Jens Gulden

A Systematic Evaluation of Enterprise Modelling Approaches on Their Applicability to Automatically Generate ERP Software

Customising Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to the enterprises needs is still a technical endeavour often involving enabling/disabling modules, modifying configuration files, etc. This is quite surprising given the large body of work on Enterprise Modelling and Model-Driven Software Engineering. Ideally, one models ones enterprise and, with a press on a button, the ERP software supporting the enterprise is generated. In this paper, we present a systematic evaluation of Enterprise Modelling approaches for their applicability to automatically generate ERP software supporting an enterprise. Inspired by the work of an ERP vendor, which, next to generating ERP software to support an enterprise, also wants to incorporate the common-sense of an enterprise in the ERP software, we also evaluate Enterprise Ontologies since current Enterprise Modelling languages lack semantics on the instance level. None of the existing approaches are tailored towards automated (ERP) software generation without the need for programming. However, the approaches possess valuable aspects which can aid in the ERP software generation process. Therefore, next to the evaluation, we present take-home points from the approaches, e.,g., reasoning capabilities to make common-sense suggestions when something is not possible.

Visually Comparing Process Dynamics with Rhythm-Eye Views

To visualize information about process behavior over time, typically timeline based visualizations are used in contemporary analysis tools. When an overview over a large range of process instances and possible repetitive behavior is to be displayed, however, the timeline projection comes with several limitations. In this article, an alternative to the common timeline projection of process event data is elaborated, which allows to project series of time-related events and regularities therein onto a circular structure. Especially for comparing process rhythms in multiple sets of event data, this visualization comes with advantages over timeline projections and provides more flexibility in configuration. A conceptual elaboration of the approach together with a prototypical implementation is presented in this paper.

Patterns as Abstractions of Spatial Axes

The decision of how to model patterns as elements of formal systems is a yet sparsely covered research topic. The present article introduces an approach which understands patterns as non-linguistic carriers of formal semantics in models. The notion of patterns is embedded into a theory which links spatial orientation and navigation to the constitution of semantics in human understanding. Inside this framework, the concept of patterns is treated conform to the notion of spatial axes on a shared higher level of abstraction. A formal model is presented which expresses the introduced notion of patterns in a practically applicable meta-modeling language.

A Research Agenda on Visualizations in Information Systems Engineering

Effectively using visualizations in socio-technical artifacts like information systems and software yields a number of challenges, such as ensuring that they allow for all necessary information to be captured, that visualizations can be efficiently and correctly read, and perhaps most important: that communication is fostered, leading rather to a shared understanding instead of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. While over the last years many strides have been made to propose visualizations for specific purposes (such as modeling language notations, software interfaces, visual methods, and games), there has been less attention for frameworks and guidelines meant to support the people making such visualizations. When taking a closer look at the deficiencies in research on visualizations in information systems today, it turns out that especially a deeper understanding of the mental processes behind comprehending visualizations and the way humans are cognitively affected by visualizations, is required in order to gain advanced theoretic underpinnings for the creation and use of visualizations in information systems. In this paper we build towards a research agenda on visualization in information systems engineering by identifying a number of relevant requirements for research to address, of fundamental, methodical and tool nature.

Business Process Models for Visually Navigating Process Execution Data

To analyze large amounts of data, visual analysis tools offer filter mechanisms for drilling down into multi-dimensional information spaces, or slicing and dicing them according to given criteria. This paper introduces an analysis approach for navigating multi-dimensional process instance execution logs based on business process models. By visually selecting parts of a business process model, a set of available log entries is filtered to include only those entries that result from execution instances of the selected process branches. Using this approach allows to exploratively navigate through process execution logs and analyze them according to the causal-temporal relationships encoded in the underlying business process model. The business process models used by the approach can either be created using model editors, or be statistically derived using process mining techniques. We exemplify our approach with a prototypical implementation.

Toward Requirements-Driven Design of Visual Modeling Languages

The design of a visual modeling language demands for a large number of decisions to be taken, depending on the intended purposes of the language, the domain context, and the goals and requirements of different stakeholders who are the prospective users of the language. Methodical support for the design and choice of visual modeling languages plays an important role in Enterprise Modeling (EM), because EM strongly relies on the use of visual modeling languages for expressing human-understandable abstractions of complex domain contexts. However, existing research primarily discusses individual design aspects of visual modeling languages. The results of these studies partially overlap or contradict each other. The work at hand introduces an approach for systematically identifying and managing trade-offs between competing design recommendations, as well as for gaining an integrated multi-perspective view on requirements towards visual modeling languages. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by reconsidering some design decisions taken for the widely used Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) language.

Risk map as a library management information dashboard: a case study in adapting a configural display

In this paper, we report on our application of Cognitive Work Analysis to create an Abstraction Hierarchy model that helps librarians identify key functional relationships for managing the overall performance of a library. By themselves, functional relationships are not as useful in providing insights into the reasons for good or poor performance. However, when these functional relationships are set against the context of system invariants and constraints, they can provide library managers information useful for diagnosis and localization of problems. We propose the Risk Map visualization technique as an information dashboard to cognitively access these functional relationships. Furthermore, when these functional relationships are portrayed over time, trends and patterns can be detected with relative ease.

Semantic Support for Visual Data Analyses in Electronic Commerce Settings

While the value of visualizations for understanding and exploring knowledge is considered high in diverse fields of application, the efforts for creating effective and efficient data visualizations often outweigh the capacities of individuals and organizations to create their own data visualizations from scratch. Hence, software tool support is demanded to allow users who are not experts in creating visualizations to have access to these visual means of expression as well.

Recommendations for Data Visualizations Based on Gestalt Patterns

An increasing amount of automated business processes and more intensive network communication among enterprise information systems leads to continuously growing amounts of data, which to understand requires to find cognitively adequate modes of representation. One is to use data visualizations. Support for efficiently selecting appropriate data visualizations based on specific information demands, however, is yet very limited. This article suggests a model infrastructure which allows to enrich syntactical matching patterns between data and visualization elements by associating Gestalt Patterns to both the characteristics of available data, and to visualization types. Based on these uniformly associated Gestalt Pattern characteristics, a distance measure can be computed between available data and available visualization types, which forms the basis for performing an automatic ranking of visualization types to support users in selecting visualizations appropriate to their information demands.

Message from the Methodical Development of Modeling Tools Workshop Co-Chairs (Mod Tools 2015)

Preface to the workshop