Informatica

Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOW) aims at supporting the collaboration between several autonomous and heterogeneous business processes, distributed over different enterprises or organizations. Coordination of these processes is a fundamental issue that has been mainly addressed in a static context, but it still remains open in a dynamic one such as the Internet in which IOW applications are more and more enacted nowadays. In such a context, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are known to be a natural solution for modeling IOW since they provide adequate abstractions and specific mediators to cope with IOW coordination. Consequently, this paper provides an agent-based model for coordinating business processes involved in a dynamic IOW. This model is a triplet (E, M, R). E is the set of coordinated entities. It corresponds to the different business processes that may be published, discovered or deployed by IOW partners. M is the media supporting coordination. It is a multi-agent architecture compliant with the Workflow Management Coalition architecture and integrating specific components devoted to coordination issues. Finally, R is the set of rules governing the coordination. In our context, R is described through an organizational model aiming at structuring the interaction among the coordinated entities and the different components of the architecture.

In the context of enterprise engineering, strategic planning, information systems engineering, and software engineering activities should be tightly integrated. Traditional, interview-based requirements gathering and elicitation techniques are suited for this aim not enough well and often lead to the violation of the strategic alignment. The vision-driven requirements engineering has been proposed to solve this problem. The paper contributes to the further development of vision-driven requirements engineering techniques. It proposes a methodical framework that defines a complete scheme to organize different level requirements and allows to flowdown requirements from business to software level preserving their business-orientation.

Interoperability is becoming an area with high focus both at national and cross-national level. This paper presents an assessment of the maturity levels of cross-national interoperability activities within the governmental domain in 13 nations. This analysis includes an assessment of national enterprise architecture programs and national interoperability collaborations, in order to find out whether these serve as important precursors for engaging in cross-national interoperability collaborations. This paper document the importance of national activities as a precursor for engaging in cross-national interoperability collaboration by demonstrating the relation between the maturity of national and cross-national activities.

Semantic Web is envisioned as semantic description of data and services enabling unambiguous computerized interpretation. Thanks to semantic description, computers can perform demanding tasks such as automation of discovery and access to heterogeneous data sources. Although this is possible with the existing technologies, combination of web services technology, ontologies and generative programming methods makes this simpler and more efficient. This paper presents the model for dynamic generation of web services for data retrieval from heterogeneous data sources using ontologies. Emphasis is on dynamic generation of web services customized to a particular user based on the request defined by ontology. The paper also describes a prototype of the model implementation. Some advantages of our approach over other approaches are also provided.

The widespread use of the XML format for document representation and message exchange has influenced techniques for data integration in last years. A development of various XML languages, methods and tools gave rise to so called XML technology. Enterprise Information Integration (EII) requires an accurate, precise and complete understanding of the disparate data sources, the needs of the information consumers, and how these map to the business concepts of the enterprise. Any integration takes place in context of an Enterprise Information System (EIS). In the paper we explain various approaches to EII, its architectures as well as its association to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). We introduce basic features and issues of EII and justify why XML technology contributes to finding sufficiently powerful support for tools for enabling EII. In particular, a database approach to XML provides a universal solution enabling to construct tools for achieving EII. In the paper we present some features of the XML technology, mainly its database part, and show how it is usable in EII.

Business rules are relatively new addition in the field of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which are kind of business information systems, development. Recently some relevant enhancements of existing business information systems engineering methods were introduced, although there are still open issues of how business rules may be used and improve qualitative and quantitative attributes of such kind of information systems. The paper discusses existing business information systems engineering issues arising out of using business rules approach. The paper also introduces several ways of business rule involvement aiming at ensuring ERP systems development agility based on running researches in the field also carried out by the authors.