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As business information is getting more and more difficult to manage, business entities are increasingly adopting business process management practices and tools, providing new models and techniques for process-related information management. In parallel, semantic web technologies are emerging, which are capable of providing methodologies and tools to represent and process the semantic content of business processes. Applying semantic web technologies in business process management can enhance process understanding and can facilitate querying for pertinent process information. This chapter discusses the challenges and benefits associated with the coupling of semantic technologies with business process management and describes a methodology for representing the semantic content of the BPMN specification in the form of ontology. Moreover, it explores query mechanisms for conventional and semantics-based querying of business models.

This paper refers to methods and tools for enabling context detection and management based on events. We propose a context model that builds on top of previous efforts and we give details about the mechanisms developed for context detection in event marketplaces. In addition, we show how simple or complex events can be used in combination with external services in order to derive higher level context with the use of Situation-Action-Networks (SANs). Specifically, we present two different approaches, one for detecting low level context and another one for deriving higher-level contextual information using SANs. We present an illustrative scenario for demonstrating the process of specialization of our generic context model and its instantiation based on real-time events.

Serendipity, the process of making fortunate discoveries for which someone was not looking for, can play a crucial role in leveraging creativity in learning [1]. Serendipity enables creative connections to develop while it can have a role in revealing hidden connections or "hidden analogies", especially in a social context such as in most learning processes [2]. The results of a chance encounter can result in new ideas relevant to the learner's previous knowledge [3]. In previous work, we have reviewed the related literature and identified five enabling factors for serendipity [4]: diversity, unexpectedness or novelty, personalization, visualization, and social interaction. The aim of this paper is to construct an architectural framework based on the aforementioned factors that can be used as a guide in the development of information seeking systems aiming to leverage serendipity in learning.

To address the issue of business process adaptation, we focus on handling adaptation needs as cross-cutting concerns because they rely or must affect many parts of a business process. Our research objective is to enhance aspect-oriented business process management with event-driven capabilities for discovering situations requiring adaptations. To this end, we develop an aspect-oriented extension to BPMN2.0 and we couple it with an event-driven approach for detecting and reasoning about situations that require adaptation of business processes. We use event processing in order to monitor the process execution environment and, when execution violates some quality “threshold” or a problem arises, to detect it and trigger lookup for a suitable process adaptation, using a reasoning mechanism. We demonstrate that our approach is able to address simultaneously adaptation on process model and execution level.

Modern organizations need real-time awareness about the current business conditions and the various events that occur from multiple and heterogeneous environments and influence their business operations. Moreover, based on real-time awareness they need a mechanism that allows them to respond quickly to the changing business conditions, in order to either avoid problematic situations or exploit opportunities that may arise in their business environment. In this paper we present an event-driven system that enables awareness about the situations happening in business environments and increases organizations’ responsiveness to them. We illustrate how the proposed system increases the awareness of stakeholders about the running business processes, as well as their flexibility by presenting a practical application of the system in the logistics domain.

In this chapter we give an overview of technologies and tools that can support the management of attention of employees. Moreover, we present a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organisations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA rules with ontologies. We present the system’s architecture, describe its main components and present early evaluation results.

Collaborative systems and methods are used within corporate environments to support innovation and management of new ideas. The aggregation of innovation-related information from a community of users is a non-trivial task that requires the use of specialized collaborative systems and methods. In this paper we explore the use of Prediction Markets for community-based idea management and present IDEM, a software system that is used for generating and evaluating new ideas utilizing the concept of Prediction Markets. In addition to trading, IDEM supports users submit new ideas, rate and comment on them. Academic experiments and industrial pilots reveal the perceived usefulness of the system.

Collaboration, either inter or intra-organization is a critical business function that demands skills and knowledge spanning a wide range of domains including social, business and technical domains. Collaboration patterns can be a means to capture best practices about recurring collaborative problems and solutions. Many forms of patterns have been proposed addressing specific aspects of collaboration such as business interaction design and workflow. In this paper we propose a novel collaboration pattern model that aims to constitute a framework capable to describe recurring collaborative activities taking place in the context of virtual organisations.

In this paper we present a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations, which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA rules with ontologies. We present the architecture of the system, describe its main components and present early evaluation results.

The motivation of this paper is to research the individual and the team levels of knowledge management, in order to unveil prominent knowledge needs, interactions and processes, and to develop a software architecture which tackles these issues. We derive user requirements, using ethnographic methods, based on user studies obtained at TMI, an international management consultancy. We build the IKOS software architecture which follows the p2p model and relies on the use of Social Semantic Desktop for seamless management of personal information and information shared within groups. Finally, we examine the way our approach matches the requirements that we derived.

This paper presents a synthetic summary of the literature in the area of quality of e-government services, as a basis for the future construction of a relevant model and ontology. We include 18 different approaches concerning quality of service for public sector in general and e-government more specifically. Using as a criterion the focus of each approach on organizational issues or the front end of the service we classified them in introvert and extrovert ones. As a result of the review we were able to organize the main components influencing quality of e-government services in the following four key areas: service, content, system and organization.

As software processes for developing eGovernment services become more complex, it is necessary to provide computer-based tools to support the software engineering process. Furthermore, actions should be taken to limit the loss of critical knowledge during the life cycle of eGovernment services. In this paper we first illustrate the overall architecture of ONTOGOV, an under-development software engineering environment for developing and managing the life-cycle of eGovernment services. We then outline two ontologies upon which ONTOGOV is based. Finally, an application scenario is described and the paper concludes with the identification of further steps and research directions.

An increasing number of enterprises are getting interested in exploiting knowledge, tacit or explicit, lying outside their organizational borders and augmenting the knowledge network of their organizations. A first generation of knowledge e-marketplaces has arisen to provide the platforms for knowledge exchange and trading in an inter-organizational level. This paper develops a framework to evaluate the business models, roles, processes, and revenue models of knowledge trading platforms and provides a survey of six existing knowledge marketplaces based on this framework. Finally, a set of conclusions is drawn on what issues should be addressed in a knowledge marketplace in order to eliminate the risks and gain the trust of its targeted customers.