Paul Johannesson

Natural Language Processing and Information Systems

Database prototyping is a technique widely used both to validate user requirements and to verify certain application functionality. These tasks usually require the population of the underlying data structures with sampling data that, additionally, may need to stick to certain restrictions. Although some existing approaches have already automated this population task by means of random data generation, the lack of semantic meaning of the resulting structures may interfere both in the user validation and in the designer verification task. In order to solve this problem and improve the intuitiveness of the resulting prototypes, this paper presents a population system that, departing from the information contained in a UML-compliant Domain Conceptual Model, applies Information Extraction techniques to compile meaningful information sets from texts available through Internet. The system is based on the semantic information extracted from the EWN lexical resource and includes, among other features, a named entity recognition system and an ontology that speed up the prototyping process and improve the quality of the sampling data.

A method for transforming relational schemas into conceptual schemas

A major problem with currently existing database systems is that there often does not exist a conceptual understanding of the data. Such an understanding can be obtained by describing the data using a semantic data model, such as the ER model. Consequently, there is a need for methods that translate a schema in a traditional data model into a conceptual schema. We present a method for translating a schema in the relational model into a schema in a conceptual model. We also show that the schema produced has the same information capacity as the original schema. The conceptual model used is a formalization of an extended ER model, which also includes the subtype concept.<<ETX>>

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.

Design principles for process modelling in enterprise application integration

There is a growing need for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies, which align the applications of an organisation to its business processes. Such technologies require an adequate methodological support so that well-structured and easily understandable models can be constructed. In this paper, such a methodological support is proposed by introducing principles for the design, validation and presentation of process models and associated data models. By applying these principles, we obtain different views of the models, and thereby facilitate the use of common models for different stakeholders, e.g. business managers, designers and operators.

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 a Framework for Comparing Process Modelling Languages

The increasing interest in process engineering and application integration has resulted in the appearance of various new process modelling languages. Understanding and comparing such languages has therefore become a major problem in information systems research and development. We suggest a framework to solve this problem involving several instruments: a general process meta-model with a table, an analysis of the event concept, and a classification of concepts according to the interrogative pronouns: what, how, why, who, when, and where. This framework can be used for several purposes, such as translating between languages or verifying that relevant organisational aspects have been captured. To validate the framework, three different process modelling languages have been compared: Business Modelling Language (BML), Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) and UML State Diagrams.

A declarative foundation of process models

In this paper, a declarative foundation for process models is proposed. Three issues in process management and modeling are identified: business orientation, traceability, and flexibility. It is shown how these issues can be addressed by basing process models on business models, where a business model focuses on the transfer of value between agents. As a bridge between business models and process models, the notion of activity dependency model is introduced, which identifies, classifies, and relates activities needed for executing and coordinating value transfers.

Aligning Goals and Services through Goal and Business Modelling

E-services are used as the cornerstones for modelling interaction points of cooperating IT systems, within and between enterprises. So far, research and development of e-services have mainly focused on an operational perspective, such as the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. However, on a strategic level, the success of e-services depends on their ability to work as a medium for the exchange of business values. In this paper, we present an approach that utilizes goal and business models as the foundation for designing e-services. The approach can be used to ensure that the developed e-services support the desired goals and business values of involved actors. A case study from the Swedish health care sector is used to ground and apply the presented approach.

Towards a formal definition of goal‐oriented business process patterns

Purpose - Organizations of today are becoming ever more focused on their business processes. This has resulted in an increasing interest in using best practices for business process re-engineering. ...