Archive for the ‘Information Systems’ Category

Visit to Tsinghua University – Aug 2011

Friday, September 9th, 2011

This week I returned from a two weeks long visit at the BPM group at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where I was invited by Prof. Jianmin Wang, Assistant Dean of School of Software.

This year Tsinghua University is celebrating a 100 years anniversary. With its more than 37 000 students, it is one of the larger and and well-reputed universities in Kina.

During my stay I also attended the first Chinese BPM conference. The high point of the conference was the keynote speech “BPM: Quo Vadis? Future Research Directions” given by Arthur ter Hofstede from QUT.

Anchor Modeling Journal Article

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

After the Best paper award at the ER 2009 conference, we got invitation to write a journal article on Anchor Modeling. The title of the new article is “Anchor Modeling – Agile Information Modeling in Evolving Data Environmnets”. The authors are Lars Rönnbäck (Resight), Olle Regardt (Teracom), Maria Bergholtz (DSV), Paul Johannesson (DSV) and I. The article has now been accepted for publication in the journal Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE, Elsevier). A preprint of it can be found here.


Abstract: Maintaining and evolving data warehouses is a complex, error prone, and time consuming activity. The main reason for this state of aairs is that the environment of a data warehouse is in constant change, while the
warehouse itself needs to provide a stable and consistent interface to information spanning extended periods
of time. In this article, we propose an agile information modeling technique, called Anchor Modeling, that
oers non-destructive extensibility mechanisms, thereby enabling robust and exible management of changes.
A key benet of Anchor Modeling is that changes in a data warehouse environment only require extensions,
not modications, to the data warehouse. Such changes, therefore, do not require immediate modications of
existing applications, since all previous versions of the database schema are available as subsets of the current
schema. Anchor Modeling decouples the evolution and application of a database, which when building a
data warehouse enables shrinking of the initial project scope. While data models were previously made
to capture every facet of a domain in a single phase of development, in Anchor Modeling fragments can
be iteratively modeled and applied. We provide a formal and technology independent denition of anchor
models and show how anchor models can be realized as relational databases together with examples of
schema evolution. We also investigate performance through a number of lab experiments, which indicate that
under certain conditions anchor databases perform substantially better than databases constructed using
traditional modeling techniques.

Keywords
: Anchor Modeling, database modeling, normalization, 6NF, data warehousing, agile development,
temporal databases, table elimination

Most Promising Practical Concept Award

Monday, September 20th, 2010

We are happy to announce that the paper “Design of an Open Social E-Service for Assisted Living” was awarded “most promising practical concept” at the EGOV2010 conference in Lausanne Switzerland. The paper was written by myself, Gustaf Juell-Skielse, and Petia Wohed. The EGOV conference focuses on issues related to design, implementation and evaluation of e-Government. This was the ninth conference in the series and attracted almost 150 researchers presenting about 100 papers. Our paper presented some of the results from the Open Social Services project at Järfälla municipality financed by Vinnova.

Preprint of the paper can be found here: Design of an Open Social E-Service for Assisted Living.pdf

BPM for E-services

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

This week we submitted a paper titled “Business Process Management for Open E-services in Local Government” to the BPM track in the Australian Conference on Information Systems. The paper describes the prototype which we developed for the Open Social Services (ÖST) project. More generally it discusses the use of business process technology for the development of e-services. A preprint of the paper can be found here.

The work was carried out in cooperation with Dr. David Truffet from Australia and Gustaf Juell-Skielse (DSV). I met David during my visit at QUT last summer, which coincided with his own visit there. Similarly to me, David believes in the YAWL open-source initiative carried out by the BPM group at QUT and invests (among other through the establishment of a consulting company for YAWL) on spreading out the research results and YAWL to industry and official sector.

Project proposal to the Swedish Research Council (VR)

Monday, May 31st, 2010

The project proposal which Paul, Martin, Birger and myself submitted to the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) this year can be found here (VR10-main.pdf). It is an improvement from our proposal from last year. The objective is to research on the integration of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) with social software (SoS).

Presentation by A/Prof. Karim Baina

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Last Friday (16th of April 2010) A/Prof Karim Baina, visiting Syslab, gave a presentation on Enterprise Architecture as well as the work of his reserch team at Ensias.

The slides of the presentation can be found Karim.Baïna.EA.Talk@SYSLAB.16April2010.slides.long.version.pdf.
CV of A/Prof. Karim Baina can be found Karim.Baïna.EA.Talk@SYSLAB.16April2010.agenda.pdf.

Seminar on Value Encounters by Hans Weigand

Friday, October 30th, 2009

This week Hans Weigand and his PhD student Jeewani Jayasinghe from Tilburg University visited us for doing research on value based service modeling. We discussed the relationships between web services and “real” services and how conflicts can be detected when combining services. Hans also gave a presentation on value encounters as a means for capturing the logic of co-creation of value.

Workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontologies in Amsterdam 2009

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The first workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontologies (VMBO) was arranged by SYSLAB and took place in February in Kista. The second VMBO workshop will take place in Amsterdam on Dec 21 – 22 2009.

From the Call of Papers:
The importance of modeling the essence of enterprises on a level that abstracts from business process details is increasingly recognized. Two recognized approaches are value modeling and REA. The REA (Resources, Events and Agents) model originating from the accounting domain is maturing to a conceptual framework and ontology for Enterprise Information Architectures in general. Value modeling is a business modeling approach that focuses on the value objects exchanged in business networks and that is supported by the e3-value tool set.

Call for Papers

Business Process Management with Social Software: An Integrated Technology for Work Organisation

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Today, Paul, Birger, Martin and I submitted a project application to the Swedish Research Council.

Abstract:
Software support for well structured business processes is today provided through workflow technology
and process management tools. Tailored to support well structured processes, these tools do not provide
adequate support for loosely structured work activities such as knowledge intensive processes. This type of work
is heavily reliant on professional knowledge, deals with large amounts of data and tasks that can be redone several
times. The purpose of the project is to bring together state-of-the-art research in business process management
systems and social software to design services and methodology for supporting loosely structured processes. This
architecture will enable flexible process enactment, configurable and context-aware user interfaces, and service
based task support.

VR09-ProjectDescription.pdf
VR09-PopularDescription.pdf

Dr. Chun Ouyang’s visit at DSV – 17-21 Nov 2008

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Last week Dr. Chun Ouyang from the BPM group at QUT visited us. She used the opportunity to stop over in Stockholm after her conference trip to the 6th IEEE European Conferecne on Web Services held 12-14 November in Dublin.

Chun is known for her work on mapping BPMN to BPEL and BPEL to Petri nets. Recently Chun has been involved in the implementation of YAWL4Film. YAWL4Film is an extension of YAWL for supporting the film production process in the film industry in Australia. At DSV Chun gave a very interesting and inspiring presentation of this work. More about it can be read here.
Chun’s visit is a continuation of our cooperation with the BPM group at QUT, which I regularly visit (latest in July-August 2008).

During Chun’s one week stay at DSV we worked on:
– Migration of YAWL4Film and the Conference case to the new release of YAWL, YAWL 2.0
– A new project proposal at QUT, which will be related to our project proposal on Service Oriented Architecture for Knowledge Intensive Processes– The book chapters for the YAWL book in which we are involved.

Thanks for your visit Chun!