Barbara Re

Knowledge-based platform for eGovernment agents: A Web-based solution using semantic technologies

Currently eGovernment is clearly gaining momentum in our society. Many solutions and projects are being developed and, among the large amount of used tools, semantics is called to play a paramount role. In order to overcome issues related to cooperation, interoperability and accessibility of services in the domain, semantics can be used to improve in-use solutions and to develop new mechanisms able to support the development of expert and intelligent systems in eGovernment. This paper addresses a semantic based philosophy to tackle a holistic platform for the domain taking into account the knowledge of the administrations. By means of intelligent documents and Life Events, as they are presented in the paper, it is possible to build up a intelligent platform to host eGovernment services, as proved by the successful study case Tecut portal.

Interoperability issues among smart home technological frameworks

Population aging may be seen both as a human success story, the triumph of public health, medical advancements and economic development over diseases and injures, and as one of the most challenging phenomena that society faces in this century. Assistive technology in all its possible implementations (from Telemedicine to Ambient Assisted Living, and Ambient Intelligence) represents an emerging answer to the needs of the new generation of older adults whose desire is to live longer with a higher quality of life. Objective of this paper is to present the results of a public financed action for the development and implementation of an “integration platform” for Ambient Assisted Living that includes features of home automation (energy management, safety, comfort, etc.) and introduces “smart objects”, to monitor activities of daily living and detect any abnormal behavior that may represent a danger, or highlight symptoms of some incipient disease.

Research challenges in business process adaptability

Modern software systems are more and more deployed within moving and continuously changing contexts. It is not easy to consider all the possible contexts configurations/variances at priori, or it is quite cumbersome and error prone to list and program all this variability points at development time. For such a reason different research trends try to develop mechanisms to express, analyse and support the dynamic adaptation of a software system while it is running. Business Processes show today similar characteristics. In order to keep their competitiveness and quality for products and services, organizations need to be able to adapt to changing contexts. Changes have to be reflected in the software systems supporting the corresponding organizational activities. In this paper we report the results of a systematic literature review on Business Process Adaptation. The reviewing process lead us to consider 84 papers from the main digital libraries indexing computer science conferences and journals. From the reading and the systematic analysis of these papers we derived some research trends and challenges which have been considered relevant to be able to cover the main sources of adaptation in the definition of effective Business Processes.

Business Processes Verification for e-Government Service Delivery

Domain experts knowledge represents a major source of information in the design and the development of user-centric and distributed service-based applications, such as those of e-government. Issues related both to the communication among domain and IT experts, and to the implementation of domain dependent requirements in service-based applications, have to be carefully considered to support both Public Administrations efficiency and citizen satisfaction. In this article, we provide as user-friendly approach toward business process assessment via formal verification. Starting from a semi-formal notation, well understood and largely used by domain experts, we provide a mapping to a formal specification in the form of a process algebra. This transformation makes possible formal and automatic verification of desired quality requirements. The approach has been already applied, with encouraging results, in the e-government domain to verify the quality of business processes related to the delivery of e-government digital services to citizens. Moreover, the approach is supported by a plug-in for the Eclipse platform permitting to have an integrated environment in which to design the process model and to assess its quality.

An Operational Semantics of BPMN Collaboration

In the last years we are observing a growing interest in formalising the execution semantics of business process modelling languages that, despite their lack of formal characterisation, are widely adopted in industry and academia. In this paper, we focus on the OMG standard BPMN 2.0. Specifically, we provide a direct formalisation of its operational semantics in terms of Labelled Transition Systems LTS. This approach permits both to avoid possible miss-interpretations due to the usage of the natural language in the specification of the standard, and to overcome issues due to the mapping of BPMN to other formal languages, which are equipped with their own semantics. In addition, it paves the way for the use of consolidated formal reasoning techniques based on LTS e.g., model checking. Our operational semantics is given for a relevant subset of BPMN elements focusing on the capability to model collaborations among organisations via message exchange. Moreover, one of its distinctive aspects is the suitability to model business processes with arbitrary topology. This allows designers to freely specify their processes according to the reality without the need of defining well-structured models. We illustrate our approach through a simple, yet realistic, running example about commercial transactions.

Direct Verification of BPMN Processes through an Optimized Unfolding Technique

Business process analysis is one of the most important and complex activities of Business Process Management. Business processes are typically defined by business experts which ask for graphical and user-friendly notations. Nevertheless most notations used typically lack precisely defined semantics limiting the possibility of analysis to informal approaches such as observation techniques. To support formal verification techniques it is necessary to define a precise mapping between the adopted user-friendly notation and a formal language. In this paper we propose a Java based verification approach for Business Processes modeled using the BPMN 2.0 standard. In particular, we defined a precise Java mapping for the main elements of the BPMN 2.0 notation. The relations among the different elements of a BPMN 2.0 specification are supported by the inclusion of specific attributes and methods in the created Java objects. The behavior of a set of interrelated objects, corresponding to a BPMN 2.0 specification, can be explored using an algorithm we defined for the purpose. Such an algorithm permits to avoid the state explosion phenomenon using an ad-hoc unfolding technique. A plug-in for the Eclipse IDE platform has been developed. It permits to have an integrated environment in which to design a business process, to verify it, and to check the result of the verification in order to improve the business process itself. This iterative approach can continue until all the issues highlighted by the verifier are solved. The approach and the prototype have been successfully applied to real scenarios within the Public Administration domain, with encouraging results.

Cloud computing for network business ecosystem

Traditionally, computing infrastructure has been a substantial burden for companies. But what happens when business are unchained from their physical infrastructure and allowed to focus on business goal ? The model of infrastructure as a service and cloud computing bring us closer to this possibility. In this paper we discussed the growth of the web based service industry. The myriad of service now available over the internet rely on data center spread around the world. One of the major new trends in computing the rise of what is known as cloud computing, in witch not only service are offered remotely over the internet, but also a full menu of computing resource such a computing power, storage, databases, and many other resources.

Business process flexibility - a systematic literature review with a software systems perspective

Business Process flexibility supports organizations in changing their everyday work activities to remain competitive. Since much research has been done on this topic a better awareness on the current state of knowledge is needed. This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review to develop a map on Business Process flexibility with a special focus on software systems related aspects. It covers a spectrum of the state of the art from academic point of view. It includes 164 research works from the main computer science digital libraries. After an introduction into the topic the applied methodology is described. The output of the paper is in the form of schemes and reflections. Starting from the needs for Business Process flexibility, its impact on Business Process life-cycle is introduced. Successively instruments used to express and to support Business Process flexibility are presented together with related validation scenarios. In this paper we also highlight possible future research lines needing further investigations. In particular we identified room for future works in the area of languages for modeling flexibility, on-the-fly verification solutions, adaptation of Business Process running instances, and techniques for evolution recognition.

BProVe: A formal verification framework for business process models

Business Process Modelling has acquired increasing relevance in software development. Available notations, such as BPMN, permit to describe activities of complex organisations. On the one hand, this shortens the communication gap between domain experts and IT specialists. On the other hand, this permits to clarify the characteristics of software systems introduced to provide automatic support for such activities. Nevertheless, the lack of formal semantics hinders the automatic verification of relevant properties. This paper presents a novel verification framework for BPMN 2.0, called BProVe. It is based on an operational semantics, implemented using MAUDE, devised to make the verification general and effective. A complete tool chain, based on the Eclipse modelling environment, allows for rigorous modelling and analysis of Business Processes. The approach has been validated using more than one thousand models available on a publicly accessible repository. Besides showing the performance of BProVe, this validation demonstrates its practical benefits in identifying correctness issues in real models.

A Guidelines framework for understandable BPMN models

Abstract Business process modeling allows abstracting and reasoning on how work is structured within complex organizations. Business process models represent blueprints that can serve different purposes for a variety of stakeholders. For example, business analysts can use these models to better understand how the organization works; employees playing a role in the process can use them to learn the tasks that they are supposed to perform; software analysts/developers can refer to the models to understand the system-as-is before designing the system-to-be. Given the variety of stakeholders that need to interpret these models, and considering the pivotal function that models play within organizations, understandability becomes a fundamental quality that need to be taken into particular account by modelers. In this paper we provide a set of fifty guidelines that can help modelers to improve the understandability of their models. The work focuses on the Business Process Modelling Notation 2.0 standard published by the Object Management Group, which has acquired a clear predominance among the modeling notations for business processes. Guidelines were derived by means of a thoughtful literature review – which allowed identifying around one hundred guidelines – and through successive activities of synthesis and homogenization. In addition, we implemented a freely available open source tool, named B EBoP (understandaBility vErifier for Business Process models), to check the adherence of a model to the guidelines. Finally, guidelines violation has been checked with B EBoP on a dataset of 11,294 models available in a publicly accessible repository. Our tests show that, although the majority of the guidelines are respected by the models, some guidelines, which are recognized as fundamental by the literature, are frequently violated.