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The enterprise management represents a heterogeneous aggregate of both resources and assets that need to be coordinated and orchestrated in order to reach the goals related to the business mission. Influences and forces that may influence this process, and also for that they should be considered, are not concentrated in the business environment, but they are related to the entireoperational context of a company. For this reason, business processes must be the most versatile and flexible with respect to the changes that occur within the whole operational context of a company.Considering the supportive role that information systems play in favour of Business Process Management - BPM, it is also essential to implement a constant, continuous and quick mechanism for the information system alignment with respect to the evolution followed by business processes.In particular, such mechanism must intervene on BPM systems in order to keep them aligned and compliant with respect to both the context changes and the regulations. In order to facilitate this alignment mechanism, companies are already referring to the support offered by specific solutions, such as knowledge bases. In this context, a possible solution might be the approach we propose, which is based on a specific framework called Process Management System. Our methodology implements a knowledge base support for business experts, which is not limited to the BPM operating phases, but includes also the engineering and prototyping activities of the corresponding information system. This paper aims to compare and evaluate a traditional BPM approach with respect to theapproach we propose. In effect, such analysis aims to emphasize the lack of traditional methodology especially with respect to the alignment between business processes and information systems, along with their compliance with context domain and regulations.

The healthcare ambit is usually perceived as “information rich” yet “knowledge poor”. Nowadays, an unprecedented effort is underway to increase the use of business intelligence techniques to solve this problem. Heart disease (HD) is a major cause of mortality in modern society. This paper analyzes the risk factors that have been identified in cardiovascular disease (CVD) surveillance systems. The Heart Care study identifies attributes related to CVD risk (gender, age, smoking habit, etc.) and other dependent variables that include a specific form of CVD (diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disease, etc.). In this paper, we combine Clustering, Association Rules, and Neural Networks for the assessment of heart-event-related risk factors, targeting the reduction of CVD risk. With the use of the K-means algorithm, significant groups of patients are found. Then, the Apriori algorithm is applied in order to understand the kinds of relations between the attributes within the dataset, first looking within the whole dataset and then refining the results through the subsets defined by the clusters. Finally, both results allow us to better define patients’ characteristics in order to make predictions about CVD risk with a Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network. The results obtained with the hybrid information mining approach indicate that it is an effective strategy for knowledge discovery concerning chronic diseases, particularly for CVD risk.

The diffusion of small low cost sensors has opened new opportunities for the design of real-time monitoring systems in several application fields. Internet of Things (IoT) is a new branch of Information Technology that connects several of these heterogeneous devices through different network protocols to provide large scale interoperability. In this paper we describe how some open source software tools can be integrated to collect, monitor and process streams of data received in real-time by sensor devices. The tools we have employed are the Things-Board platform to collect sensor data and the Spark Streaming framework for cluster computing to perform data analytics. The presented architecture can be exploited in various monitoring scenarios (such as clinical, environmental or energetic processes) to study the trend of some key parameters and also to produce alerts in case of problematic situations. Without loss of generality, we focus on biomedical data about the breath of patients affected by chronic respiratory disease: real-time monitoring of breath parameters enables automatic ventilotherapy and allows also to warn doctors in time in severe cases.

Nowadays many small and medium companies are interested in entering into foreign markets to establish a brand presence, sell their products and beat the competitors. Before making such a marketing decision, marketing experts can be guided by the traditional analysis of reports but also by the Web, through the analysis of social networks, blogs, forums, etc. These sources can provide real-time information about the perception that users have of specific brands and products. As a result, there are several tools that can extract interesting information from these unstructured data. In this paper, we propose an innovative knowledge extraction architecture realized through the integration of some existing tools. The aim is to retrieve the more frequent concepts from unstructured sources, suggest other links of articles and images, with multi-language feature so that the research is language independent. The architecture provides a knowledge base of a specific domain, which is used to suggest concepts related to the research, and to filter the results obtained from the elaboration of the unstructured sources. We present a case of study related to marketing in agri-food sector, in order to illustrate how the software works, the results obtained, their interpretation and the managerial implications.

The use of e-learning in education is an ever-increasing practice. E-learning could generate effective learning for education. There are several factors affecting the creation of successful e-learning for education as well as several criteria possibly applied to evaluate the effectiveness. The “traditional” way (questionnaire, interview, information system analysis) to measure effectiveness is not enough in e-learning measure of effectiveness because part of the information, that coming from social networks, will be lost. This paper, after identifying the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of a synchronous e-learning system, and identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), proposes an approach for evaluation based on the analysis of information derived from social aspects. The paper proposes a set of CSFs and KPIs to study the students’ perception of e-learning platform and highlights how to measure the KPIs using social software information.

In the field of "Data Exploration" many approaches have been developed to solve the problem of management of big data that are also semantically rich. Nowadays, there is a strong need to support the discovery-oriented applications where data discovery is a highly ad hoc interactive process to support the users by assisting the navigation in the data to find interesting objects. In this work starting by a theoretical data exploration system, where we identified the main features that a data exploration system must have to an efficient exploratory experience, we propose a combination of two data exploration techniques faceted navigation and data mining with the aim to improve the discovery information during exploration. This approach is contextualized better in Information Mining. Information mining, in fact, aims at discovering knowledge, i.e. more general patterns within objects or collections of objects.

The use of e-learning in education is an ever-increasing practice. E-learning could generate effective learning for education. There are several factors affecting the creation of successful e-learning for education as well as several criteria possibly applied to evaluate the effectiveness. The “traditional” way (questionnaire, interview, information system analysis) to measure effectiveness is not enough in e-learning measure of effectiveness because part of the information, that coming from social networks, will be lost. This paper, after identifying the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of a synchronous e-learning system, and identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), proposes an approach for evaluation based on the analysis of information derived from social aspects. The paper proposes a set of CSFs and KPIs to study the students’ perception and highlights how to measure the KPIs using social software information.

This paper discusses an evolution of exploratory portal for an ad- vanced and easy construction of an exploratory portal, through a simplification of the data loading process by a modeling of complex taxonomies. The main re- quirement for achieving this goal has been to make the schema-driven portal through a modeling of taxonomy, the data and the portal layout on Excel. A framework is proposed in which we implement an application that can build the exploratory portal from this Excel model. We have validated the portal popula- tion process, first “in vitro”, then “in vivo”.

A correct assessment of e-learning projects is a complex task because there are several aspects (such as contents, technologies, organizations etc.) that must be considered and many actors (learners, teachers, pedagogues, etc.) each one with specific requirements to be met. In recent years, in order to standardize the evaluation and to define the quality features of an e-learning project, several sets of factors (called Critical Success Factors) have been defined. The Critical Success Factors are focused on many aspects but, in our vision, they don’t consider properly the learners’ opinions. The learner is exactly the main e-learning project stakeholder. Thus, he/she could be considered at the centre of the e-learning system and his/her opinions must be carefully evaluated. In this paper, we describe our idea to support the analysis of the learners’ discussions posted on the web2.0 media (like forums, wikis, etc.) and to support the subsequent evaluation of the lacks and the benefits of e-learning projects.

Enterprise activities are governed by regulations and laws that are multiple, heterogeneous and not always easy to understand. The arising and/or the modification of these regulations and laws can cause a significant impact in the business context, especially in terms of enterprise information systems adaptation. Currently, there are many methodological and technological tools that facilitate the application of regulations and procedures, but they are not integrated enough to ensure a complete problem management. Therefore, they are not sufficient to support organizations and companies in the management of their business processes. In this paper we propose a methodological and technological solution, able to model, manage, execute and monitor business processes of complex domains. The system allows both the design of an information system and its prototyping as a web application, by the extension of an appropriately selected Business Process Management suite. During both the design and the usage phases of the prototyped information system, it is possible to interface with a knowledge base that contains information about regulations and aspects that characterize the enterprise (organizational chart, tasks, etc.).

PurposeRich Internet Application (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, explore and specify design decisions in the light of usability requirements and stakeholder's goals. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem.Design/methodology/approachTo meet this challenge, the authors extend IDM (Interactive Dialogue Model), a dialogue‐based approach focusing on the conceptual dialogue flow with the user, codifying a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIAs.FindingsThe approach, called Rich‐IDM demonstrated some relevant features: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi‐formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper proposes a simple way to fill the gap between hypermedia design and user experience design for RIAs, which is an open issue, both from the web engineering point of view and the human‐computer interaction point of view.Practical implicationsThe authors have described how Rich‐IDM can help designers to capture and cope with some RIA interface flaws. In this case, the benefits of the approach are directly related to the semantics of its primitives.Originality/valueThe authors' proposal is the first, consolidated step of a promising research avenue.

The reference context in which companies operate is often characterized by a high level of complexity. Any attempt aimed to represent such complexity can be facilitated by referring to appropriate semantic knowledge bases, able to structure the domain concepts along with the relationships between them. Such consideration can be particularly applied to the Model-Driven designing phases of a software system, and especially within the User eXperience - UX - modelling process. In effect, the UX modelling is becoming more and more dominant, even with the advent of Rich Internet Applications - RIAs. They represent particular web applications that are capable to provide features and functionalities of traditional desktop applications. This paper introduces a Knowledge-Driven framework for the UX engineering process based on the interaction with a domain knowledge base, along with a prototype generator. Such framework is obtained by extending and by adapting an existing one, the IDM Editor, which performs the UX reengineering of a legacy application, using the methodology Interactive Dialogue Model - IDM.

The communication between specialists who use different terminologies based on their expertise is a notable problem in all sectors. When legal professional and business process analyst have to exchange know-how, it is very difficult to find a common vocabulary because the cultural background of the actors is completely different. Moreover, some experts take for granted basic concepts that are not known by other experts or are known with a different semantic meaning, thus creating significant information gaps that affect all analysis tasks. The problem described above is presented in the HSEPGEST project. The project aims to create a coherent information system able to harmonize the many European, national, and local laws and regulations on health, safety, and the environmental protection. The resulting information system implements the concepts present in these laws and regulations and could be easily adapted to the frequent changes of the concepts. This paper proposes some helpful guidelines that will be used by legal professionals. The guidelines can be used as a tool to schematically describe existing laws and regulations in order to make them simpler to understand for business process analysts who will take care of the design of the information system. The guidelines seek, in short, to bridge the skill gap between legal professionals and business process analysts.

E-learning assessment is a key aspect in the overall e-learning process. There are several parameters to consider during the assessment. In recent years, several sets of factors, called Critical Success Factors, have been defined to provide a structural approach to assessment. They focus on many aspects but, in our view, they do not properly consider student satisfaction with courses. In e-learning applications, student opinion must be examined where it is expressed: on e learning course social pages and/or social pages outside the platform but specific to the e-learning course. The problem is that these resources are unstructured and thus it is important to structure these resources before using them for assessment. In this paper, we discuss a proposal that can capture student opinion from social pages, combining several techniques, such as Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction; ontologies that help us to understand what and how students discuss about e-learning courses.

Modern web applications (mashups, mobile apps, context-rich web services) offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to model the usability keeping under control the design complexity unleashed by innovative interface and carefully considering the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the user experience. To meet this challenge, we propose a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and we provide designers with a collection of conceptual model metrics to evaluate alternatives at early stages of the web app lifecycle. We demonstrate through a case study our novel ideas about model metrics and preliminary research results. Rich Internet Applications, User Experience Transformation, User Experience Requirements, Web Model Metrics, Rich-IDM.

The growth of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) calls for new conceptual tools that enable web engineers to model the design complexity unleashed by innovative interaction (with increasing communication potential) and to carefully consider the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the User Experience (UX). In this paper we illustrate how is particularly relevant for RIA engineering not only to capture existing RIA technologies with suitable design artifacts but also to model an effective dialogue between users and RIA interfaces. Through a case study, we propose a set of conceptual design primitives (Rich-IDM) to enable web engineers to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction, and to take design decisions which meet both usability and communication requirements.

Model-driven engineering is a promising approach for the modernization of legacy applications, but there are still many issues to address, especially to obtain automatic refactoring of the User Experience (UX) of existing applications applying modern interaction paradigms as Rich Internet Applica-tion (RIA). The MIGROS tool tries to solve the hurdles for the model-driven modernization of the UX of legacy application (as implemented in Cobol CICS, Visual Basic, Power Builder, etc.). It is designed upon a set of well-known methods in the web engineering field. It is implemented as a set of Eclipse plug-ins that support reverse engineering and model transformation exploiting the OMG Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) technology.

ThegrowthofRichInternet Applications (RIAs)callsfornewconceptual tools that enable designers and web engineers to model and keep under control the design complexity unleashed by innovative interaction (with increasing communi- cation potential) and carefully consider the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the user experience. Based on the theory of Situational Awareness, in this paper we illustrate how 5 major "interface demons" are particularly rele- vant for RIA engineering and undermine an effective dialogue between users and RIA interfaces. From this analysis, we propose a set of conceptual design primi- tives (Rich-IDM) to enable designers and web engineers to characterize the complex components of RIA models and take design decisions which meet both usability and communication requirements.

The introduction of the Enterprise 2.0 philosophy is to make the companies more flexible by improving the collaboration between the employees. The real application of this concept doesn’t concern about a simple adoption of a new technology but a more complex change that involves all company’s sectors. Today, there is not a unique and well-know methodology to design this innovation inside the business process and applications. The collaboration aspects were not properly considered in the panorama of the traditional methodologies to model collaborative business applications. Thus, in this paper in order to fill this gap, we introduce a new methodological approach supported and explained through real case studies.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, to explore and specify design decisions at the light of usability requirements and stakeholder's goals. To meet this challenge, we codify a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIA. We demonstrate through a case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.

Nowadays there are an increasing evolution of technologicalsolutions providing the virtual collaboration among people geographically distributed to obtain some common goals. At the same time virtual collaborative environments are often used for learning purposes because increase the interaction among users. These systems are usually developed in a custom way according to the specific requirements without any kind of standardization in terms of definition of collaboration among involved users. Although the literature shows attempts to formally express learning processes through a standardlanguage, there are not proposals that combine e-learning languages with typical concepts of 3D collaborative experiences. This paper propose a notation model able to design collaboration for e-learning virtual environments. In this paper we present also the architecture of a tool that helps the designer in the use of the notation model here proposed.

Web is a measureless growing information source. Here we could have the common user that surf the web for fun, and the particular user surfing the web to work, for instance, the financial analyst that hopes to find some financial information.These users are similar in their habit to visit evera pool of 10-15 websites where they are sure to find interesting information. In this paper, we introduce the architecture of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that uses the power of Semantics to create a new type of Web Portal fully customizable that we will call MyE-Wall. In this portal, the user can’t attach widget, but modules containing each one the section of a particular web site. Therefore, the idea is allow a user to create of a new website composed by a patchwork of different website’s sections selected by himself. Here we use semantics for two reasons: (i) to process the structure of a particular website and create the corresponding module to attach on the portal (ii) to provide the application of a set of features (reasoning engine, swrl rules, etc...) to reason on the information collected, according the preferences that the usercould have specified in his own profile.

The web revolution makes outdated preexisting Information Systems (legacy systems). Companies need to update their Information Systems without lose neither investments on design and implementation made in the past nor the know-how acquired during years. The modern trend is to activate a reengineering process for the legacy systems. It is important that the reengineering process con-sider both technological aspect and definition of the Human Computer Interaction as important quality factors for the Information System transformation into a Web Information System. The process requires a methodological approach oriented to the application of a specific methodology for each reengineering phase. In this paper, we present a reengineering path that involves both technological and methodological aspects. The idea was born during the MIGR.O.S (MIGRation Open Source) project that aims to transform legacy systems into modern Web Information Systems.

Hypermedia applications were, at the beginning, hand-coded pages with “ad-hoc” links. This production method was acceptable until a few pages had to be produced, but it became rapidly unmanageable when several hundreds of pages with complex interactive objects had to be considered. In particular, two interwoven problems rapidly became relevant: how to ensure the “usability” of modern large hypermedia-applications (Garzotto, Matera & Paolini, 1999), and how to improve the efficiency of its production/maintenance process. In good hypermedia applications, in fact, the reader should be able to effectively exploit the information contained in the application: that is, he or she should be able to quickly locate the objects of interest, to understand the inner structure of the objects and to easily navigate from one object to another. Several factors concur to the achievement of usability: one of the most important is to have a good structuring of the information objects and a good structuring of the navigation patterns.

The complexity of the information systems has recently had a remarkable increase, mostly thanks to the enormous impact that it has had in the multi-agent system (MAS) area; hence the need to integrate two systems and obtain an IS that takes advantage of the potentialities of the MAS. To this purpose, a methodology to analyze and design a multi-agent system is needed. In order to define such a methodology, which should take into account all the aspects of the MAS, first we need to establish not only a conceptual model of the system but also a communication level model. In this paper we propose the use of DDS framework for the communication level and the use of the BWW ontology for representation and design of the domain knowledge base. The idea of the above-mentioned methodology was conceived in the SISTDE project, which uses the ontology for the description of the domain, so as to provide the agents with a knowledge base that concurs to define their behaviour according to external events. In addition to this, the experience we have matured in the IS modelling using the BWW ontology is a key-point of our approach.

Today, to deal with Information Systems appears very complex because the term by now is used in order to indicate any application able to resolve any problem in a specific business area. During the years, we have seen to use this term in a very general way often with divergent meanings between them. Moreover, they have been used several and different design methodologies, from the functional decomposition to those relative ones to big framework SAP-like (that they put together different specific applications with the goal - above all Marketing goal- to supply integrated Information Systems simply choosing some configuration parameters) and, beside these, several and different philosophies of design like ERP, MRP, CRM etc… Moreover, the advent and the extraordinary spread of Internet and, therefore, the expansion of the Information System on the Web, have generated an remarkable increment of methodologies and technologies for the design and the development of applications for the Web, forcing to review well-known methodologies, such as the Object Oriented, with the result to make the effective use of UML for the design of Information Systems extremely complex. In general terms we can assert that any methodology, for being truly effective, must allow the designer to concentrate itself on the problem to resolve rather than to try to understand as using the same methodology in order to express the specific problem. It appears, therefore, necessary to try to make order in this chaotic universe of acronyms, philosophies, methodologies that often approach similar problems and offer similar solutions even if dressed of innovation and oneness, supplying a clear point of reference to which we will relate within this book. INFORMATION SYSTEMS The term Information Systems means “the set of the procedures and the infrastructures that support and describe the flowing of the information inside an organizational structure” (Pighin, 2005) In other words, an Information System allows to describe, in detail, as any Company (public or private) carries out the job to which it is deputy and which are the material and immaterial resources available. Such definition prescinds, and must prescind, from the use of an eventual automation related to the use of Computer-based systems. To become “automated”, partially or completely, an Information System means to design and to develop a Computer-based System that supports and implements how much described previously; Alternatively, rather, the application must be adapted itself completely to the way of working of the Company, and not vice versa. A lot often, today, many Software Houses tries to impose to the Companies the way of working already implemented within their applications, prescinding from the peculiarities of the companies, their history and the resources available. Of course, to develop an ad-hoc application requires remarkable economic investments and not always it is affordable for the average and small productive realties and, therefore, often it is indispensable to balance these two divergent requirements. The goal of the book and of the methodology that is described inside, it is just to realize a compromise between the economic effort and the necessity, for the Companies, to differ from other concurrent economic realities. Information Systems: from business process design to the business process reengineering In the 1990 Hammer (Hammer, 1990) published its theory on the necessity of reengineering the business processes starting from the observation of the reality and from the experience that many computer experts had experimented in their professional life. It asserted that the introduction of innovative technology on old business processes had highest probabilities of failure. Such affirmation, however obvious, had the merit to raise the problem of the understanding of how the company carried out its own job and with which resources before proposing innovation. This is, in our opinion, the guideline that would have to always drive the proposal of innovation to a company but as pointed out previously, it is not how much happens in the majority of the cases. The theory of the BPR - Business Process Reengineering – (Hammer, Stanton 1995), in brief, is made up of three main phases: 1. AS-IS: the definition of present BPs (Business Processes). This is supposed to be the fundamental phase of the analysis because it allows to identify the Primary Processes (or Macro-Processes) that they describe as the company works currently; 2. Comparison and diagnosis: it is provided to a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of what it is found, using well-known techniques of benchmarking, and eventually a comparison with companies of the same typology; 3. TO-BE: re-definition of BPs according to the requirements of a company. The variables to be considered in each phase are at least four and in particular: • The flow of BPs: the decomposition of the Processes in activity flows; • The organizational structure: the contribution and the responsibility of the productive units to BP; • The human resources: the characteristics, skills and the availabilities to the change; • Systems of values (motivation and boosting): a system that aims both to reduce the opportunistic individual factor and to measure the productivity. Considering globally these variables, the strategies of Reengineering that have been asserted are substantially 3: 1. Buy-side strategy: related to the part of Information System that regards the suppliers of raw materials and/or services (B2B, e-procurement, etc.); 2. In-side strategy: related to the part of Information System inside the company (ERP); 3. Sell-side strategy: related to the part of the Information System that involves the final users (B2C, etc.). Any design of reengineering always begins with the necessity of a change and the definition of a new business vision. In the first phase (AS-IS), therefore, it is indispensable to understand as the company operates currently, with which organizational structure and which level of responsibility within the activities in being, with which kind of Human Resources (skills, availability to the change, etc.) and with which system of values that define both the individual and structure goals and the way with which it is come stimulated to the aim to reduce most possible what in literature it is called “opportunistic individual behaviour” (Williamson, 1975). This phase is, in our opinion, most difficult and most expensive from the economic and employed resource point of view but, if well executed, a succeeding concurs to carry out BPR with. In fact, starting from the detailed analysis of the present situation and using opportune tools of simulation, it is possible to carry out a first rationalization of the organizational structure and the flows of business processes. Such affirmation, justified from the experience of a quarter of century in the field of the high level Information Systems of one of the authors, is based on the fact that often the operating procedures and the information exchange inside the Companies is the result of a series of adjustments that they have contributed to create, in the course of time, a superstructure not justified and often unknown to the Company’s people. AS-IS Analysis would have to identify a few Primary Processes for being able to effectively manage a reengineering of the same ones and, in particular, we think that for big Company 15 processes would have to be characterized approximately. Both the Primary Processes and the Support Process (or Secondary Processes) are represented using the Value Chain of Porter (Millar, Porter 1985) identifying the Processes that create value for the Company according to their mission. The first activity, therefore, concerns the decomposition of these processes in a harmonic and reasoned flow of tasks. For many years, from the introduction of the concept of Business Process, it has been a complete anarchy in the use of an effective notation for the graphical representation of the flow of the activities regarding the first variable into play. Some big Software Houses have developed its own method (for instance, FILENET, now an IBM subsidiary) while others have used standard methods like IDEF0 (IEEE, 1998). The fundamental characteristic of these models of representation of the Processes is that they are not user-oriented, that is they are particularly complex to use and too much cryptic the final user could understand they. Finally, in 2004, the more important Companies in this sector have gathered in a consortium to aim to develop a common and effective notation to be used to model the BPs in an understandable way for the final customer. Such notation, BPMN - Business Process Management Notation, that it is the base of this book and will come shortly illustrated later on, (OMG, 2006) now is maintained from the OMG. The representation of the Processes through BPMN uses, for its formal representation, a specific language machine-readable - BPEL - which the Companies of the sector use in order to develop all the support tools that are not free of charge. Our research group, since many years, uses OWL (Ontology Web Language) as main language for the modeling and the definition of meta-model because it is considered more suitable to represent the concepts and the base rules understanding a methodology. The choice to use the ontologies in the field of Software Engineering has been confirmed by a recent paper published by IEEE (Cardoso, 2007). The use of Ontologies, that shortly will be dealt forward, allow us homogeneity of modeling being a platform/company-independent. The second phase, defined of Comparison and Diagnosis, provides a first activity of appraisal using the techniques of benchmarking sure complex and articulated but tendentially determinist. Different is instead the comparison with other similar Companies. In literature, often it refers to such a comparison with the term of Best Practice that means some success cases of companies that operate in the same segment of market with equal dimensions: in other words, concurrent companies. It is obvious that the Companies cannot have approached, legally, sensitive data of concurrent Companies in order not to incur in the crime of industrial espionage. It is equally obvious that the big Consultant Companies, thanks to the elevated number of customers, could have such information, but they would not have to use them for the same reason expressed previously. The term Best Practice comes instead used widely in the business field but with obvious scope to propose to the customer something of pre-assembled. According to our opinion, the true comparison would have instead to be carried out between how much found using benchmarking and the goals of the Company according to the Vision that has generated the change necessity. Finally, the third phase, called TO-BE, has the job to redesign the way with which the Company must work in order to aim its goals. The change, of course, will regard all the involved variables described previously and the result will be absolutely integrated. It is interesting to notice that, until now, we have spoken exclusively about Information System and not about applications by agreement with the separation between the two systems, Information System and Computer-based System, described previously. During the last few years, the Business Process Management (BPM) that “is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology has been asserted, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational BPs involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information” (Van der Aalst, 2003). This mixture between Information System and Computer-based System was already present de facto on the market since many years. In fact, when the big Consultant Companies with their associated Software Companies propose the notorious Best Practices, they certainly sell effective software applications, but these applications are pre-manufactured and customizable through an opportune set of parameters, so it is possible that these applications are not the better possible solution for that specific company. In short, the Consultant proposes to the company a solution to the problems that have driven to the change but, this solution does not keep in some account the own peculiarities. Some among the more important Companies of the sector pursue this type of approach, that could be useful for some Companies of small and averages dimensions but the economic effort required a lot often is unsuitable to this kind of Companies. The market currently is global and too much competitive, so the reasons that induce to change are multiple. Moreover, the change necessities take part very frequently (in some cases also many times in the same year) so the Information System must be flexible for being able itself to adapt easy to the new reality without the necessity of dramatic reengineering. In the same way, the support Computer-based System must be equally flexible for effectively being able to adapt itself to the new requirements. The philosophy of the BPM proposes to exceed the logic of the BPR, just for the ability to implement flexible systems in order to follow the continuous evolution of BP; it considers as main software instrument the Workflow Engines that has the job to automate the repetitive activities above all (the operating job) usually oriented inside the Company, putting into effect the transformation of the Processes according to the in-side strategy that generated the ERP. In this book, we will not deal about ERP because, however currently many Software Companies continue to advertise their products like ERP, practically having unique DBMS and allowing the sharing of the information between all the business software systems is a norm of good design. Therefore, the BPM as more modern, more flexible and softer approach of the BPR. However, is it true? No, it is not in our opinion. In fact, very often would be opportune before to carry out, where necessary, a radical transformation using the BPR and successively to follow the continuous evolutions through the techniques of the BPM. In fact, using the directly BPM in order to model BPs in the point of view of their automation, it is high the risk to fall back in the error described by Hammer: to graft computer-based innovation on a not adequate organizational structure represents a high probability of failure. The failure risk increases considering which professional figure should model the BPs. In the point of view of automating the execution of this flow of activities, it seems natural to design such a flow using the necessary sagacity to the implementation and, therefore, the key figure would have to be an expert of design of applications. Such choice does not seem adequate to us. In the methodology proposed in the book the starting hypothesis regards just the knowledge that a cultural gap exists between the specialists of business and organization and the specialists of software applications. Web application: the concept of user experience Today it is dealt widely about Web applications (WA), but everyone interprets in its own way this definition. We think, therefore, to be opportune to clear to the reader what we mean for Web application. Firstly, it is well to clear what sure we do not mean with such a term that instead, unfortunately, many specialists of the field adopt. The WA is not a traditional application that uses the Browser as interface. The WA is, instead, a tightened marriage between the necessity to carry out operations, being active part of a Business Process, with the typical usability and the navigation of a static Website. The greater causes of failure in the area of Web are determined from the inability of the visitor to find the information that it needs and to surf between these. For this reason, some methodologies of design of Web Application have been born in the last years that will come deepened and illustrated in the following pats of this book. At the dawning of Web, also with the knowledge of the concept of Hypertext, that is a semantic relation between information, many have undertaken the development of such applications without using a design methodology; they realized absolutely unusable WA in which the visitor “it got lost” and that it abandoned desperate in order not to return there never more. When account of the necessity has become us to use also for this type of applications a design methodology, many turned to the only noted and widely used: UML. Many continue to think about this methodology without to keep in some account the fact that it has been born in order to model System-Oriented applications continuing to ignore the requirements of usability of the visitor. UML has been evolved in order to try to model any thing, without to lose own originates represented by the base rules of the Object-Orientation thus becoming potentially a methodology able to model any thing (also BPs) but, de facto, so complicated to be unusable even for the same specialists of applications. The user of a WA needs, instead, “to feel at ease” in a world to which it belongs, and that it agrees before still to find the information which it needs. This means to model the user-experience: To model the interaction of the user with the application by agreement with its requirements and not to model the application according to the requirements of the system. The approach used in this book aims to model the interaction of the user with the WA using the paradigm of the “Dialog”, considering both the peculiarities of the user (multi-user) and those of the device that it is using (multi-device). Moreover, the user of a WA uses information not closely tied to the data but that instead are related to the marketing and to the creation of a world able to attract a new user. The approach used for modeling the WAs is based on three levels: conceptual level, logical level and page level. The details of every level will be illustrated more ahead; in this moment we only notice that the more advanced point of the modeling, mainly close the implementation (page level), loses a few semantic to advantage details to the necessary developer. The attention of the specialists, therefore, is moving more and more towards the application domain rather than towards the classic design of applications (OO). This area of research, confirmed from the result of the Workshop on the DSM (Domain Specific Modeling) in the conferences OOPSLA 2006 and 2007, considers not effective the use of standard methodologies in order to model any thing in any application domain. The main reason is the limitations that these methodologies of course introduce and that force to express the key concepts of an application domain “make up” that make to lose in clarity and acquaintance (Paiano, 2006), (Paiano, 2007). In the conference of 2006, IBM itself, UML owner, has tried to illustrate the use of UML from the point of view of the DSM, and the result has been a sort of an Old-Style functional decomposition, brought up-to-date with some of the typical terms of the OO. In any case, one of the key concepts of this area of research is represented by the automatic generation of the final application starting from the model. We are nearly perfectly by agreement with this tendency. The domain we consider is the web, and we model the WAs using a methodology, that we think absolutely suitable for the Web, in order to model applications in different application domains, with the awareness that, if will be further clarity and representativeness requirements, we can modify the below meta-model thanks to the use of Ontology that allow us to express concepts many complexes with the needed semantic and clarity. Finally, starting from the model of the application, we automatically generate the final WA using two different open source frameworks. Complex Web Information Systems: The challenge At this point, a question is not being more deferred: What is a Complex Web Information system? A Complex Web Information System is an Information System, usable via Web, which includes inside the way a Company performs its activities, the BPs. This System must be usable and must be arranged to easily follow the changes of the activities of the Company according to the vision of a Company as an “open system” (Galbraith, 1973) adopting, therefore, a contingent perspective about its position in the business world. This vision, after 35 years, is not only actual but unavoidable in the global market of the third millennium. As the reader can see, the answer appears quite simple, however to aim the goal of designing a “contingent” Information System capable to effective adapt itself to the continuous changes forced by the solicitations coming from the outside of the Company, it is needed a complex work of analysis and integration of several methodologies. Therefore, the challenges of this book are: • To design Information Systems approaching two main problems: on one hand those relative to the development of web applications and on the other hand to the design and integration, inside of the information system, of the business processes that, although their importance and unquestioned usefulness, they found it hard to enter in a pervasive way in the design and the development of the Web Information Systems. • To implement the Information Systems through the automatic code generation tools that, starting from the design model in a machine readable format, help the IT expert to obtain the Information System very close to the design and without the little personal choices very often dangerous. The methodology that is to the base of this book has the goal to propose a solution to the several problems related to the development of Information Systems usable via Web. Regarding the BPs, as argued previously, it is thought fundamental to start from a deepened analysis of the actual situation without to consider eventual automations. Moreover, being this activity much complex and embracing every aspect of the business life, the experience and the skill of the analysts who, apart some cases ascribable to small business reality, are expert of organization and models of business and not expert of development of applications, are decisive. This clear separation of the jobs represents our starting hypothesis. In fact, currently we can identify two situations. The first represents how much happens using the techniques of the BPM. The consultant companies aim to design BPs from the point of view of the developer of applications, allowing therefore of being able to use the Workflow Engines or similar techniques. In this case, they completely lose sight of the company in its wholeness, so this technique represents just a way to design applications with look & feel more attractive but substantially similar to the functional decomposition of approximately 20 years ago. Of course, in some cases, this technique can be equally effective, but it is impossible to generalize its use. The second situation represents, instead, exactly the opposite one. A big Consultant Company designs the new BPs considering correctly the company in its wholeness and acting on all the variable ones into play. Successively, when they will develop the computer-based system, which must support the new way to work of the Company, the developers will use well-known techniques of Design of applications considering BPs just as requirements. Therefore, it needs to bridge the gap between the design of BPs and the design of the Web applications. Our research work, that it is the base of this book, has the goal to bridge this gap through a methodology that keeps into account the requirements and the peculiarities up to here evidenced. The research activity, therefore, starts from the foundation that the activity of the business experts, that are those who have the task to redesign a Company in its wholeness, stop itself at a detail level unsuitable to those who, instead, must implement the applications. Therefore, the first methodological step carried out from the designers of applications is that one to refine the flow of the processes in order to render them apt to being a true Input (and not just as a requirement) for the developers. Moreover, two possible scenarios are proposed. The first regards the part of Information Systems turned to the internal stakeholders by agreement with the strategy of reengineering of the BPs defined “in-side” to which often it is associated, erroneously to our opinion, the acronym ERP. This type of users often has the necessity of applications Data or Process-Driven, and, therefore, the philosophy of designing the User-Experience could be not suitable, in the sense that it, in the majority of the cases, coincides with the semantic structure of an E-R model with the timing based on the flow of the operations. For the internal users, the use of a Workflow Engine could be suitable also, but we have thought opportune to give a greater freedom to such users in order to build a “virtual desktop” according to their needs. For this reason, and by agreement with the philosophy of the DSM, we have preferred to generate automatically the Java Portlet or the Webparts in Microsoft environment. In this way the user could personalize its virtual desktop adding to the business activities also others Portlet about individual productivity or social communication. The second scenario, concerns, instead, the external users of the company and therefore essentially, but not only, by agreement with the strategy of reengineering of BPs defined “sell-side”. The external users use essentially a WA in order to both navigate between the information and to activate BPs being been integrating part of the same ones. This scenario allows to make a design of the User-Experience independent from the processes and by agreement with how much described in the previous paragraph to which successively will be integrated the BPs. According to these considerations, this book aims to introduce two new methodologies: the first one as result of the extension and a reasoned integration of existing methodologies at conceptual and logical levels introducing a new publishing model, the second one, that oriented to the internal stakeholders, as an enhancement of the generation of applications through workflow engines. This book, dealing with new methodologies, is clearly oriented to the scholars demanding their contribution to improve our approach; however, since the book also deals with tools and automatic code generation starting from the models of the Information Systems, it could be an essential guide for practitioner that have to design, to manage and to maintain Information Systems.

The huge amount of files of different types (from photos, personal documents, to accounting or fiscal documents) which everyone stores in his own personal computer or in other hardware device (such as internet virtual space, external hard drives, etc.) risk, with the passing of time, to go lost. The founding idea of the eSCI project (eStore of Captured Information) is just to avoid the accidental loss of files, proposing to develop a web portal which allows the user to safely store his own documents and to retrieve them whenever he wants through a simple internet connection. Within the scope of this research project, the reached objective was double: first to assist the user in the document indexing activity, leading him to define the right keywords able to univocally characterize each file; in this way the user doesn’t index the document only though its file name but also providing more precise information about its content. This allows to characterize the document according to a semantic meaning which will make its retrieval easier. At the same time, we would develop a software architecture that should be able to automatically generate the right data entry forms needed to index each particular class of documents, avoiding the expensive activities of the evolutive maintenance of the application. We made use of ontologies to express the real semantic value that each document could hide, simplifying their indexing and retrieval.

Up to some years ago, industries operating in the field of document filing system had a great boost to their growing, pulled, above all, by the need of the Public Administrations and of the Great Industries to externalize their paper archives. Now these companies are slowly trying to convert themselves to digital enterprises becoming, de facto, provider of services going very far from the simple physical space rental in a warehouse: services as Substitutive Optical Scan, document indexing, manual data input, OCR are now essential. In this context these companies are often in difficulty having to face up problems more typical of the software engineering field: small several documental production are more and more dependent on their clients’ internal business processes and integrated with their information systems. This makes them more and more subject to the work of external software house to perform every, even little, modification to the implemented systems. In this paper we presents a case study: the YouFile service prototype. The system supports smart document (both paper and electronic) indexing. It is based on a WebOS interface in order to benefit of the desktop metaphor, and it uses an ontological approach that defines not only the document classes but also the semantic relationships between specific characteristics of each document class. The system allows to manage the process of the document indexing and retrieving in an automatic way, generating the data entry forms at run-time.

In this chapter the focus is on business process design as middle point between requirement elicitation and implementation of a Web information system. We face both the problem of the notation to adopt in order to represent in a simple way the business process and the problem of a formal representation, in a machine-readable format, of the design. We adopt Semantic Web technology to represent process and we explain how this technology has been used to reach our goals.

Taking into account that the new capabilities of modern e-book readers can manage a lot of media such as audio, video and allow an excellent interaction with the user than could add a comments or bookmarks, activate applet such as test or example in a educational e-book, the e-book could be considered as a real hypermedia document with strong interaction with its reader. Until now, unfortunately, the e-book has been seen as a transposition of the paper model onto a digital one, aiming to reduce the time and costs of distribution; thus the author has no incentive to rethink the content for the potential offered by the electronic medium. The task is no longer to provide a form of mediation between digital support and traditional book, but to reinterpret [1] [2] the modalities of spread of knowledge. Here presents an attempt, using W2000 methodology [3][4] to arrive at a structured approach to design that place the authors at the center of the process. Using this analysis we present EB2000, a new web-based authoring tool in which the authors can create specific e-book content, cooperate with other author or third parties for multimedia content, and to publishing the complete e-book in standard format.

The growing demand for web applications and the new multi-user and multi-device requirements of these has led to the need for a structured and well-reasoned approach that helps both the application designer and the developer to produce a good quality product. On one hand we have the application designer, who has to describe all aspects of the application and manage the complexity of the tasks; on the other hand both the application customer and the developer need to validate and understand the designer's choices. To conciliate these needs, we propose a prototyping framework based on W2000 [1][2] methodology: in this way the designer has a powerful tool to keep control over the web application, the customer has a point of reference for evaluating the design, and the developer can better understand the design thanks to the prototyped application.

JWeb is a development environment for complex WWW applications, based upon the HDM model. JWeb (entirely written in Java) consists of two different parts: the development environment and the execution environment. The development environment allows the definition of the conceptual structure of the application, the creation of a supporting DataBase and the DataBase population. The execution environment allows the running of the application, possibly after some customization operations. We envision three main ways of using JWeb: as a training tool, for students and practitioners; as a fast prototyping tool, to test different design hypothesis, and to come up with a final design; as a tool for fast development and deployment of complex, high quality, Web applications.

Estimating time and costs is a crucial factor in application development projects and low error margins are a priority. In line with the very fast evolution of Internet technologies, all applications are quickly becoming Web applications, which are growing without a consolidated project methodology. Thus there is a clear need for an estimation model for these applications' development projects. The aim of the present paper is to illustrate a new Web application cost estimation model that can form the starting point for any development project. The estimation model described in this paper is called MMWA (metrics model for Web applications). This is an "early measures model", since the measurements are effected at the start of the software life cycle, with a view to accurately estimate time and costs so that the right decisions can be taken concerning the development of the Web application in hand.