Abstract: This paper proposes a technique for analysis and testing BPEL-based web service composition using High-level Petri Nets. To illustrate how these compositions are verified, the relationships between BPEL-based web service composition and High-level Petri Nets is constructed. By analyzing the structure of web service composition based on BPEL, the corresponding HPN is constructed. The dynamism and occurrence are presented in HPN with guard expression with coloured token. After translation, the equivalent HPN of the web service composition based on BPEL can be verified on existing mature tool, and the related researches on HPN, e.g. testing coverage and reduction techniques that have been studied deeply, can be employed in testing of web service composition based on BPEL, optimized test case can be generated based on the HPN translated. An example is provided to illustrate the translation ruled and the automatic verify progress.

Abstract: Business rules provide an elegant solution to manage dynamic business logic by separating business knowledge from its implementation logic. The drawback of most existing business rule approaches is the lack of standardization and interoperability. The lack of service-orientation and remote accessibility of business rule engines makes it hard to use business rules in distributed environments. This paper contributes the design and implementation of VIDRE (Vienna Distributed Rules Engine), a service-oriented business rule engine based on RuleML. VIDRE enables enterprise applications to access business rules as easy as accessing a database, by exposing rules as Web services. VIDRE uses RuleML as an interlingua to represent facts, rules, and queries. One of the main contributions of the VIDRE approach is the ability to distribute rules and facts across various rule engines, therefore, enabling powerful ways of separating and executing business rules within intra- and interorganizational boundaries.

Abstract: Today component- and service-based technologies play a central role in many aspects of enterprise computing. However, although the technologies used to define, implement, and assemble components have improved significantly over recent years, techniques for verifying systems created from them have changed very little. The correctness and reliability of component-based systems are still usually checked using the traditional testing techniques that were in use before components and services became widespread, and the associated costs and overheads still remain high. This paper presents an approach which addresses this problem by making the system verification process more component-oriented. Based on the notion of built-in tests -- tests that are packaged and distributed with prefabricated, off-the-shelf components -- the approach and supporting infrastructure help to automate some of the testing process, thereby significantly reduces system testing effort. After providing an introduction to the principles behind component-based verification, and explaining the main features of the approach, we show by means of a small example how it can reduce system verification effort.

Abstract: Business performance modeling and model-driven business transformation are two research directions that are attracting much attention lately. In this study, we propose an approach for dashboard development that is model-driven and can be integrated with the business performance models. We adopt the business performance modeling framework, and we extend it in order to capture the reporting aspect of the business operation. We describe models that can effectively represent all the elements necessary for the business performance reporting process, and the interactions among them. We also demonstrate how all these models can be combined and automatically generate the final solution. Finally, we discuss our experience from the application of our technique in a real-world scenario. This case study shows that our technique can be efficiently applied to and handle changes in the underlying business models, delivering significant benefits in terms of both development time and flexibility.

Abstract: This paper presents an approach for translating legalese expression of business contracts into candidate business activities and processes while ensuring their compliance with contract. This is a progressive refinement using logic-based formalism to capture contract semantics and to serve as an intermediate step for transformation. Particular value of this approach is for those organisations that consider moving towards new approaches to enterprise contract management and applying them to their future contracts

Abstract: This paper sketches the approach we have taken in an extensive survey to evaluate existing tools providing support for enterprise architecture (EA) management. From there, we outline important strengths and weaknesses of existing EA management tools discovered in the survey and suggest some approaches for improving the tool support available in this field. The tool evaluation, to which the paper refers, is built on a definition of EA management, which we operationalized via a set of scenarios, which constitute a sufficiently concrete base for making precise statements about the tool support. The paper outlines some scenarios, which are constructed to be representative for EA management, and therefore cover typical tasks. In order to ensure the representativeness of the scenarios, they were validated by ten of our industry partners. Considering the results of the evaluation, which covered nine EA management tools, we show characteristic strengths and weaknesses common to the tools. From this analysis, which e.g. covered the tools? metamodeling capabilities, the methodologies they offer to address EA management, and especially their visualization-specific capabilities, we suggest areas for further improvement regarding the software support for EA management. This is meant as a contribution to the field of EA management, which we view as not adequately addressable in practice without tool support due to the inherent complexity of this field.

Abstract: This paper describes an approach and the architecture of Quality of Service (QoS) contract specification, establishment, and monitoring for Service Level Management (SLM). Contract is an essential concept in SLM. The service consumer side and the service provider side must share common understanding of QoS characteristics and agree on the common language for specifying desired QoS parameters in the form of QoS contracts. A service consumer must also negotiate with a service provider to establish mutually agreed QoS contracts for an interactive session. The service provider must consider QoS contracts already agreed upon with existing consumers and system resource conditions in establishing a new QoS contract. Similarly, a service consumer must be prepared in revising its contract with the service provider as conditions change over time. Once a QoS contract is established, SLM must provide monitoring to make sure that the service is provided at agreed QoS parameter range. If necessary, SLM must activate adaptation mechanisms to bring the service quality to the desired level. A case study is presented to validate the QoS contract management design approach and architecture for SLM.

Abstract: Software Processes and Software Process Modeling approaches were and still are in the heart of enterprise preoccupations. This interest is essentially motivated by the increasing need to build reliable and complex software systems in a short time to market. During the three last decades, a variety of Process Modeling Languages were proposed in order to capture the expertise of enterprises. However no one succeeded in gaining the attention of the industry. Main reasons were because that most of them were either imprecise or not suitable to be executed or both. This paper presents UML4SPM, a UML2.0-based Language for Software Process Modelling. Expressiveness, understandability, precision and executability were our main objectives while designing UML4SPM. Our contribution comes in form of MOF-Compliant metamodel, a simple yet expressive graphical notation and diagrams and a precise semantics. In order to validate our work, we evaluate UML4SPM with the well-known ISPW-6 process example, a standard benchmark problem for software process modeling.

Abstract: The growing scale and complexity of the enterprise computing systems under distributed and heterogeneous environments present new challenges to system development, integration, and maintenance. In this paper, we present a model driven web service development framework to combat these challenges. The framework capitalizes on the UML profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC), MDA and Web Services. Within the framework, first, the platform independent models (PIMs) are created using the EDOC profile. Second, the PIMs are broken down into sub PIMs according to functional decomposition, each of which can provide service independently and will be implemented in a web service. Then, these sub PIMs are transformed into the corresponding web service interface models for service publication and invoking. Finally, supported by model transform techniques, the sub PIMs are implemented into web services on specific platforms. Automatic model transformation is the key to this framework, therefore, the transformation from EDOC models to Web Service interface models within this framework is deeply discussed, and the detailed transformation rules are proposed. A case study is also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these rules and the merits of this framework.

Abstract: The paper proposes an approach to content dissemination that exploits the structural properties of XML Document Object Model in order to provide efficient dissemination by at the same time assuring content integrity and confidentiality. Our approach is based on the notion of encrypted post-order numbers that support the integrity and confidentiality requirements of XML content as well as facilitate efficient identification, extraction and distribution of selected content portions. By using such notion, we develop a structure-based routing scheme that prevents information leaks in XML-data dissemination and assures that content is delivered to users according to the access control policies, that is, policies specifying which users can receive which portions of the contents. Our proposed dissemination approach further enhances such structure-based, policy-based routing by combining it with multicast in order to provide high efficiency in terms of bandwidth usage and speed of data delivery, thereby enhancing scalability.

Abstract: There exist the generic concepts and semantic relationships in the description of procedural knowledge and strategic knowledge in contract management. In order that contract information could be understood and processed by machine automatically, more semantic descriptions are needed. Ontology has become a promising technology to express semantics. At present, Web ontology languages have been standardized. However, building domain ontology based on OWL (Ontology Web Language) just begins and has a long way to go. In building domain ontology, people should explore the rationality in expressing domain concepts and relations between the concepts, considering the capabilities of OWL (not the capability of natural languages). In this paper, we put forward a framework of contract ontology after considering capabilities to express semantic relations provided by OWL. Then we use Prot?g?-2000 to build OWL representations of the contract ontology and make some analyses. Our exploration might not standardize contract ontology. We explore with the intention to help people better understand the rationality in expressing concepts and relations between the concepts in contract management in order that OWL contract ontology and other domain ontology are improved and standardized as soon as possible.

Abstract: Due to company mergers and business to business interoperability, there is a need for model transformations in the area of business process modeling to facilitate scenarios like model integration and model synchronization. General model transformation approaches do not consider the special properties of business process models and horizontal transformation scenarios. Therefore, we propose a model transformation approach based on domainspecific patterns which are applied for analyzing business process models in a precise way. This approach facilitates the definition of business process model transformations, which can be easily adapted to different business process modeling languages and specific transformation problems. At the same time it supports the intuitive understanding of the domainexperts in business process modeling.

Abstract: A number of model transformation approaches have been proposed both from academia and industry since automated manipulation of models plays a central role in model driven development. Ideally, a model transformation technique should also be compatible with manual changes that might be performed by designers on the generated models in order to resolve unforeseen requirements or limited expressiveness of the involved metamodels. This paper proposes an approach to model transformation based on answer set programming. Starting from target models that have been manually modified (and possibly not belong to the co-domain of the transformation being used), the approach is able to deduce a collection of models that approximate the ideal one from which it is possible to generate the previously modified target.

Abstract: The variety of design artefacts (models) produced in a model-driven design process results in an intricate rela-tionship between requirements and the various models. This paper proposes a methodological framework that simplifies management of this relationship. This frame-work is a basis for tracing requirements, assessing the quality of model transformation specifications, metamod-els, models and realizations. We propose a notion of con-formance between application models which reduces the effort needed for assessment activities. We discuss how this notion of conformance can be integrated with model transformations.

Abstract: Workflow forms a key part of many existing Service Oriented applications, involving the integration of services that may be made available at distributed sites. It is possible to distinguish between an "abstract" workflow description outlining which services must be involved in a workflow execution and a "physical" workflow description outlining the particular instances of services that were used in a particular enactment. Provenance information provides a useful way to capture the physical workflow description automatically especially if this information is captured in a standard format. Subsequent analysis on this provenance information may be used to evaluate whether the abstract workflow description has been adhered to, and to enable a user executing a workflow-based application to establish "trust" in the outcome.

Abstract: This reference model for IT management responsibilities covers the most important aspects when modeling, analyzing and evaluating enterprise architecture, EA. The reference model can be employed to support IT management in their quest to make well-informed decisions, e.g. to derive architectural principles in order to obtain a proper scope for EA activities, measure the status of the current EA, follow up changes committed, and evaluate alternative EA scenarios. The model is based on extensive literature studies and has been tested in a series of empirical studies.

Abstract: This paper describes the automation and optimization of a software development process of NTT Data. The target systems of this development process are Web based information systems running on a J2EE platform. The automation and optimization of that process was achieved by the application of model driven techniques, mainly the integration of development tools via a meta object facility (MOF) repository backbone. The internal evaluation of NTT Data pointed out a development effort and time reduction of more than 50%. The main lessons learned form this case include the necessity of model-to-model transformations, the need to preserve advantage of existing development process and tools landscape, the requirements to care about configuration and change management from the beginning and the requirements to support also non modeling tools. Also, we identified a new business role, which is that of a tool and process integrator

Abstract: This paper presents a conceptual framework for service modelling. This framework provides a conceptual basis for the modelling and reasoning about services, and the operations, such as composition and discovery, that are performed on them at design and run-time. In particular, the framework should facilitate the use of different service description languages tailored to different service aspects, such as the behaviour of a service and the information it manipulates, or design tasks, such as modelling, analysis and implementation. The idea is that models produced by these languages can be mapped onto a single, common conceptual framework, thereby facilitating one to relate these models, e.g., to verify consistency or conformance. Therefore, a requirement on the framework is to capture all elementary and generic service properties that are relevant during the service development process. We capture these properties by analysing existing service definitions and from earlier experience.

Abstract: We present the structure of an ontology for Information Security (IS) and discuss a paradigm whereby it can be used to extract knowledge from natural language texts such as IS standards, security policies and security control descriptions. Besides providing a vocabulary for the IS domain, the proposed ontology stores logical forms corresponding to statements in the text, as well as a set of axioms used for inference in description logic (DL). We also describe a tool to provide automatic support for the formalization process.

Abstract: This paper discusses a novel implementation of a workflow engine that supports service-based applications. The applications are defined according to the GAT model, which is an event-based programming model using conditional guards to determine when both normal and exception-handling activities are to be executed. We propose implementation techniques for key features of GAT. These include implementing control flow based on the evaluation of guards, the management and distribution of events, and enforcing atomicity across the evaluation of guards and the execution of the corresponding activities. We have built an engine following this approach which uses available technologies to support translating GAT models into executable applications.

Abstract: The specification of quality of service (QoS) constraints over software design requires measures that ensure such requirements are met by the delivered product. Achieving this goal is non-trivial, as it involves, at least, identifying how QoS constraint specifications should be checked at the runtime. In this paper we present an implementation of a model driven architecture (MDA) based framework for the runtime monitoring of QoS properties. We incorporate the UML2 superstructure and the UML profile for quality of service to provide abstract descriptions of component-and-connector systems. We then define transformations that refine the UML2 models to conform with the distributed management taskforce (DMTF) common information model (CIM) (2006), a schema standard for management and instrumentation of hardware and software. Finally, we provide a mapping the CIM metamodel to a .NET-based metamodel for implementation of the monitoring infrastructure utilising various .NET features including the Windows Management Instrumentation (WML) interface

Abstract: Digitization of paper-bound documents is one of the foremost commercial interests worldwide. First step in all such applications is transforming a paper bound document into an electronic document by scanning, subsequently applying to the image OCR to generate textual information from the document image. In this paper we describe our work that acts as a pre-processing stage for OCR application. Automatic document layout extraction and segmentation is done using spatial configuration of various text/image segments represented as bounded boxes; this segmented layout is than analyzed with certain heuristic tests and each segment is assigned labels (title, authors, abstract, body, header, footer etc). This information is than passed on to OCR module as an XML interface, accelerating it?s performance by allowing it to label recognized text segments and identifying only those parts of the document which have text resulting saving in computation. Although, the work has been motivated for application to an automated machine translation system preserving the overall document layout, it has a number of other applications such as in information retrieval, search etc. This information is also being used to classify technical documents into three categories which can be extended to any number of classes based on spatial configuration heuristics.

Abstract: Several studies have indicated that existing IS (IS) often fail to provide adequate business process support. To systematically identify the reasons for this drawback, we conducted a case study in the automotive domain and a survey among 79 IT practitioners. This paper presents the findings of this empirical research and explains why mere "process-orientation" (regarding business process support) is scarce

Abstract: The emergence of networked eBusiness and the wave of service-oriented computing facilities create new challenges for automating inter-enterprise business process management and eContracting. This development leads to strategical benefits for agile enterprises, but also to new challenges on enterprise system architectures and platforms. This paper discusses the techniques of introducing trust-related decisions into eContracting, and their effects. This work enhances the web-Pilarcos project results on B2B interoperability middleware; the architectural model supported comprises of autonomous business services forming loosely-coupled, eContract-governed eCommunities

Abstract: Enterprise organizations use Data Warehouses (DWHs) analyze their performance. Performance is judged regarding the achievement of goals. DWH data models are well established. There exist numerous domain-specific modeling approaches. Enterprises also often model their goals in terms of formal or semiformal goal models. The problem is that these two aspects - the Data Warehouse and the Enterprise Goals - are described separately and not related to each other. We identify a need for combining these two aspects. If their relationship is made explicit, it can be used to enhance the way users access and interpret data in the DWH. To address this limitation, in this paper we introduce a weaving model between enterprise goals and DWH data. Thus we present a domain-specific application of model weaving to an aspect of enterprise computing. We describe metamodels for both aspects as well as the weaving links between them, which allows to show the aspects separately but also in combination. We furthermore illustrate how to use the weaving links to create business metadata. Business metadata can be used in the DWH to describe the business context and implications of the data to the users, but is usually not available in today?s DWHs. We apply our approach to a sample situation, which is used as a running example in the paper.

Abstract: Individual user needs are subjective, perspective, and context-dependent at the same time. In this paper, I will pre-sent an adaptive multi-perspective user interface which learns the individual preferences when working with documents, i.e. the way a user categorizes documents and clusters them within direc-tories. The system is built on dynamic conceptualizations of docu-ments and folders based on term correlations providing the basis for an integrated and associative management of office docu-ments, emails and bookmarks. Users get assistance in classifica-tion and retrieval by offering a wide range of techniques which may be combined in any way. The system records successful query processes for reuse and further allows users to publish respective expert profiles learned by the system.

Abstract: Due to the increasing impact of technology on the banking industry, the resulting risks play a vital role in bank-wide risk management. Additional gain in attention can be ascribed to the recent Basel II regulatory framework covering operational risk. To deliver adequate support for the process of technology risk management, flexible and seamlessly integrated software architectures are required. Based upon ontology-driven information systems the concept of an ontology-centric technology risk management architecture is explored. As a basis, the conceptual role of ontologies in information systems is portrayed and the technology risk environment in the banking domain summarized. The proposed architecture then is constructed around two essential concepts: The modeling of domain knowledge within an ontology as well as the integration of multiple, special-purpose software components into one architecture.

Abstract: The complexity, unpredictability and inter-dependency of the components in a workflow often demand thorough planning at the design level. In this paper we propose a Data-Centric approach to instantiate, monitor and manage complex workflows. We believe a culture change in the orchestration of services is required to consider their data dependency while modelling workflows. The current process or activity oriented mechanism, utilized in the existing workflow technologies, failed to live up to expectations mainly due to data issues at later stages.

Abstract: Confidentiality is often one of the primary requirements for electronic documents. Often, encryption is used for achieving these confidential documents. From the perspective of an electronic document system, key management for long-term encrypted documents could become problematic, especially for big organizations. There are a number of non-trivial issues to be handled by such a system. In particular, some of the encrypted confidential documents need to be stored for a long period of time. It is possible that the keys for accessing these documents may get loss or corrupted. On the other hand, storing duplicates of these keys may not be secure. To handle this problem, we propose an electronic document system, which makes use of cryptographic hardware tokens. In this paper, we will describe the key recovery mechanism for this system. We use the secret sharing scheme, and integrate it into our system. It securely protects longterm encrypted documents without sacrificing users? convenience or system?s scalability. Prototype has been implemented, and preliminary results have been encouraging.