Knowledge Management perspective offers important insights in our work. Here, we fixed the most valuable concepts from Knowledge Management and Software Engineering applied in our work.

GENERIC BUSINESS MODELLING FRAMEWORK

Christopher John Hogger and Min Li

We present a position paper setting out the essentials of a new declarative framework named GBMF intended for modelling the higher-level aspects of business. It is based upon logic programming including, where appropriate, finite-domain constraints. Business plans, processes, entity constraints, assets and business rules are representable in GBMF using an economical repertoire of primitive constructs and without requiring overly-burdensome programming effort. The framework, which has been fully implemented, has been applied so far to small-scale business exemplars. Our more general future aim, however, will be to demonstrate the framework's generic character by providing precise semantic mappings between it and other business modelling frameworks that rely upon specialized languages and engines.

ADAPTIVE PROCESSES IN E-GOVERNMENT - A FIELD REPORT ABOUT SEMANTIC-BASED APPROACHES FROM THE EU-PROJECT “FIT”

Andrea Leutgeb, Wilfrid Utz, Robert Woitsch and Hans-Georg Fill

For increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of public administration as well as improving the usability and adaptability of systems state-of-the-art semantic technologies can be combined with existing business process management (BPM) approaches in e-government. This position paper shows ontology-based approaches as implemented within the EU-project FIT. In FIT the customer approved business process modelling language ADOeGov® has been enriched with business rules in order to provide the necessary transparency, flexibility and efficiency.

A SUCCESS STORY: COLLABORATIVE EFFORT WITH THE INDUSTRY IN ADDRESSING REQUIREMENTS CHALLENGES FOR EARLY ADOPTION OF IWARP IN LINUX

Venkata Jagana, Claudia Salzberg, Renato Recio and Bernard Metzler

As customers are embracing Linux in solving business critical problems, the demand to support innovative and cutting edge technologies is also increasing at a dramatic pace. This has forced the system vendors to offer these technologies much sooner than the traditional cycles allowed. In addition, the open source of different implementations of the same technology by different vendors poses a significant risk in getting an agreement on the common implementation. In order to address these multitude of problems and get an open source implementation of new technology for acceptance into Linux mainstream sooner, we have adopted an innovative method. This method allowed us to work on a common implementation for Linux by avoiding the clash of multiple implementations right from the beginning but of bringing all the relevant vendors, much before the technology gains foothold in the market with any proprietary implementatiosn. In this paper, we'll clearly describe in detail the success story of iWARP support for Linux right from the start of how we have formed a community, generated the requirements that are agreeable to all vendors and open source developers, how it further drove an industry standard to define a programming interface in parallel with the implementation and how the code convergence should happen with an existing Infiniband technology. We’ll also describe further how this model can be applied for faster adoption of the upcoming future technologies into Open source based implementations after addressing the new technology challenges.

BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND IT PROFESSIONALS - A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

Susanne Berger and Georg Peters

There is ongoing discussion whether and to which extent and aspects professionals in the field of information technology (IT) and business administration (BA) are different. Often IT people are considered to be introverted while it is assumed that BA professionals are stronger with respect to communication and networking. In our paper we take a social network analysis perspective to examine if this prejudice is true for BA and IT professionals who are members of an online business community.

THE IP MULTIMEDIA SUBSYSTEM (IMS) & THE MOBILE INTERNET - OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE MOBILE OPERATOR

Amanda O'Farrell and Brendan Tierney

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a new mobile communications architecture, which enables many new and innovative services, and can extend the possibilities of mobile internet application development. These mobile internet applications and the IMS, are considered in terms of the impact that they can have on the critical success factors (CSFs) of mobile operators. The CSFs identified are particular to mobile operators that are competing in a highly saturated (in terms of mobile penetration) marketplace, and that are facing the threat of increasing competition

SPECIFICATION AND VERIFICATION OF VIEWS OVER COMPOSITE WEB SERVICES USING HIGH LEVEL PETRI-NETS

Khouloud Boukadi, Chirine Ghedira, Zakaria Maamar and Djamal Benslimane

This paper presents a high level Petri-Net approach for specifying and verifying views over composite Web service. High level Petri-Nets have the capacity of formally modelling and verifying complex systems. A view is mainly used for tracking purposes as it permits representing a contextual snapshot of a composite Web service specification. The use of the proposed high level Petri-Net approach is illustrated with a running example that shows how Web services composition satisfies users’ needs. A proof-of-concept of this approach is also presented in the paper.

INTEROPERABILITY CHALLENGES IN NEW MEMBER STATES SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES REQUIRE SUITABLE EAI ARCHITECTURES

Karsten Tolle, Valentinas Kiauleikis, Gerald Knoll, Claudia Guglielmina and Alessandra Arezza

Study, design and develop a federated architecture that will use UBL messages and interoperability services, which aims at supporting SMEs EAI in New Member States.

COMEX: COMBINATORIAL AUCTIONS FOR THE INTRA-ENTERPRISE EXCHANGE OF LOGISTICS SERVICES

Oleg Gujo and Michael Schwind

The exchange of cargo capacities is an approach that is well established in the practice of logistics. Few of these mostly web-based market places, however, are able to take synergies into consideration that can be generated by the appropriate combination of the transportation lanes of different carriers. One way to achieve this is to employ combinatorial auctions, that allow one to bid on bundles of lanes. This article describes a combinatorial auction for the intra-enterprise exchange of logistic services. In the real world case considered here, we implement and analyze such an exchange process in an enterprise that is related to the food sector and organized in a profit center structure. In the intra-enterprise exchange process, each profit center is able to release delivery contracts for outsourcing if the geographic location of a customer allows a reduced-cost delivery by another profit center in the neighborhood. The cost calculation is based on the results of an integrated routing system, and the in and outsourcing process is managed by using the auction mechanism ComEx. For the purpose of customer retention the delivery contracts are kept by the corresponding profit center, the incentive for exchanging the customers is achieved by a cost-savings distribution mechanism. After a description of the web-based logistics auction together with the route optimization system DynaRoute, the article describes the search for a cost optimizing strategy that bundles the appropriate delivery contracts.

AN EFFICIENT SYSTEM FOR EJB MOBILIZATION

Liang Zhang, Beihong Jin, Li Lin and Yulin Feng

In these days, conducting business requires more and more employees to be mobile. To be efficient, these mobile workers need to access the enterprise applications with their mobile devices at anytime and any-where. How to efficiently extend the enterprise applications to the mobile devices becomes a challenging task to the enterprise. In this paper, we present our recently developed system for mobilizing enterprise ap-plications, which provides efficient access to EJB components from MIDP2.0 mobile devices. Considering the characteristics of wireless media, our system can dynamically choose the most appropriate communica-tion method and provide the synchronous exactly-once communication semantic. Security is explored by providing data encryption, two-way authentication and a simple tool for managing the access control list. We also develop a mechanism for supporting priority service. Thread pool and object caching are imple-mented to increase the efficiency. Lastly, our system offers various tools to enhance the development automatism, while still allowing the programming flexibility by providing a rich set of APIs.

A METHODOLOGY FOR DEVELOPING ONTOLOGIES USING THE ONTOLOGY WEB LANGUAGE (OWL)

Magdi N. Kamel, Ann Y. Lee and Edward C. Powers

It is generally agreed upon that ontologies are the knowledge representation component of the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for developing ontologies in different disciplines as means for sharing a common understanding of the structure of information in a domain among both people and machines. This paper describes a seven-step methodology for developing ontologies using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) based on related approaches for software and ontology development. As with contemporary software development methodologies, the steps of the proposed approach are applied iteratively and in a cyclical fashion in order to accurately capture the domain knowledge.

PATTERN-BASED COLLABORATION IN AD-HOC TEAMS THROUGH MESSAGE ANNOTATION

Daniel Schall, Robert Gombotz and Schahram Dustdar

In this paper we present a specification for annotating messages to enable computer-supported message processing, addressing, and analysis. The benefits of annotating messages according to our XML based specification are two-fold: Firstly, it allows computer support during collaboration by enabling automated message addressing (i.e., determining who should get a message) and message management (e.g., managing your messages according to activities, projects, and task). Secondly, it enables post-collaboration analysis of messages and mining of message logs for patterns and for workflow models. We provide a proof of concept by presenting how annotated messages may support and facilitate collaboration that happens according to certain collaboration patterns. In addition to the patterns we have already introduced in our previous work, we present more patterns such as Monitors that emphasize the applicability of computer supported message handling.

A NEW GROUP KEY MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE FOR FRAUDULENT INTERNET BANKING PAYMENTS DETECTION

Osama Dandash, Yiling Wang, Phu Dung Le and Bala Srinivasan

Fraudulent payments detection in the banking system is an extremely important form of risk management, particularly as the industry loses close to one billion dollars a year from fraud. Several modern techniques in detecting fraud are continually evolved and applied to many business fields. However; there is still no efficient detection mechanism that is able to identify legitimate users and trace their illegal activities. This paper presents a new Group Key Management (GKM) structure that facilitates internal fraudulent banking payments detection mechanism by dynamically combining an Individual Key (IK) and a Group Key (GK). The main objective of the proposed mechanism is to identify internal fraudsters and trace their records amongst other group members.

IMPROVING THE SEARCH AND CATALOGUING OF ITEMS IN C2C E-COMMERCE PORTALS

Antonio Gallardo, Jose Jesus Castro-Schez, Milagros Hazas and Juan Moreno-Garcia

The business achievement among consumer via e-commerce is getting more important at the present time. In this paper, we propose to make use of fuzzy logic with the aim to improve the search and cataloguing of goods and services in Consumer-to-Consumer electronic commerce (E-commerce) portals (e.g. ebay). These portals are the media through most the electronic transactions among consumers are conduced today. We suggest a method that tries to adapt to users' real needs. It allows to buyer carry out searches in an imprecise way and to the seller to deal with catalogues of items (goods or services) described also in a lacking exactness way.

AUTOMATIC ORCHESTRATION OF WEB SERVICES THROUGH SEMANTIC ANNOTATIONS

Philippe Larvet

A new service can be developed as an orchestrated composition of existing web services. This paper describes an original process to automate the composition of semantic web services, by processing their "semantic tags". These tags can be extracted from the WSDL descriptions of the services and inserted into a light semantic description attached to the operations of the considered web services. A specific mechanism can examine these tags and determine automatically the possible "connectivity" of two given web services: the output of WS1, for example, semantically fits with the input of WS2. Then, the two web services are semantically connectable. This process can be used within the context of a service creation environment, in which the developer often wishes to assemble different services corresponding to an initial request. By using the semantic tags, a specific composition mechanism is able to connect automatically the chosen services and to assemble them to produce the final service that fits with the original request.

INTERACTION BELIEFS - A WAY TO UNDERSTAND EMERGENT ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

Marco Stuit, Nick B. Szirbik and Cees de Snoo

We assume that business processes consist of sets of individual and collaborative activities performed by actors and the interactions between them. Each interaction involves multiple roles, which can be played by various agents – human or artificial. These have their own local beliefs and expectations about the behaviour(s) of the other participant(s). We represent these beliefs by using the ‘interaction belief’ concept. We show how a designer can reason about an interaction belief, how it can be modelled and what diagrams are necessary, and how it is constructed for the purpose of simulation and agent development. Some of the differences between workflow modelling and agent-oriented process modelling are discussed. In order to illustrate the new concept and how it is operationally used, we present a business interaction example that shows how agents, equipped with interaction beliefs, can enact a business process in a non-centralised, emergent manner. Finally, we explore some interesting questions that have arisen due to the introduction of the interaction belief concept and outline some promising topics for future research.

DYNAFLOW: AGENT-BASED DYNAMIC WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT FOR P2P ENVIRONMENTS

Adriana Vivacqua, Wallace Pinheiro, Ricardo Barros, Amanda de Mattos, Nathalia Cianni, Pedro Monteiro, Rafael de Martino, Vinicius Marques, Geraldo Xexeo, Jano Souza and Daniel Schneider

Many projects are characterized by their flexibility and high number of changes before a definitive solution is implemented. In these scenarios, the people involved may change, as may deadlines, assignments and roles, especially when the projects span a long period of time. Traditional workflow systems don’t handle dynamic scenarios well, as they are centralized and pre-defined at the start of the project. To address these problems, there is a need for systems that are able to adapt according to the situation, to deal with the dynamic aspects of the design process. In this paper, we present a P2P approach to dynamic workflow management, where peers may join or leave and roles may change depending on the situation. DynaFlow is an agent based system, where agents take action when exceptions occur. This type of system could provide adequate support for dynamic groups, such as open source projects, where participation is fluid and changes according to members’ availability.

SUMMARIZING DOCUMENTS USING FRACTAL TECHNIQUES

M. Dolores Ruiz and Antonio B. Bailón

Every day we search new information in the web, and we found a lot of documents which contain pages with a great amount of information. There is a big demand for automatic summarization in a rapid and precise way. Many methods have been used in automatic extraction but most of them do not take into account the hierarchical structure of the documents. A novel method using the structure of the document was introduced by Yang and Wang in 2004. It is based in a fractal view method for controlling the information displayed. We explain its drawbacks and we solve them using the new concept of fractal dimension of a text document to achieve a better diversification of the extracted sentences improving the performance of the method.

CORPORATE CULTURE: A NEW CHALLENGE TO E-SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Khalid Al-Mutawah, Vincent Lee and Yen Cheung

Traditional supply chain management systems (SCMs) are giving way to opportunities provided by the rapid growth in Internet applications. The purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding of the structure of electronic SCMs (e-SCMS) and the role that corporate culture plays in e-SCMS’s performance. To achieve this, two path dependence research questions are stated: how can e-SCMS be described, and how corporate culture influences can be measured. To address the first question an in-depth literature review was conducted to describe the structure of e-SCMS. For the second question, a qualitative research approach was used where a case study in the Australian Supply Chain Pharmaceutical Industry was reviewed. Preliminary findings indicate that the organizational links in the e-supply chain can be described as a rotating ring that facilitates the flexibility factor in forming new strategic alliances. The findings also indicate a matrix model as a possible tool to measure the needs to implement corporate cultural changes for improved corporate performance.

DISCOVERING SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES IN FEDERATED DIRECTORIES

Michael Schumacher, Tim van Pelt, Ion Constantinescu, Alexandre de Oliveira e Sousa and Boi Faltings

This paper presents a flexible federated directory system called WSDir, which allows registration and discovery of semantic web services. Our directory system is used in a context where ubiquitous ehealth services should be flexibly coordinated and pervasively provided to the mobile user by intelligent agents in dynamically changing environments. The system has been modeled, designed and implemented as a backbone directory system to be searched by an infrastructure made up by such kind of agents coordinating web services. The system is modeled as a federation: directory services form its atomic units, and the federation emerges from the registration of directory services in other directory services. Directories are virtual clusters of service entries stored in one or more directory services. To create the topology, policies are defined on all possible operations to be called on directories. For instance, they allow for routed registration and selective access to directories.

A WEB-BASED CENTRAL GATEWAY INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE AUTOMOTIVE AFTER-SALES MARKET - BUSINESS INTEROPERABILITY THROUGH THE WEB

Geert Houben, Kris Luyten, Karin Coninx and Frank Schönherr

The Block Excemption Regulation of the European Commission was enacted in 2002 with the goal to strenghten competition between dependent and independent repairers in the automotive after-sales market. The FP6 MYCAREVENT project embraces these goals while triggering new business opportunities by activating a mobile accessible infrastructure with a single gateway to different kinds of resources. This information procurement framework allows customers to find specific vehicle repair and diagnostic data from different car manufacturers and 3rd parties in the same way. In order to provide a higher degree of accessibility, extensibility and adaptivity, the service-oriented infrastructure presented in this paper is web-based and consists of three main components: mobile clients, Service Portal and Remote Services. New communication and multimedia technologies are invoked to improve interoperability, usability and maintenance of the underlying Mobile Service World. In this paper we focus on the architecture of this highly flexible procurement infrastructure. Standardized elements and methodologies ensure an integrated solution and enable easy integration of new content, services and components.

ADAPTIVE WORKFLOWS FOR SMART DEVICES - A CONCRETE APPROACH TOWARDS DEVICE FAILURES

Seng Loke, Sea Ling, Maria Indrawan and Suryani Kurniati

Smart devices in an environment (e.g., home, factory, military settings, in-vehicle, office, etc) can be programmed and coordinated by a workflow in advance to achieve a user's goal. No matter how advanced or smart the devices are, devices can fail during workflow execution. In this paper, we describe an approach to remedy such situations. We apply the existing concept of adaptive workflow management to a collection of devices, called a {\em device ecology}. Information about the devices are kept in a device hierarchy so that a suitable substitute device that can perform a similar task can be retrieved to replace a failed device in order to ensure the workflow can continue execution. Similarity is defined based on a device hierarchy in an ontology language. A prototype has been implemented as proof of concept.

ONTOLOGY-BASED DYNAMIC SERVICE COMPOSITION USING SEMANTIC RELATEDNESS AND CATEGORIZATION TECHNIQUES

Yacine Rezgui and Samia Nefti

Organizations need to migrate their legacy systems to higher order applications capable of engaging in automated modes of collaboration to support distributed business processes. This requires a change of focus from intra-enterprise system integration through agreed data struc-tures to inter-enterprise business process integration through smart composition of web-serviced applications. The paper presents an approach aiming at supporting ontology-based semantic composition of web-services to support distributed electronic business processes. This new generation of composite services is semantically coordinated and pervasively provided in a secure, scalable, and resource-aware environment. Two services, at the heart of the service composition exercise, are featured, namely: the semantic compatibility and categoristion services.

A VIRTUAL LABORATORY FOR WEB AND GRID ENABLED SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

Francesco Amigoni, Mariagrazia Fugini and Diego Liberati

In current economic and scientific scenarios, interactions and organization models tend to be more and more oriented to flexibility of relationships, heterogeneity of elements, and collaboration among divisions. These requirements impose new approaches to problem solving procedures, and push technologies to new solutions to both cooperation and competition. A possible approach, which is a technical solution and an organizing paradigm at the same time, is based on the concept of Virtual Organization. This paper, starting from the Virtual Organization paradigm and from workflows, shows an approach to the definition and execution of distributed scientific experiments as set of services executed on distributed collaborating sites at different heterogeneous organizations. The focus is on flexibility, reuse, orchestration, collaboration, and interoperability of services within a cooperation process. The workflow of the experiment can be specified by actors with low information technology but high domain knowledge. The context of the work is e-Science, in particular, bioinformatics, but the presented concepts can be easily generalized and extended to other classes of business interaction. A prototype environment is described.

VALUE CREATION FOR SMES USING COLLABORATIVE COMMERCE MARKETPLACES

Yen Ping Cheung, Daisy Seng and Jay Bal

To compete with low cost competitors from other regions of the world, collaborative commerce marketplaces (CCMs) can assist SMEs to innovate and rejuvenate their business. For instance, CCMs allow the configuration of partners’ capabilities very quickly in response to market’s demand to collectively bid for tenders/projects. Through collaboration with partners in the CCM, SMEs are able to venture outside their regions to capture new markets. A comprehensive, visual and dynamic CCM model is presented in this paper which can be used as a basis for further study of CCMs. Two selected case studies from a CCM are used to verify the proposed model. The layered approach of the model provides opportunities for further examination of the dynamic and complex interactions in CCMs.

BUSINESS INNOVATION VIA COLLABORATION - E-MANUFACTURING: WEB-BASED COLLABORATION SYSTEMS FOR SMES

Kwangyeol Ryu, Seokwoo Lee, Wonpyo Hong, Dongyoon Lee and Honzong Choi

Unpredictable challenges from global markets and customers make it difficult for manufacturers to produce quality products satisfying cost and time constraints. To cope with competitive and dynamically changing internal and external conditions, the manufacturing industry needs to be equipped with advanced technologies including IT as well as substantial infrastructure. “e-Manufacturing” is referred to as a system methodology enabling the integration of manufacturing operations and functional objectives of an enterprise by using intelligent IT technologies such as the Internet, and tether-free communication methods including wireless networking or web-based connections. The key factor of e-Manufacturing is collaboration. Hence, we have developed four kinds of web-based collaboration systems, referred to as hub systems, while conducting our e-Manufacturing project funded by the Korea government. In this paper, therefore, the functions and characteristics of each collaboration hub system will be introduced. Furthermore, a case study of business innovation by applying collaboration systems for SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) will be carried out. As a result of applying collaboration systems to SMEs, they can achieve competitiveness because of effective web-based tools, and also accomplish business innovation, which allows them to survive in a global market.

A NOVEL APPROACH FOR ROBUST WEB SERVICES PROVISIONING

Quan Z. Sheng and Anne H. H. Ngu

Availability and reliability of Web services are important issues for developing many electronic business applications. Unfortunately, it is hard to guarantee the availability of a service given that the number of its requests might be potentially huge. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for robust Web service provisioning based on mobile agent and resource discovery technologies. With our approach, new service instance can be instantiated at appropriate idle computing resources on demand, therefore reducing the risk of service being unavailable. We present a matchmaking algorithm for resources selection, as well as a multi-phase resource planning algorithm for composite Web services.

AN INDEPENDENT REPUTATION SYSTEM FOR P2P NETWORKS

Chaiyasit Tayabovorn and Songrit Maneewongvatana

Over the last few years, peer-to-peer or (P2P) networks have changed much the attitude of our online life. Entire users on such networks can play either provider and consumer role or even both simultaneously. They can share many diverse resources directly with each other regardless of true identity of interacting participants. To utilize such networks securely, the reputation-based system then becomes a critical part of today's P2P networks. Unfortunately, among current P2P networks, any reputation data used by the reputation system in such networks is still limited and valid to only the same community where its referrers and raters belong. This is regarded as an inflexibility, which causes problems in many aspects. In this paper, we propose a model of P2P reputation-based system whose main concept is to create an independent P2P community called reputation community. This community maintains all reputation data of various kinds from other communities. With this concept, we believe that it can make the reputation system more flexible, scalable, and secure.

INTERACTION-ORIENTED COLLABORATIONS

Giorgio Bruno

This paper addresses binary collaborations and choreographies, based on web services technology. The nature of the problem leads to two complementary approaches: one focuses on activities, and the other on interactions. This paper follows the interaction-oriented approach and proposes a modeling notation, called Interaction-Oriented Nets (IONs), which allows binary collaborations, choreographies and abstract orchestration models (i.e. abstract business processes made up of communication activities) to be homogeneously represented.

A CONTEXT-AWARE SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE EXECUTION AGENT

António Luís Lopes and Luís Miguel Botelho

This paper presents the research on agent technology development for context-aware execution of semantic web services, more specifically, the development of SEA (Service Execution Agent), a semantic web services execution agent that uses context information to adapt the execution process to a specific situation, thus improving its effectiveness and providing a faster and better service. Preliminary results show that the introduction of context information and context-aware capabilities in a service execution environment can speed up the execution process, in spite of the overhead that it is introduced by the agents’ communication and processing of context information. The developed service execution agent uses standards such as OWL S service descriptions and WSDL grounding information. Also, an Agent Grounding definition has been proposed to enable the execution of semantic web services provided by agents. The implementation of the agent was done through the integration and/or the extension of the following software tools: JADE, OWL S API and XSP.

DEVELOPING AGILE USER INTERFACES FOR HETEROGENEOUS DEVICES IN BUSINESS PROCESSES

Yaojin Yang and Lasse Pajunen

Along with the increasing popularity of mobile devices, for accessing services provided by business processes people now would like to use various devices in different circumstances or for different tasks. To support this kind of heterogeneous situation, user interfaces must be agile enough to adapt. In our research, we have identified five key requirements and five principles to help developers to achieve this. Furthermore, we have introduced the concepts of user interface process and user interface service, where user interface development for business processes is well positioned in a bigger picture of Web Service and Service Oriented Architecture. Our research results have been presented by a case study developing a group messaging system.

CD-LOMAS: A COLLABORATIVE DISTRIBUTED LEARNING OBJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Andrea De Lucia, Rita Francese, Ignazio Passero and Genoveffa Tortora

Learning Objects are stored in repositories and spread through Internet. The educational sector needs to share good quality educational contents, which can be reused and adopted in several contexts. In this paper we present CD-LOMAS (Collaborative Distributed Learning Object MAnagement System) to support the sharing of contents and the collaboration on their development in a highly distributed environment. Complex Learning Objects are decomposed into simpler Learning Objects that can be distributed at different sites. In CD-LOMAS artifact management features, such as coordination of cooperative workers and versioning, are integrated with context-awareness.

BROADBAND TECHNOLOGIES AND THE ACCESS NETWORK - EVALUATION TOOL PROPOSAL

João Paulo Ribeiro Pereira and José Adriano Pires

The deployment of Broadband technologies is a key driver of economic development, productivity, and social advancement, and has view a great growth over the past decade. But, the main part of this development and growth has been in the core networks, and the capacity of the access network to delivery broadband services remains as a challenge ("last mile problem"). The access network remains a bottleneck in terms of the bandwidth and service quality it affords the end user. By other side, the access network is much more spread geographically and covers larger areas. Then, this part of the network is usually the most expensive component in terms of capital investment and OAM cost. Some studies reefer that this networks required 70% of the total investment. Several access technologies can be used in this part of the network, which can be used to resolve the bandwidth bottleneck and the investment problem: xDSL, HFC, FTTx, FWA, WiMAX, PLC, Satellite, etc. The goal of this paper is to identify all the essential costs of building broadband access networks, and then to perform a comparison of different technologies in various scenarios. In order to do this, we have developed a model framework and a evaluation tool. The paper presents a techno-economic analysis of eight broadband technologies for access networks: digital subscriber line (DSL), hybrid fiber coax (HFC), power line communications (PLC), fiber to the home (FTTH), fiber to the curb (FTTC), fiber to the cabinet (FTTCab), and wireless alternatives such as WiMAX and satellite. Several actors (such operators, service providers, …) could use this tool to compare different technological solutions, forecast deployment costs, compare different scenarios, etc

DATA QUALITY FOR EFFECTIVE E-COMMERCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Tanko Ishaya and Julien Raigneau

The quality of web data has become a critical concern for organisations and it has been an active area of Internet Computing research. Despite its importance and many years of active research and practice, the field still require ways for its assessment and improvement. This paper presents a framework for assessing the quality of customer web data and a well defined set of metrics for quantifying its quality. A prototype has been designed and implemented to demonstrate the usefulness of the data lifecycle and metrics for assessing the quality of customer data.

KEY ISSUES FOR LEARNING OBJECTS EVALUATION

Erla M. Morales Morgado, Ángela Barrón Ruiz and Francisco J. García Peñalvo

Web development is promoting important advantages for educational area specially e-learning systems. By one side Learning Objects (LOs) aim the possibility to reuse specific information and by the other side they can be interchanged though different context and platforms according to the user’s needs. However an urgent necessity exists to guarantee the LOs quality content. There exists a plethora of quality criteria to value digital sources but there are only a few suggestions about how to evaluate LOs to structure quality courses. This work is a proposal to evaluate LOs as a continued process taking into account different kind of LOs evaluation: Context, Input, Process and Product and quality criteria related to metadata information, pedagogical and usability issues, together with a strategy to ensure a continued LOs quality contents.

WHICH CONTRIBUTION OF THE WEB SERVICES IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF WEB SEARCHING? A BEHAVIOURAL STUDY OF THE NET SURFERS

Christian Belbèze and Chantal Soulé-Dupuy

The difficulty of finding information on the Web grows and this even for most expert among us. In order to better understand how search the Net surfers, we observed five adults and four children. Two different protocols of observation, both presenting imposed and free searches, were defined for the children and the adults. Thus, we could define a certain number of behaviours, attitudes and difficulties, and then we classified them. The result of these observations as well as the analysis of the behaviours are presented in this paper. Owing to these observations, the main goal of this paper is to introduce the contribution of Web services in the improvement of information access and Web searching.

TOWARDS COOPERATION AMONG COMPETITIVE TRADER AGENTS

Paulo André Lima de Castro and Jaime Simão Sichman