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Telos is a conceptual modeling language intended to capture software knowledge, such as software system requirements, domain knowledge, architectures, design decisions and more. To accomplish this, Telos was designed to be extensible in the sense that the concepts used to capture software knowledge can be defined in the language itself, instead of being built-in. This extensibility is accomplished through powerful metamodeling features, which proved very useful for interrelating heterogeneous models from requirements, model-driven software engineering, data integration, ontology engineering, cultural informatics and education. We trace the evolution of ideas and research results in the Telos project from its origins in the late eighties. Our account looks at the semantics of Telos, its various implementations and its applications. We also recount related research by other groups and the cross-influences of ideas thereof. We conclude with lessons learnt. © 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

It is widely recognized that accurately identifying and classifying competitors is a challenge for many companies and entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, it is a paramount activity which provide valuable insights that affect a wide range of strategic decisions. One of the main challenges in competitor identification lies in the complex nature of the competitive relationships that arise in business environments. These have been extensively investigate over the years, which lead to a plethora of competition theories and frameworks. Still, the concept of competition remains conceptually complex, as none of these approaches properly formalized their assumptions. In this paper, we address this issue by means of an ontological analysis on the notion of competition in general, and of business competition, in particular, leveraging theories from various fields, including Marketing, Strategic Management, Ecology, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences. Our analysis, the first of its kind in the literature, is grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and allows us to formally characterize why competition arises, as well as to distinguish between three types of business competitive relationships, namely market-level, firm-level and potential competition.

Process choreographies are part of daily business. While the correct ordering of exchanged messages can be modeled and enacted with current choreography techniques, no approach exists to describe and automate the exchange of data between processes in a choreography using messages. This paper describes an entirely model-driven approach for BPMN introducing a few concepts that suffice to model data retrieval, data transformation, message exchange, and correlation – four aspects of data exchange. For automation, this work utilizes a recent concept to enact data dependencies in internal processes. We present a modeling guideline to derive local process models from a given choreography; their operational semantics allows to correctly enact the entire choreography from the derived models only including the exchange of data. We implemented our approach by extending the camunda BPM platform with our approach and show its feasibility by realizing all service interaction patterns using only model-based concepts.

Security Requirements Engineering is an emerging field which lies at the crossroads of Security and Software Engineering. Much research has focused on this field in recent years, spurred by the realization that security must be dealt with in the earliest phases of the software development process as these phases cover a broader organizational perspective. Agent-oriented methodologies have proved to be especially useful in this setting as they support the modeling of the social context in which the system-to-be will operate. In our previous work, we proposed the SI* modeling language to deal with security and trust, and the Secure Tropos methodology for designing secure software systems. Since then, both have been revised and refined in light of experience gained from their application to several industry case studies. This chapter presents the consolidated versions of the SI* modeling language and the Secure Tropos methodology and recounts our experiences, explaining the practical and theoretical reasons behind each consolidation step.

Managing design requirements of complex socio-technical designs in heterogeneous and rapidly-changing environments demands new approaches. In this chapter we use the framework described by Krippendorff [1] to describe the evolution of requirements thinking and subsequently develop a research agenda. Krippendorff’s trajectory of artificiality shows an increasing dematerialization and human-centeredness of artifacts. He distinguishes six kinds of artifacts, namely material products; goods, services, and identities; interfaces; multi-user systems and networks; projects; and finally, discourses. Based on a review of the design literature, involving two major design journals, we find that the design of socio-technical systems currently tends to be situated on the level of multi-user systems and networks. Projects and discourses hardly get any attention in requirements thinking. We therefore develop an agenda for future research directed toward advancing requirements thinking at the level of projects and discourses as artifacts of design.

Designing Web-based information systems requires the use of a thorough design methodology. Particularly, when the content of the system is gathered from different information sources available via the Web, the specification of how data is to be retrieved requires appropriate design tools. Concretely, a solution to the problem of how to facilitate the design of integrating heterogeneous information sources is needed, in order to be able to provide a uniform access to data gathered from different sources. In this paper we propose the use of the Hera methodology extended with the Semantic Layer, which concentrates on the integration aspect. The presented integration framework provides a coherent and meaningful (with respect to a given conceptual model) view of the integrated heterogeneous information sources.

At the CAiSE conference in Heidelberg in 1999, Wasim Sadiq and Maria Orlowska presented an algorithm to verify workflow graphs [19]. The algorithm uses a set of reduction rules to detect structural conflicts. This paper shows that the set of reduction rules presented in [19] is not complete and proposes an alternative algorithm. The algorithm translates workflow graphs into so-called WF-nets. WF-nets are a class of Petri nets tailored towards workflow analysis. As a result, Petri-net theory and tools can be used to verify workflow graphs. In particular, our workflow verification tool Woflan [21] can be used to detect design errors. It is shown that the absence of structural conflicts, i.e., deadlocks and lack of synchronization, conforms to soundness of the corresponding WF-net [2]. In contrast to the algorithm presented in [19], the algorithm presented in this paper is complete. Moreover, the complexity of this alternative algorithm is given.

Business processes depend on human resources and managers must regularly evaluate the performance of their employees based on a number of measures, some of which are subjective in nature. As modern organisations use information systems to automate their business processes and record information about processes’ executions in event logs, it now becomes possible to get objective information about resource behaviours by analysing data recorded in event logs. We present an extensible framework for extracting knowledge from event logs about the behaviour of a human resource and for analysing the dynamics of this behaviour over time. The framework is fully automated and implements a predefined set of behavioural indicators for human resources. It also provides a means for organisations to define their own behavioural indicators, using the conventional Structured Query Language, and a means to analyse the dynamics of these indicators. The framework’s applicability is demonstrated using an event log from a German bank.

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Recent database research has given much attention to the specification of “flexible” transactions that can be used in interoperable systems. Starting from a quite different angle, Business Process Modelling has approached the area of communication modelling as well (the Language/Action perspective). The main goal of this paper is to provide some useful structuring mechanisms for interoperable transactions based on the Language/Action perspective. The paper thus tries to build a bridge between two rather separated worlds: the research on interoperable transactions on the one hand, and the research on business process models on the other. Extended deontic logic provides the material for this bridge. To better structure the specification, a distinction is proposed between the transaction level, the task level, and the contract.