Rimantas Butleris

An Approach for Extracting Business Vocabularies from Business Process Models

Being a part of business process management (BPM) life cycle, business process modeling has found its place in information systems development (ISD) practices as well. At the same time, concepts of business vocabularies and rules are also the hot topics among BPM and ISD practitioners and academics. Nevertheless, in ISD, the integration of business process models with business vocabularies and rules is still not standardized and remains quite empiric. In this paper, basic aspects of the approach for business vocabularies’ extraction from business process models are presented. The approach is based on novel business level OMG standards “Business Process Model and Notation” (BPMN) and “Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Business Rules” (SBVR), thus contributing to OMG’s vision about Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and to model-driven development in general. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.42.2.2310

Extending BPMN Business Process Model with SBVR Business Vocabulary and Rules

Despite the fact that business process (BP) modeling has its long-lasting traditions in various areas of application, this discipline remains in the constant process of improvement and issue-solving. The possibilities of synergy among business process models and business vocabularies & rules are analyzed in this paper. The authors emphasize the existing gap between business process modeling and specification of business vocabularies & rules. Such situation may lead to misunderstandings while reading and interpreting business models and also miscommunication issues within among the organizations. Some of these issues could be resolved by realizing the integration of BP modeling standards with business vocabularies & rules. The paper presents some argumentation to back such statements. Later, basic principles of the approach for BPMN Business process model integration with SBVR business vocabulary & rules are presented and briefly described in this paper. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.41.4.2013

Application of particle swarm optimization algorithm to decision making model incorporating cluster analysis

Recently quite much attention was given to the investigation of Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO). It was proved that PSO algorithm has exhibited good performance across wide range application problems. This paper proposes the use of PSO algorithm for decision making model updating. The decision making model is used to generate one-step forward investment decisions for stock markets. The artificial neural networks (ANN) are used to make the analysis of historical daily stock returns and to calculate one day forward possible profit, which could be get while following the model proposed decisions, concerning the purchase of the stocks. Subsequently the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied in order to select the ldquoglobal bestrdquo ANNs for the future investment decisions and to adapt the weights of other networks towards the weights of the best network. Different from our previous works this paper presents a new variant of PSO algorithm where the clusters of particle are identified in the search space. Knowing clusters the centers of clusters are substitutes for the best particle. Also this paper introduces variation of regular PSO algorithm where decision and particle training is made based on the performance of worst particle. Experimental investigations have shown that average performance per a fixed number of iterations can be improved by substituting cluster centers for the individualpsilas best positions. Also experimental investigation on decision making using worst particle shows that better results than using regular PSO can be achieved.

Towards the Combination of BPMN Process Models with SBVR Business Vocabularies and Rules

Combination capabilities of BPMN and SBVR are analyzed in this paper. In order to combine these two standards we have to analyze current proposals. Process modeling focuses on visualization of process with specific notation. However, today there is a need to have business rules separately from process in order to reduce the size of the process model and avoid misunderstandings and miscommunications between analysts and domain experts or between organizations. Therefore, there is a need to combine business process management and business rule management in one user-friendly environment.

AN APPROACH FOR THE METAMODEL OF THE FRAMEWORK FOR A PARTIAL AGILE METHOD ADAPTATION

Today, such information system development methods as Extreme Programming, Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Crystal family, Agile modeling, OpenUP and others are being positioned as proven alter-natives to the more traditional plan-driven approaches. However, although there are a variety of agile methods to choose from, the formal methods for their partial adaptation and customization are lacking. The main aim of this paper is to present a metamodel of the framework for a partial agile method adaptation. The paper presents the process of metamodel construction from the concepts that are both direct and indirect solutions to the sub-problems of the partial agile method adaptation. The presented paper extends some of our earlier and more fragmented findings that have been described in our previous work. http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.40.1.194

REVERSIBLE LOSSLESS TRANSFORMATION FROM OWL 2 ONTOLOGIES INTO RELATIONAL DATABASES

The goal of the paper is to define reversible, information preserving transformation from OWL 2 ontologies into relational databases using our proposed hybrid approach, when a part of ontology constructs is directly represented by relational database structures and another part having no direct correspondences in a relational database is stored in metadata tables. The desirable transformation is defined in QVT Relations language following additional requirements under which such transformation is reversible and does not lose semantic information when performing from ontology to database and backward.

Graphical user interface development on the basis of data flows specification

This paper introduces graphical user interface (GUI) modelling approach and it positions in information system (IS) development process. The overview of graphical user interface design methods and methodologies is presented. The main objective of the proposal is the consistency of IS development process, which includes requirements specification, system design and implementation phases. The GUI modelling process is based on the data flows specification. Detailed explanation of modelling steps is presented. Paper includes an illustrative example of the web based GUI development according to the proposed process.

Approach for Semi-automatic Extraction of Business Vocabularies and Rules from Use Case Diagrams

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities to extract well-structured business vocabularies and rules from the formalized requirements specifications expressed via use case diagrams; Object Management Group’s (OMG) standards, namely Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Business Rules (SBVR) and Unified Modeling Language (UML), are used for this purpose. The paper concentrates on a semi-automatic extraction approach by proposing UML2SBVR mapping matrix, extraction algorithm and implementation prototype. An experiment and the evaluation of its results are discussed to prove the usability of the presented approach.

Towards Software Testing Process Improvement from Requirements

Software requirements are the concurrent part of any project. However, these requirements are not effectively used in the testing process. The solutions founded in literature not only confirm the relevance of the software requirements and testing, but also reveal the absence of better solution combining software requirements and testing in a single element. The solution how to minimize the gap between requirements and testing is presented in this paper, since it is especially significant in a change of requirements. The idea of solution is based on gathering the useful data for information system testing from requirements and transforming it into structural models.

The Need for Business Vocabularies in BPM or ISD Related Activities: Survey Based Study

Inclusion of business vocabularies (BVs), also referred to as glossaries, into information systems development (ISD) activities is a growing trend, yet this process is often lacking objective feedback and consolidated opinion from the industry and experts. In an effort to fill this gap, the two-stage research study with people working in the fields of information systems development or business process management (BPM) has been carried out. In this paper, key results of the questionnaire-based exploratory survey have been presented. Results make it relatively safe to presume that the BPM/ISD community generally supports the developments in the field of business vocabulary integration and standardization. On the other hand, results reveal that existing standards like SBVR are not widely known, and the BVs themselves are rarely considered a necessary element of the project. These findings could serve as a solid proof that research in this area, as well as development of working solutions, especially CASE tool integrations, should be intensified.