Enterprise Modeling and Decision-Support for Automating the Business Rules Lifecycle

Business rules represent policies, procedures and constraints regarding how an enterprise conducts its business. To get the full benefits of modeling business rules requires an approach to managing them through their full lifecycle, from acquisition through deployment and evolution. The research reported in this paper is aimed at determining what infrastructure capabilities are needed to provide this lifecycle support. The solution embodies a modeling framework that captures the structure of the enterprise, in terms of which the business rules can be expressed, and decision-support capabilities for reasoning about and deriving business rules. The paper demonstrates the possibility of automatic support of the business rules lifecycle by automatically generating business rules from the captured information, along with data representing domain assumptions in a case study (the London Ambulance System). A system was implemented to illustrate the methodology and to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. The methodology also gives guidance on how to deal with pragmatically important situations such as rules that involve both automated and human tasks, nondeterministic rules, and goal-oriented versus operational rules.     

Edge Mashups for Service-Oriented Collaboration

This paper presents the Live Distributed Objects platform that makes it possible to combine hosted content with P2P protocols in a single object-oriented framework.     

Next-Generation Enterprise Computing: Beyond EDOC 2006

With the increasing demand for networked and XML services, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and next-generation enterprise computing.     

开放式企业信息入口网站整合性技术架构研究

本论文探讨了开放式企业入口网站的一般特性与功能,以及信息、应用程序与服务的整合架构,内容-提供者的标准组件等。     

Automating negotiation for m-services

Mobile electronic commerce (m-commerce) is an emerging manifestation of Internet electronic commerce that bridges the domains of Internet, mobile computing and wireless telecommunications in order to provide an array of sophisticated services (m-services) to mobile users. To date, much of the research in the area has concentrated on the problem of service discovery. However, once a service has been discovered, it needs to be provisioned according to the goals and constraints of the service provider and the service consumer. Since, in general, these will be different stakeholders (with different aims), the de facto provisioning method will be some form of negotiation. To this end, this paper develops automated negotiation protocols and strategies that are applicable in m-commerce environments. Specifically, we develop and evaluate time-constrained bilateral negotiation algorithms, that allow software agents to adapt to the quality of the network and/or their experience of similar interactions.     

End-User Development of Mashups with NaturalMash

Context: The emergence of the long-tail in the market of software applications is shifting the role of end-users from mere consumers to becoming developers of applications addressing their unique, personal, and transient needs. On the Web, a popular form of such applications is called mashup, built out of the lightweight composition of Web APIs (reusable software components delivered as a service through the Web). To enable end-users to build mashups, there is a key problem that must be overcome: End-users lack programming knowledge as well as the interest to learn how to master the complex set of Web technologies required to develop mashups. End-User Development (EUD) is an emerging research field dealing with this type of problems. Its main goal is to design tools and techniques facilitating the development of software applications by non-programmers.Objective: The paper describes the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, an innovative EUD tool for mashups (a mashup tool). NaturalMash aims at enabling non-professional users without any knowledge of programming languages and skills to create feature-rich, interactive, and useful mashups.Methods: The design of NaturalMash adopts a formative evaluation approach, and has completed three design and evaluation iterations. The formative evaluations utilize usability testing, think aloud protocol, questionnaires, observation, and unstructured interviews. Additionally, we compare the expressive power of naturalmash with the state-of-the-art mashup tools.Results: The results from the formative evaluations helped us identify important usability problems. From an assessment point of view, the results were promising and sggested that the proposed tool has a short and gentle learning curve in a way that even non-programmers are able to rapidly build useful mashups. Also, the comparative evaluation results showed that NaturalMash offers a competitive level of expressive power compared with existing mashup tools targeting non-programmers.Conclusion: As the evaluation results indicate, NaturalMash provides a high level of expressive power while it is still highly usable by non-programmers. These suggest that we have successfully achieved the objective of the proposed tool, distinguishing it from existing mashup tools that are either too limited or highly specialized for non-professional users.     

An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups

On the newly programmable Web, mashups are flourishing. Designers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standarization and compatibility offers considerable challenges. IBM Sharable Code is an online service platform for developing and sharing situational Web 2.0 applications and mashups. The platform is based on an innovative domain-specific language that streamlines and standardizes the development and deployment of applications consuming and exposing Web APIs. Parts of the DSL and the resulting applications and mashups can be shared and reused by members of the IBM Sharable Code community. In this article, the authors offer an overview of the platform's architecture and the DSL language at its core.     

从数据管理到内容管理——企业门户核心技术研究

文章探讨了企业门户的核心技术之一，即内容管理，并且论证了从传统的数据管理到内容管理的转变的必要性。内容管理最初主要是指网站内容管理，目的是为了有效的管理Web站点上大量的静态和动态网页。但随着电子商务和Internet的迅速发展，内容管理已经上升成为网络时代的关键技术之一，并在企业门户中处于核心地位。文章首先给出了内容管理的定义，然后探讨了内容管理的核心概念，并最后给出了内容管理系统的框架。     

Automating Hypermedia for Decision Support

Many ‘first generation’ hypermedia systems were designed to support applications, which do not require the dynamic and general characteristics necessary for our domain --- decision support systems (DSS). The heart of our research is a dynamic model of hypermedia incorporating virtual structures and computation, which we call generalized hypermedia. Generalized hypermedia broadens and automates the ‘static’ or non-virtual notion of first generation hypermedia for a knowledge-based DSS shell. The shell provides a hypermedia-style interface for navigating among DSS application models, data and reports. Such a shell should support applications in a variety of fields, e.g., engineering, manufacturing, finance, and therefore must provide hypermedia support as general, system-level functionality Generalized hypermedia superimposes a hypermedia network on a DSS application, generating all hypermedia nodes, links and link markers dynamically from the application's standard, non-hypermedia knowledge base. In this paper we demonstrate how automating hypermedia can enhance decision making with a DSS. We describe generalized hypermedia and discuss the challenges presented to it by a dynamic, real-time environment.     

End Users at the Bazaar: Designing Next-Generation Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

The "bazaar" metaphor has developed a lasting popularity in software engineering, especially as software architectures have evolved from monoliths to service orientation. Nevertheless, the metaphor is limited because it doesn't consider end users, those who develop software for themselves. Introducing such an end user, the "prosumer," to the bazaar not only suggests a changing division of work in software development but also calls for different functionality and architectural choices. The authors evaluated changing software architectures from an end-user development (EUD) perspective, taking the case of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as traditionally monolithically designed systems moving toward service orientation. On the basis of the study's findings, which indicated problems with the systems' technical flexibility, the authors developed a tool set for fostering EUD activities. Their new architecture for ERP systems enables end users to create their own solutions.     

Monoliths to Mashups: Increasing Opportunistic Assets

Opportunities are available resources that yield desired results. An opportunity's suitability depends on who seizes it and the context for its use. Opportunistic development builds hybrid software systems from reusable resources called opportunistic assets. Mashups are Web application hybrids that consume these assets. Monoliths are self-contained systems that can produce such opportunistic assets if they can expose key functions that are easy to mash. A major barrier to reusing legacy monoliths is integration. Elevating integration connectors to first-class opportunistic assets reduces this barrier by linking to and presenting monolith applications as opportunities for mashups.     

Automating statistics management for query optimizers

Statistics play a key role in influencing the quality of plans chosen by a database query optimizer. In this paper, we identify the statistics that are essential for an optimizer. We introduce novel techniques that help significantly reduce the set of statistics that need to be created without sacrificing the quality of query plans generated. We discuss how these techniques can be leveraged to automate statistics management in databases. We have implemented and experimentally evaluated our approach on Microsoft SQL Server 7.0     

Automating the Search for Elegant Proofs

The research reported in this article was spawned by a colleague's request to find an elegant proof (of a theorem from Boolean algebra) to replace his proof consisting of 816 deduced steps. The request was met by finding a proof consisting of 100 deduced steps. The methodology used to obtain the far shorter proof is presented in detail through a sequence of experiments. Although clearly not an algorithm, the methodology is sufficiently general to enable its use for seeking elegant proofs regardless of the domain of study. In addition to (usually) being more elegant, shorter proofs often provide the needed path to constructing a more efficient circuit, a more effective algorithm, and the like. The methodology relies heavily on the assistance of McCune's automated reasoning program OTTER. Of the aspects of proof elegance, the main focus here is on proof length, with brief attention paid to the type of term present, the number of variables required, and the complexity of deduced steps. The methodology is iterative, relying heavily on the use of three strategies: the resonance strategy, the hot list strategy, and McCune's ratio strategy. These strategies, as well as other features on which the methodology relies, do exhibit tendencies that can be exploited in the search for shorter proofs and for other objectives. To provide some insight regarding the value of the methodology, I discuss its successful application to other problems from Boolean algebra and to problems from lattice theory. Research suggestions and challenges are also offered.     

Automating financial markets

An electronic financial marketplace can be regarded as a single multiorganizational distributed system with a communications network at the centre and a number of linked peripheral elements. The paper describes the characteristics of electronic marketplaces, the progress being made in automating financial markets, some of the problems that may arise and likely future developments.     

Automating virtual reality

The author discusses some applications of virtual reality and the limitations of interactivity. He considers how automatic simulated behavior minus the application judgment of direct human participation is already evolving in computer animation. In traditional animation, the animator explicitly controls every action of the characters, provides every cause, and determines every effect. While we think of virtual reality as the ultimate interactive technology, it is likely that only new tasks will be purely interactive. As applications are better understood, the ratio of interactive to automated processing will go down. We can expect anthropomorphic simulated humans to work on simulated projects in not necessarily visible virtual worlds     

Automating test automation

When trying to introduce TTCN-3 and thus improving test automation we are regularly faced with the issue of legacy test automation. These existing approaches to test automation range from small code developed for a very specific task to large applications with substantial development effort or even purchased solution from third party vendors that might include hardware components. Often these solutions cater for a specific need and their combined application is controlled by humans. A higher degree of test automation can be achieved if these solutions are combined in a test system to enable batch runs for example. TTCN-3 can be a good choice for implementing a future-oriented solution. However, recreating all of the existing parts in TTCN-3 might not be a feasible solution from a business perspective. Instead of refraining from creating an advanced solution, the idea is to use those existing parts to substantially reduce the effort necessary to introduce an improved test automation solution. In this paper, we will report on the successful integration of legacy test solutions using TTCN-3 and creating a new, advanced test system that enables overnight test runs. The paper will illustrate our challenges and experiences from this project.     

Automating Support for Software Evolution in UML

Disciplined support for evolution of software artifacts is important in all phases of the software life-cycle. In order to achieve this support, a uniform underlying foundation for software evolution is necessary. While, in the past, reuse contracts have been proposed as such a formalism in a number of different domains, this paper generalises the formalism, and integrates it into the UML metamodel. As such, support for evolution becomes readily available for many kinds of UML models, ranging from requirements to the implementation phase.     

Automating exception-safety classification

Exception handling mechanisms provide a structured way to deal with exceptional circumstances, making it easier to read and reason about programs. Exception handling, however, cannot avoid the problem that the transfer of control might leave the program in an inconsistent state—resources might leak, invariants might be violated, the program state might be changed. Since client code often needs to know how a program behaves in the presence of exceptions, the exception-safety classification distinguishes three different classes of safety guarantees; this classification is used, for example, during the review process in the Boost organization for standardized libraries in C++. Classifying the safety level of a procedure requires understanding program invariants and tracking program state at any given point in the code, which is error-prone when done by hand. Yet, no tool support is available to date. In this paper we present the first automated analysis for exception guarantees. Since the safety level of an arbitrary procedure is undecidable, the analysis conservatively approximates exception safety . The analysis is based on the theory of backward data-flow analysis and recognizes two of the three safety guarantees, the strong and the no-throw guarantee, and provides counterexamples otherwise. A prototype implementation is available.