As a result of the growing adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) technology different stakeholders need to understand and agree upon the process models that are used to con?gure BPM systems. However, BPM users have problems dealing with the complexity of such models. Therefore, the challenge is to improve the comprehension of process models. While a substantial amount of literature is devoted to this topic, there is no overview of the various mechanisms that exist to deal with managing complexity in (large) process models. It is thus hard to obtain comparative insight into the degree of support offered for various complexity reducing mechanisms by stateof-the-art languages and tools. This paper focuses on complexity reduction mechanisms that affect the abstract syntax of a process model, i.e. the structure of a process model. These mechanisms are captured as patterns, so that they can be described in their most general form and in a language- and tool-independent manner. The paper concludes with a comparative overview of the degree of support for these patterns offered by state-of-theart languages and language implementations.

Managing process model complexity via abstract syntax modifications

Modeling efficient knowledge bases for improving the semantic property of the World Wide Web is mandatory for promoting innovations and developments in World Wide Web. There is a need for efficient and organized modeling of the knowledge bases. In this paper, a strategy Onto Collab is proposed for construction of knowledge bases using ontology modeling. Ontologies are visualized as the basic building blocks of the knowledge in the web. The cognitive bridge between the human conceptual understanding of real world data and the processable data by computing systems is represented by Ontologies. A domain is visualized as a collection of similar ontologies. A review based strategy is proposed over a secure messaging system to author ontologies and a platform for retracing the domain ontologies as individuals and as a team is proposed. Evaluations for ontologies constructed pertaining to a domain for non-wiki knowledge bases is carried out.

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Onto Collab: Strategic review oriented collaborative knowledge modeling using ontologies

Bibliometric Analysis of Portuguese Research in e-government

In this paper, we present an investigation of the Portuguese research on e-government. Bibliometric techniques are used to explore all the documents published by researchers affiliated to Portuguese institutions from 2005 to 2014 and listed in the Scopus® database. Research production, impact, source types, language used, subject areas, topics, scopes, methods, authors, institutions, networks, and international cooperation are analysed and discussed. We conclude that so that Portuguese research on e-government can evolve, more researchers should be involved, international cooperation should be developed, and more attention should be given to the study of the reasons behind the very good results of the country in the provision of e-government services, as measured by the international rankings. By establishing the evolution and current standing of e-government research in Portugal and exploring the ways forward, our conclusions may prove useful to e-government researchers, research managers, and research policy makers.

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A decade of Portuguese research in e-government: evolution, current standing, and ways forward

Disaster Warning System in the Philippines Through Enterprise Engineering Perspective : A Study on the 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan

We consider current Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) Action Rules Specification to be unnecessarily complex and ambiguous. Even while using a “structured English” syntax similar to the one used in SBVR, such specifications are: incomplete while not containing enough ontological information to derive a functional implementation; and complex by containing mostly unneeded specifications. We propose a new meta-model for DEMO’s Action Model in the form of an EBNF syntax which is being implemented in a prototype that directly executes DEMO models as an Information and Workflow System. This prototype includes an action engine that runs DEMO transactions and the enclosed actions specified in our approach. We are currently integrating Blockly in our solution to allow syntactically correct visual programming of our proposed new Action Rule language that includes constructs to evaluate logical conditions, update the state of internal or external information systems, obtain input and provide output (formatted with WYSIWYG template editor) to users, among others.

Bridging Ontology and Implementation with a New DEMO Action Meta-model and Engine

The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) comprises a set of models and diagrams to represent an organization. While applying DEMO on a project in collaboration with the town council of the city of Funchal, we saw a need for improvements in the Process Model. Thus, in this paper we propose improvements to the current body of knowledge regarding DEMO’s Process Model representations, fusing the contents of the Process and Cooperation models. Namely, we propose a semantically richer Process Diagram and a Transaction Description Table, to achieve a more agile and comprehensive solution to depict the essence of organizational reality. Our approach presents the information in a more straightforward and transparent way, which is easier to understand by collaborators. This project also confirmed the known DEMO conciseness metric of allowing a reduction of over 95% in the complexity of representations. One of our main research contributions is that, even though the information is more accessible and easier to grasp in the diagrams we propose, the processes’ complexity is still present in the description table.

Validation of DEMO’s Conciseness Quality and Proposal of Improvements to the Process Model

This paper reflects some useful outcomes of a practical enterprise change project where the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) was used in the initial stage as to give a neutral and concise but comprehensive view of the organization of a local government administration having the purpose to implement an e-government project. During our enterprise engineering project we were faced with some problems while applying current official DEMO Way of Working (DWoW), namely: (1) the lack of a tool and method steps to quickly and collaboratively collect enterprise model data and (2) inability to efficiently and effectively propagate model changes. The main contribution of this paper is a new DWoW as to solve the just mentioned problems supported by collaborative prototype tool.

A Case Study Based New DEMO Way of Working and Collaborative Tooling

This paper reports the findings and insights obtained from the application of a DEMO-based methodology in a collaboration project with the town council of Funchal, city of Madeira Island, on the subject of the Portuguese Building Code of law. As agreed with the council, one of the goals of this project was to model the universe of discourse of their Urban Appraisal Department. Its activity is subject to very complex legal restrictions encompassing several knowledge domains such as architecture, engineering, etc. The unique circumstances and requirements of the project motivated a novel version of DEMO’s Fact Model. Specifically, 510 surveyed facts, composed of 65 concepts and 445 composing attributes along with their rationale, were specified in two main artifacts presented in this paper: the Fact Diagram and the Fact Description Table. Moreover, 567 combinations between 119 types of application deliverables and 21 types of urban operations - all of which potentially subject to future changes - were considered as instances of concepts in type-square structures related to application deliverable management. Our main research contributions are the synthetization and expressive power of the improved Fact Model, which allowed us to overcome the complexity and intricacies of legislation and create representations that are easily understood and productively discussed by the full range of stakeholders regardless of their technical prowess, experience, or background.

Fact Model in DEMO - Urban Law Case and Proposal of Representation Improvements

In this paper we present a novel conceptual model that systematizes the integrated management and adaptation of: 1 enterprise models, 2 their representations, 3 their underlying meta-models i.e. their abstract syntax and 4 the representation rules i.e. concrete syntax for the respective models. All this for different modelling languages and also different versions of these languages. Thanks to our original use of the adaptive object model and type square patterns-normally applied in the context of software engineering, but here applied for enterprise engineering-we manage to provide a strong conceptual foundation for the development of software tools that allow a precise and coherent specification of models and their evolution and also of meta-models and their evolution. We also present a prototype of such a tool currently being developed to enable collaborative enterprise ontology model management using the Semantic MediaWiki as a base framework. This solution is solidly grounded on the theoretical foundations of organizational self-awareness and Ψ-theory of enterprise ontology and is a valuable contribution to facilitate general and distributed enterprise model management and also concrete and abstract syntax specification i.e. the specification of a language's meta-model. This allows flexibility and ease of use in creation and adaptation of organizational models and also the use of semantic queries to detect and inform users on any violation of meta-model rules. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Duarte Pinto

Papers

Bridging Ontology and Implementation with a New DEMO Action Meta-model and Engine

Validation of DEMO’s Conciseness Quality and Proposal of Improvements to the Process Model

A Case Study Based New DEMO Way of Working and Collaborative Tooling

Fact Model in DEMO - Urban Law Case and Proposal of Representation Improvements

Universal Enterprise Adaptive Object Model: A Semantic Web-Based Implementation of Organizational Self-Awareness