Hans Weigand

Towards a reference ontology for business models

Ontologies are viewed as increasingly important tools for structuring domains of interests. In this paper we propose a reference ontology of business models using concepts from three established business model ontologies; the REA, BMO, and e3-value. The basic concepts in the reference ontology concern actors, resources, and the transfer of resources between actors. Most of the concepts in the reference ontology are taken from one of the original ontologies, but we have also introduced a number of additional concepts, primarily related to resource transfers between business actors. The purpose of the proposed ontology is to increase the understanding of the original ontologies as well as the relationships between them, and also to seek opportunities to complement and improve on them.

Cross-organizational workflow integration using contracts

Enterprises are lining up into virtual enterprises to meet the ever-increasing customers demands in a more flexible and effective way than before. Hence, the business processes as well as supporting workflow systems need to be tightly embedded into streamlined, virtual value chains that can transcend organizational boundaries. It is generally recognized that the combination of workflow with business-object component technology provides the required solution. However, todays widespread business workflow modeling techniques suffer from an object bias, ignoring the most essential coordination vehicle in the enterprise: communication, and the resulting commitments. In this paper, we present contracts that encapsulate (formal) commitments laid down as a set of obligations to coordinate and control the interaction between business workflows. We use the business contract specification language XLBC to formally link the Component Definition Language (CDL) specification of business object-based workflow systems. XLBC is an extension of the Formal Language for Business Communication (FLBC) and a framework for the semantics of XLBC transactions is described. Finally, we indicate a feasible implementation architecture on the basis of an emerging internet-enabled business process architecture, ebXML and Trading Partner Agreements (TPAs).

Value-Based Service Modeling and Design: Toward a Unified View of Services

Service-oriented architectures are the upcoming business standard for realizing enterprise information systems, thus creating a need for analysis and design methods that are truly service-oriented. Most research on this topic so far takes a software engineering perspective. For a proper alignment between business and IT, a service perspective at the business level is needed as well. In this paper, a unified view of services is introduced by means of a service ontology, service classification and service layer architecture. On the basis of these service models, a service design method is proposed and applied to a case from the literature. The design method capitalizes on existing value modeling approaches.

On the notion of value object

It is increasingly recognized that business models offer an abstraction that is useful not only in the exploration of new business networks but also for the design and redesign of operational business processes. Among others, they can be used as input for a risk analysis that is crucial in cross-organizational business process design. However, the notion of value object is up till now not clearly defined. In this paper we investigate the notion of value, value objects and the activities involved when transferring value objects between business actors. We illustrate the proposed value object model by applying it on the well-known conference case.

Towards an organizational model for agent societies using contracts

The development of multi-agent systems calls for modeling primitives that are able to represent communication, interaction, roles and other concepts that characterize multi-agent systems. Such modeling primitives are usually not provided by (single) agent languages. Furthermore, models of organizations must incorporate the collective characteristics of the domain. We propose a conceptual framework for agent societies, consisting of three interrelated models, that distinguishes between organizational and operational aspects of the domain. Contract rules specify commitments between agents and society concerning role enactment, and commitments between agents concerning interaction.

Formalizing the evolution of virtual communities

Collaboration increasingly takes place in virtual communities using the Internet. These communities are socio-technical systems that tend to evolve strongly and become more complex over time. To ensure that the changes to these complex socio-technical systems are meaningful and acceptable to the community as a whole, the relevant members of the community need to be involved in their specification. The RENISYS method conceptualizes community specification processes as conversations for specification by relevant members. It supports this process in two steps. First, it uses formal composition norms to select the relevant community members who need to be involved in a particular conversation for specification. It then uses a formal model of conversations for specification to determine the acceptable conversational moves that the selected community members can make, as well as the status of their responsibilities and accomplishments at each point in time. By combining composition norms with conversations for specification, the specification processes can be precisely tailored to the specification support needs of the community.

Business negotiation support : Theory and practice

Business negotiation support systems (NSS) are slowly entering the market, although they lack a clear theoretical basis as of yet. Negotiation is a complicated process with many aspects that have only partially been described with the formal rigidity needed to build support systems. Most theories about negotiation are descriptive and not prescriptive, which, among other things, prevents their use as a basis for negotiation support systems. Complicating matters is that a negotiation process consists of several distinct stages, each with its own characteristics. Furthermore, there are many types of negotiations, depending on the domain. This suggests that we should not strive for one general negotiation support system, but for a set of domain-specific tools. To ground the development and application of these tools in different scenarios, we propose an integrated theoretical framework. After presenting an overview of existing negotiation support approaches, we construct a business negotiation support metamodel for NSS analysis. The metamodel is illustrated by analyzing the MeMo project, which concerns contract negotiations in small and medium enterprises in the European construction industry. The MeMo system is one of the first business NSS with an explicit international orientation.

An XML-Enabled Association Rule Framework

With the sheer amount of data stored, presented and exchanged using XML nowadays, the ability to extract knowledge from XML data sources becomes increasingly important and desirable. This paper aims to integrate the newly emerging XML technology with data mining technology, using association rule mining as a case in point. Compared with traditional association mining in the well-structured world (e.g., relational databases), mining from XML data is faced with more challenges due to the inherent flexibilities of XML in both structure and semantics. The primary challenges include 1) a more complicated hierarchical data structure; 2) an ordered data context; and 3) a much bigger data size. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose an extended XML-enabled association rule framework, which is flexible and powerful enough to represent both simple and complex structured association relationships inherent in XML data.

Modelling Communication between Cooperative Systems

In cooperative systems many of the obligations, prohibitions and permissions that govern the behaviour of the system exist as a result of communication with users and/or other systems. In this paper we will discuss the role of illocutionary logic and deontic logic in modelling these communication processes and the resulting norms. The combination of illocutionary and deontic logic can be used to reason about communication structures. It is also possible to model the authorization relations, on the basis of which orders and requests can be made, and the delegation of these authoritizations in this logic.

Workflow analysis with communication norms

The language/action perspective (LAP) as orginally introduced by Winograd and Flores has inspired several tools and information system design methodologies. The goal of this article is to make the communication norms underlying various LAP workflow loop models (DEMO, ActionWorkflow) explicit and to contrast them with the auditing norms of internal control. It appears that the communicative action paradigm embedded in DEMO and the customer satisfaction orientation of ActionWorkflow lead to norms which resemble the ones required by internal control, but there are some important differences. For that reason, we propose an extended workflow loop model that distinguishes between customer relations and agency relations. Whereas current LAP approaches do not take agency relations explicitly into account, the extended workflow loop model allows us to analyze the effects of delegation on communicative processes. A framework is offered for the normative analysis of workflows based on a number of formalized communication norms.