Wiwat Vatanawood

An approach to construct formal model of business process model from BPMN workflow patterns

The business process model is commonly created as a fundamental high level analysis model. The BPMN is one of the well known and widely used to represent the business process model. Recently, the BPMN workflow patterns are proposed as standardized business process model building blocks. The BPMN workflow patterns also provide the business analysts the common patterns of solutions to various workflow activities in practical way. The verification of BPMN workflow patterns is also essential to provide the better testing strategy in the software development. The infeasible path of the business process will be detected beforehand in the early stages of the software process. The formal model of business process will help either simulate the possible paths or verify the exhaustive search of the infeasible cases. However, the formal model is manually written and difficult to construct. In this paper, we propose an approach to construct formal model of business process model from given BPMN workflow patterns - basic control-flow patterns, and how to systematically generate the PROMELA. The BPMN control-flow patterns are extracted and translated into the PROMELA template. The resulting formal model in PROMELA is finally generated and correctly simulated in SPIN.

A development of business rules with decision tables for business processes

At present, business rules and business processes are increasingly significant for organizations. Business processes enable organization to quickly respond to changes and align with business objectives. Business rules enable organization to decouple business logic from the applications. However, the people who truly know the business rules like business managers essentially implement the business rules through software developers. This may cause the business rules used in IT systems not align with organization goals and lack of agility to change. This paper presents a method that enables the business managers to create and edit the business rules themselves by constructing decision tables as a guideline and exposing them as web services in BPEL (business process execution language) to support the expected business processes.

Instructional design using component-based development and learning object classification

The classification approaches to structural and functional learning object represent views on how the instructional designs are needed for providing useful contents for users. As learning object is increasingly used in education and training, needs for structured contents and reusability of them are also the rise. This paper proposes an integrated model, by using two models of learning object classification - structural classification and functional classification. A support environment is that the design of instruction for e-learning modules, based on component-based development technologies such as XML, JavaBeans, MVC (model-view-controller) architecture and JSP. This approach reduces cost and times for constructing Web pages of a course and makes the course more interesting and up-to-date as well.

Detection of design pattern in class diagram using ontology

The UML class diagram is used to show the structure of a particular system so that the designer can see the overview picture of the system. The design patterns help us solve the anticipated problems of the system design in the software process. It also helps guide the system design to be more flexible and scalable. However, the automatic detection of design patterns is useful as well in order to assess the expected patterns found in the design model. This paper proposes a tool for detecting design pattern in class diagram using ontologies. Our approach exploits the SQWRL rule created in the ontology to reason the structure of each particular design pattern. The number of target design pattern is reported and the related components of the pattern are located correctly.

Defining global schema for ETL of human resource performance appraisal system using REA ontology

Integrating data sources with different local schemas by ETL requires a global schema definition for improving consistency. However, the definition is usually performed without standard guideline. We propose an improved methodology for defining a conceptual model for the global schema by applying REA ontology which represents semantics for general organizational activities with their underlying policies. This study presents the generic model for not only human resource performance appraisal system, but also other business domains. The model can be extended and adapted to constant changes of appraisal policies. To be conformed to the ontology foundation, it can be implemented with RDF.

Transforming YAWL workflow to BPEL skeleton

Nowadays, a business process is presented widely in form of BPEL in order to illustrate the interaction of web services. Unfortunately, some complex business processes are not completely implemented by BPEL due to the limitation of the language. An alternative language called YAWL is lately created to support the complex patterns of business processes/workflows and to provide the well-form structural checking scheme of the patterns. However, BPEL is still famous, standardized and supported in the modeling tools. In this research, a YAWL-to-BPEL transforming procedure is proposed to encourage the alternative of using YAWL as a initial modeling language. The YAWL process/workflow patterns will be transformed into a meta-model using control flow graph. The Fold function is invoked to perform the iterative checking on both the well-structured and non well-structured process/workflow patterns. The corresponding BPEL skeleton will be finally generated.

Detection of design patterns from class diagram and sequence diagrams using ontology

This paper proposes an alternative scheme to detect design patterns in the early design stage. Both structural and behavioral designs primarily drawn in class diagram and its associated sequence diagrams are considered. Our detection approach exploits the knowledge base defined in ontology and the relevant inference rules to detect the design patterns. The Similar structural design patterns are effectively identified and exposed using ontology. In our approach, the target system design including a class diagram and its associated sequence diagrams are analyzed and translated into knowledge concepts in ontology in terms of RDF/OWL elements. The detection is performed by semantically searching our predefined knowledge base of the expected design patterns and their corresponding detecting inference rules through SWRL and SQWRL. The Protege tool is used to facilitate our demonstration. The design patterns are detected, and the set of the classes and their association are reported correctly.

UML Component Diagram to Acme Compiler

During the design phase, software architectural model is essentially used to verify the conformance of the design model against the given non-functional specifications. Theoretically, the formal architectural description languages are introduced to describe the software architectural model and the formal verification will be then possibly conducted. However, the mentioned formal approaches are not so popular because the formal languages are so difficult and seldomly supported by mature tools. Alternatively, the UML component diagram is one of the popular semi formal languages used to represent the software architectural model. In this paper, we propose an automatic mean to convert the popular UML component diagram represented by XMI into one of the formal architectural description languages called Acme. A UML component diagram to Acme compiler is implemented using FLEX and YACC tools. The context free grammar of the two languages are formally conformed.

Business process ontology for defining user story

Writing a user story is essential to communicate with end users and developers. It is popular practices found in most agile methodologies. Therefore, to reuse the user stories from the previous successful projects becomes necessary. In this paper, we propose the business process ontology for defining user story. The ontology is a knowledge base designed to collect the user stories in term of N-triple. The ontology schema is designed using classes and hierarchy relation along with the properties according to Role-Action-Object relations. We introduce the synonym property to simplify and reduce the number of the nodes in the ontology as well. Finally, we demonstrate how to initially populate and build the ontology from the historical user stories.

An xADL Extension for Service Oriented Architecture Design

Service Oriented Architecture demonstrates the concept that the diverse and complex resources in an organization distributedly work together so-called a service application. While Service Oriented Architectural Modeling Language (SOAML) becomes lately an alternative metalanguage in the design of software architecture. But in the real environment, a software architectural model is composed of the hybrid architectural patterns including SOA. We believe the usage of ADLs is more appropriate choice for hybrid architecture model. Among the variety of the ADLs, xADL is more flexible and extensible to the new architectural types and templates. In this paper, we select xADL as our base metalanguage and propose an alternative extension of xADL to cope with SOA pattern. The extended part of xADL is carefully defined in order to preserve the standard well-formalness of the original xADL schema.