There has been a huge influx of business process modeling langu ages as business process management (BPM) and process-aware information systems continue to expand into various business domains. The origins of process modeling languages are quite diverse, although two dominant approaches can be observed; one based on graphical models, and the other based on rule specifications. However, at this time, there is no report in literature that specifically targets a comparative analysis of these two approaches, on aspects such as the relative areas of application, power of expression, and limitations. In this paper we have attempted to address this question. We will present both a survey of the two approaches as well as a critical and comparative analysis.

A survey of comparative business process modeling approaches

This paper describes a long-term research program on developing ontological foundations for conceptual modeling. This program, organized around the theoretical background of the foundational ontology UFO (Unified Foundational Ontol- ogy), aims at developing theories, methodologies and engineering tools with the goal of advancing conceptual modeling as a theoretically sound discipline but also one that has concrete and measurable practical implications. The paper describes the historical context in which UFO was conceived, briefly discusses its stratified organization, and reports on a number of applica- tions of this foundational ontology over more than a decade. In particular, it discusses the most successful application of UFO, namely, the development of the conceptual modeling language OntoUML. The paper also discusses a number of methodological and computational tools, which have been developed over the years to support the OntoUML community. Examples of these methodological tools include ontological patterns and anti-patterns; examples of these computational tools include automated support for pattern-based model construction, formal model verification, formal model validation via visual simulation, model verbalization, code generation and anti-pattern detection and rectification. In addition, the paper reports on a variety of appli- cations in which the language as well as its associated tools have been employed to engineer models in several institutional contexts and domains. Finally, it reflects on some of these lessons learned by observing how OntoUML has been actually used in practice by its community and on how these have influenced both the evolution of the language as well as the advancement of some of the core ontological notions in UFO.

/pdf/towards-ontological-foundations-for-conceptual-modeling-the-7gfx6furw3.pdf

Towards ontological foundations for conceptual modeling: The unified foundational ontology (UFO) story

Activity recognition systems are a large field of research and development, currently with a focus on advanced machine learning algorithms, innovations in the field of hardware architecture, and on...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1550147716665520

A review on applications of activity recognition systems with regard to performance and evaluation

This article presents the design of a real-time health monitoring system which can store a patient's basic health parameters. The data can be made available to a medical practitioner as an alert and for monitoring by multiple means of communication. At present, healthcare systems exist with single mode communication option – popularly either in GSM or data access on a web application. The proposed health monitoring system enhances healthcare delivery by communicating multiplexed data over three modes – BLE (mobile application), GSM (messaging services) and Wi-Fi (Internet).

A health monitoring system for vital signs using IoT

The School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Republic of Korea National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India Correspondence Anand Paul, The School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, #207, IT Building 5, Daegu 702701, Republic of Korea. Email: paul.editor@gmail.com Funding information National Research Foundation of Korea, Grant/Award Number: NRF2017R1C1B5017464 We admire the emerging technologies that fascinate us, as it has become part of our daily life. Internet of Things (IoT) plays a major role in simplifying human effort. It leaps forward taking the advantages of latest wireless devices and communication technologies. IoT is a combination of technologies such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing, wireless communication devices and sensors, Internet protocol, and others. IoT logically interconnects and interoperates physical objects (sensors, wired/wireless communication devices) and virtual objects (web applications, virtual machines) over existing Internet infrastructure. IoT collects and records heterogeneous data (such as documents, images, videos, audios, and others) from heterogeneous applications (such as CCTV, medical images, barcode reader, and others) with the help of Internet. People, physical objects, and virtual objects are logically connected to the network to observe and analyze for decision-making. Therefore, IoT has transformed to be an important evolving technology and inevitable in every sectors.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hbe2.133

Internet of Things: A primer

It is an important topic in Active and Assisted Living (AAL) research and development to support elderly people suffering from memory impairment in their daily activities. A promising approach to such support is providing memory aids based on knowledge of how the person to be supported usually (i.e., in an unimpaired condition) copes with her/his daily activities. Such knowledge may be captured by IoT solutions,appropriately structured and stored in a knowledge base, and exploited when the need of support is detected. Determining the best help for a given situation implies decision-making, since the actions– flow (behavior) of an activity usually involves probabilistic branches: An automated system needs to decide which of the possible next actions is best suited for the user in a given situation. Problems of this nature involve uncertainty levels that have to be dealt with. Many approaches to this problem exploit statistical data only, thus ignoring important semantic data as, for instance, are provided by Ontologies. However, ontologies do not support reasoning over uncertainty natively. In this paper, we present a probabilistic semantic model that represent information from IoT sources and enables reasoning over uncertainty without losing semantic information. This model is implemented as an extension of the Human Behavior Monitoring and Support (HBMS) approach that provides a conceptual ”human cognitive model” for representing the user–s behavior and its context in her/his living environment. The performance of this approach was evaluated using real data collected from a smart home prototype equipped with installable sensors and IoT devices. The experiments provided promising results which we will discuss regarding limits and challenges to overcome.

IoT-based human action prediction and support

Modeling and modeling methods are crucial for information systems engineering but are seldom seamlessly integrated into all phases of development and operation: Practitioners challenge the benefits of modeling and complain about the confusing variety of concepts with overlapping semantics, symbols and syntactic rules of today’s standardized, “universal” modeling languages. Therefore, domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) are gaining increasing popularity: they are lean and convenient, support the productivity of modeling, and help to increase model quality and comprehensibility. There are, however, few approaches to embedding a DSML into a domain-specific modeling method (DSMM) that provides guidelines about how to use a given DSML and to evaluate related models. This chapter aims to make a contribution towards filling that gap by discussing, as an example and proof of concept, a domain-specific modeling method for the human cognitive modeling language HCM-L, a DSML for the domain of active and assisted living. As a modeling language without tool support has no chance to be used in practice, we are conducting that discussion on the basis of HCM-L modeler, a tool that was implemented using the metamodeling platform ADOxx and can be accessed via OMiLAB, the Open Models Laboratory for modeling method engineering. HCM-L modeler is component of an ambient assistance system for supporting elder persons in mastering their daily life activities.

HCM-L: Domain-Specific Modeling for Active and Assisted Living

This paper advocates a rigorous model focused paradigm of information system development and use. We introduce the concept of “Model Centered Architecture” that sees an information system to be a compound of various networked models, each of which is formed with the means of a Domain Specific Modeling Language. This languages are tailored to the particular circumstances of the respective system aspect. I.e., from a MOF perspective, MCA focuses on the MOF levels M2 (definitions of the DSMLs to be used for the specification of the system and it’s contexts), M1 (Specification of all System and Data Components using the DSMLs) and M0 (the instances, i.e. models of concrete objects, functions and processes). The transformation of M0 citizens to the respective implementation concepts (Structure → Data, Function→ Program, Process→ Workflow) is delegated to mapping functions defined on M2, restricted on M1 to the particular schemata (in the sense of mappings between the respective sets of schema instances), and instantiated on M0 for the concrete instances. The paper shows how such model centered approach may be applied in practice using two real development projects as running examples.

Model Centered Architecture

The problem of selecting the business process modeling methodology best suited for the business process modeling task at hand is often hampered by the conditions under which the selection is made. In this paper we sketch the foundations of a framework for selecting business process modeling methods. We base this framework on the Analytic Hierarchy Process. We therefore use a hierarchy of characteristics of business process modeling methodologies for our selection approach. To demonstrate how our approach works we discuss its application to two business process modeling tasks. We have developed a software tool that implements our framework. We describe this tool briefly in this paper.

/pdf/towards-selecting-among-business-process-modeling-1z8sbwn0dz.pdf

Towards selecting among business process modeling methodologies

Digital Ecosystems consist of a variety of interlinked subsystems. This paper presents a flexible approach to define the links between such subsystems. The idea is to exploit the paradigm of Model Centered Architecture (MCA) and to specify all links/interfaces by means of appropriate Domain Specific Modeling Languages. The approach has been successfully applied and evaluated in several projects. As a proof of concept, we present the model-based interfacing between assistive systems and human activity recognition systems, which showed good performance as needed in real-world applications.

Vladimir A. Shekhovtsov

Papers

IoT-based human action prediction and support

HCM-L: Domain-Specific Modeling for Active and Assisted Living

Model Centered Architecture

Towards selecting among business process modeling methodologies

Domain Specific Models as System Links