Testing Preorders for Probabilistic Processes

We present a testing preorder for probabilistic processes based on a quantification of the probability with which processes pass tests. The theory enjoys close connections with the classical testing theory of De Nicola and Hennessy in that whenever a process passes a test with probability 1 (respectively some nonzero probability) in our setting, then the process must (respectively may) pass the test in the classical theory. We also develop an alternative characterization of the probabilistic testing preorders that takes the form of a mapping from probabilistic traces to the interval [0, 1], where a probabilistic trace is an alternating sequence of actions and probability distributions over actions. Finally, we give proof techniques, derived from the alternative characterizations, for establishing preorder relationships between probabilistic processes. The utility of these techniques is demonstrated by means of some simple examples.     

Workflow Business Template for Application Processes in Administration Department

The reuse of business-process and information specifications can reduce the cost of business design by helping to alleviate bottlenecks in the development of workflow systems. Using a new concept we call workflow design pattern, we create a library of standard business-process and information specifications to be used as workflow business template. Business design and system design are done by customizing the standard specifications. New support tools are used to implement the design result. By using this proposed method, the cost of system development can be reduced.     

生鲜商品盘点的流程

目前，连锁超市经营生鲜商品已经成为一种普遍现象，但各大超市的经营效果却参差不齐，喜忧参半。很多经营超市生鲜的管理人员刚开始简单地将生鲜作为集客的手段和渠道，真正经营起来后发现，客流带来的经济效益却无法弥补生鲜的亏损，生鲜商品似乎成为一块“鸡肋”，让超市管理者深感头疼。     

将流程电子化进行到底

自从亚马逊书店出现在互联网上,图书零售业遭遇了什么?当CISCO甩开其它同行业对手率先开展了电子商务后,结果是怎样的?当沃尔玛以其超前的管理理念和技术手段赢得丰厚的利润时,连锁企业的危机感是否与日俱增?     

Incorporating Events into Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Because Web-scale processes are inherently cross-organizational, they require the robust enactment of interactions among autonomous parties. However, specifying the processes involved is difficult. To overcome this obstacle, the authors use a business protocol that lets the applicable events and responses vary based on where the process is deployed and the infrastructure and IT applications installed therein. Treating events and business logic as separate concerns also yields clearer models and improves reusability. The authors describe the architecture and tools and outline a methodology by which each participant in a process can define, detect, and respond to events.     

Modeling and Managing Interactions among Business Processes

Most workflow management systems (WfMSs) only support the separate andindependent execution of business processes. However, processes often needto interact with each other, in order to synchronize the execution of theiractivities, to exchange process data, to request execution of services, orto notify progresses in process execution. Recent market trends also raisethe need for cooperation and interaction between processes executed in differentorganizations, posing additional challenges. In fact, in order to reduce costsand provide better services, companies are pushed to increase cooperation and toform virtual enterprises, where business processes span across organizationalboundaries and are composed of cooperating workflows executed in differentorganizations. Workflow interaction in a cross-organizational environment iscomplicated by the heterogeneity of workflow management platforms on top ofwhich workflows are defined and executed and by the different and possiblycompeting business policies and business goals that drive process executionin each organization.In this paper we propose a model and system that enable interactionbetween workflows executed in the same or in different organizations. Weextend traditional workflow models by allowing workflows to publish andsubscribe to events, and by enabling the definition of points in the processexecution where events should be sent or received. Event notifications aremanaged by a suitable event service that is capable of filtering andcorrelating events, and of dispatching them to the appropriate targetworkflow instances. The extended model can be easily mapped onto anyworkflow model, since event specific constructs can be specified by means ofordinary workflow activities, for which we provide the implementation. Inaddition, the event service is easily portable to different platforms, anddoes not require integration with the WfMS that supports the cooperatingworkflows. Therefore, the proposed approach is applicable in virtually anyenvironment and is independent on the specific platform adopted     

基于语义的业务流程一致性评价

随着Internet技术的不断发展,电子商务中的B2B应用也逐渐成为企业之间进行业务活动的主要依托技术,企业定义了自己的业务流程,双方业务流程的一致性在业务伙伴间的协作中扮演着非常重要的角色。目前,已经有诸如BPEL4WS和ebXML这样的电子商务技术能够使得企业在业务流程级进行协作,但这些技术均是基于XML技术,所提供的功能主要是语法上的,很少涉及他们的业务流程的一致性评价。为此,扩展了ebXML框架以支持业务流程的一致性评价,设计了一个一致性评价代理来执行客户企业的需要,并搜寻ebXML注册中心的潜在伙伴的业务信息,基于良好定义的一致性标准测试他们与客户企业业务流程间的一致性,最后提交一个评价结果给客户企业。通过这样的过程,客户企业能够找到合适的业务伙伴。而且,采用了语义网的方法,使得评价的结果更加准确。     

Formalizing WSBPEL Business Processes Using Process Algebra

Industry standards for Web Service composition, such as WSBPEL, provide the notation and additional control mechanisms for the execution of business processes in Web Service collaborations. However, these standards do not provide support for checking interesting properties related to Web Service and process behaviour. In an attempt to fill this gap, we describe a formalization of WSBPEL business processes, that adds protocol information to the specifications of interacting Web Services, and uses a process algebra to model their dynamic behaviour — thus enabling their formal analysis and the inference of relevant properties of the systems being built.     

Graph Grammars for Querying Graph-like Data

Recently research has deeply investigated the problem of querying semi-structured data and data which can be represented by means of graphs (e.g. object-oriented data, XML data, etc.). Typically queries on graph-like data, called path queries, are expressed by means of regular expressions denoting paths in the graph. The result of a path query is the set of nodes reachable by means of a path expressed by a specified regular expression. In this paper we investigate the problem of extracting a subgraph satisfying a given property from a given graph representing some information. We propose a new form of queries, called graph queries, whose answers are (marked) graphs having a particular structure, extracted from the source graph. We show that a simple form of graph grammars can be profitably used to define graph queries. The result of a graph query, using a grammar G over a database D, is a marked subgraph of D ‘matching’ a graph derived from G. We consider different types of graph grammars which can be used to query graph-like data and consider their expressiveness and complexity.     

基于邻接矩阵的业务流程间距离计算方法

在业务流程管理中,多数流程间距离计算方法忽略了事件日志的重要作用,并且计算效率较低。为此,通过引入邻接矩阵提出一种新的业务流程间距离计算方法。提取保存在各类信息管理系统中的事件日志,将其转换为仅包含活动执行轨迹的简单事件日志。在此基础上,通过定义活动间的紧邻关系构造活动邻接矩阵,同时借鉴矩阵论中矩阵范数的定义,给出流程间距离的定义,并证明其满足距离度量特性。实验结果表明,该方法能够区分选择结构和并行结构并发现不可见任务,计算效率较高。     

Querying XML streams

Efficient querying of XML streams will be one of the fundamental features of next-generation information systems. In this paper we propose the TurboXPath path processor, which accepts a language equivalent to a subset of the for-let-where constructs of XQuery over a single document. TurboXPath can be extended to provide full XQuery support or used to augment federated database engines for efficient handling of queries over XML data streams produced by external sources. Internally, TurboXPath uses a tree-shaped path expression with multiple outputs to drive the execution. The result of a query execution is a sequence of tuples of XML fragments matching the output nodes. Based on a streamed execution model, TurboXPath scales up to large documents and has limited memory consumption for increased concurrency. Experimental evaluation of a prototype demonstrates performance gains compared to other state-of-the-art path processors.Received: 30 January 2003, Accepted: 4 February 2004, Published online: 8 April 2004Edited by: R. Baeza-Yates.     

Querying now-relative data

Now-relative temporal data play an important role in most temporal applications, and their management has been proved to impact in a crucial way the efficiency of temporal databases. Though several temporal relational approaches have been developed to deal with now-relative data, none of them has provided a whole temporal algebra to query them. In this paper we overcome such a limitation, by proposing a general algebra which is parametrically adapted to cope with the relational approaches to now-relative data in the literature, i.e., MIN, MAX, NULL and POINT approaches. Besides being general enough to provide a query language for several approaches in the literature, our algebra has been designed in such a way to satisfy several theoretical and practical desiderata: closure with respect to representation languages, correctness with respect to the “consensus” BCDM semantics, reducibility to the standard non-temporal algebra (which involves interoperability with non-temporal relational databases), implementability and efficiency. Indeed, the experimental evaluation we have drawn on our implementation has shown that only a slight overhead is added by our treatment of now-relative data (with respect to an approach in which such data are not present).     

Querying Linguistic Trees

Large databases of linguistic annotations are used for testing linguistic hypotheses and for training language processing models. These linguistic annotations are often syntactic or prosodic in nature, and have a hierarchical structure. Query languages are used to select particular structures of interest, or to project out large slices of a corpus for external analysis. Existing languages suffer from a variety of problems in the areas of expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness for linguistic query. We describe the domain of linguistic trees and discuss the expressive requirements for a query language. Then we present a language that can express a wide range of queries over these trees, and show that the language is first-order complete over trees.     

Modeling Content for Semantic-Level Querying of Multimedia

Many semantic content-based models have been developed for modeling video and audio in order to enable information retrieval based on semantic content. The level of querying of the media depends upon the semantic aspects modeled. This paper proposes a semantic content-based model for semantic-level querying that makes full use of the explicit media structure, objects, spatial relationships between objects, events and actions involving objects, temporal relationships between events and actions, and integration between syntactic and semantic information.     

欧尚中国第三方物流的业务流程及信息化管理

连锁经营在中国只有十多年的发展历史,其间经历了快速上升的时期,目前连锁经营面临的困难和阻力已有所显现,而物流问题已成为制约其健康发展的一大瓶颈。中国连锁经营协会会长郭戈平谈到:“在发达国家,大型连锁企业的背后都有一整套强大的物流系统支撑。这种物流支     

Improving the Usability of E-Commerce Applications using Business Processes

E-commerce applications automate many daily business activities. Users interact with e-commerce applications through menu-driven User Interface (Ul) components such as toolbars, dialogs, and windows. However, the tremendous number of functionalities may overwhelm the users. Users struggle to locate the appropriate Ul components to accomplish the tasks required by business processes. In this paper, we enhance e-commerce applications by improving their usability using the knowledge embedded in business process definitions. Our improved application provides contextual information to fulfill each business task. The improved application guides users through the various tasks in a step-by-step fashion. Through a controlled experiment, we demonstrate that our improved application offers a better usability experience for novice users by giving them more guidance and reducing the time needed to locate the next Ul component in a complex Ul.