Operational semantics of aspects in business process management

Aspect orientation is an important approach to address complexity of cross-cutting concerns in Information Systems. This approach encapsulates these concerns separately and compose them to the main module when needed. Although there a different works which shows how this separation should be performed in process models, the composition of them is an open area. In this paper, we demonstrate the semantics of a service which enables this composition. The result can also be used as a blueprint to implement the service to support aspect orientation in Business Process Management area.

An authorization framework using building information models

A building information model (BIM) is an electronic repository of structured, three-dimensional data that captures both the physical and dynamic functional characteristics of a facility. In addition to its more traditional function as a tool to aid design and construction, a BIM can be used throughout the life cycle of a facility, functioning as a living database that places resources contained within the building in their spatial and temporal context. Through its comprehension of spatial relationships, a BIM can meaningfully represent and integrate previously isolated control and management systems and processes, and thereby provide a more intuitive interface to users. By placing processes in a spatial context, decision-making can be improved, with positive flow-on effects for security and efficiency. In this article, we systematically analyse the authorization requirements involved in the use of BIMs. We introduce the concept of using a BIM as a graphical tool to support spatial access control configuration and management (including physical access control). We also consider authorization requirements for regulating access to the structured data that exists within a BIM as well as to external systems and data repositories that can be accessed via the BIM interface. With a view to addressing these requirements we present a survey of relevant spatiotemporal access control models, focusing on features applicable to BIMs and highlighting capability gaps. Finally, we present a conceptual authorization framework that utilizes BIMs.

Bayesian hierarchical models in statistical quality control methods to improve healthcare in hospitals

Quality oriented management systems and methods have become the dominant business and governance paradigm. From this perspective, satisfying customers’ expectations by supplying reliable, good quality products and services is the key factor for an organization and even government. During recent decades, Statistical Quality Control (SQC) methods have been developed as the technical core of quality management and continuous improvement philosophy and now are being applied widely to improve the quality of products and services in industrial and business sectors. Recently SQC tools, in particular quality control charts, have been used in healthcare surveillance. In some cases, these tools have been modified and developed to better suit the health sector characteristics and needs. It seems that some of the work in the healthcare area has evolved independently of the development of industrial statistical process control methods. Therefore analysing and comparing paradigms and the characteristics of quality control charts and techniques across the different sectors presents some opportunities for transferring knowledge and future development in each sectors. Meanwhile considering capabilities of Bayesian approach particularly Bayesian hierarchical models and computational techniques in which all uncertainty are expressed as a structure of probability, facilitates decision making and cost-effectiveness analyses. Therefore, this research investigates the use of quality improvement cycle in a health vii setting using clinical data from a hospital. The need of clinical data for monitoring purposes is investigated in two aspects. A framework and appropriate tools from the industrial context are proposed and applied to evaluate and improve data quality in available datasets and data flow; then a data capturing algorithm using Bayesian decision making methods is developed to determine economical sample size for statistical analyses within the quality improvement cycle. Following ensuring clinical data quality, some characteristics of control charts in the health context including the necessity of monitoring attribute data and correlated quality characteristics are considered. To this end, multivariate control charts from an industrial context are adapted to monitor radiation delivered to patients undergoing diagnostic coronary angiogram and various risk-adjusted control charts are constructed and investigated in monitoring binary outcomes of clinical interventions as well as postintervention survival time. Meanwhile, adoption of a Bayesian approach is proposed as a new framework in estimation of change point following control chart’s signal. This estimate aims to facilitate root causes efforts in quality improvement cycle since it cuts the search for the potential causes of detected changes to a tighter time-frame prior to the signal. This approach enables us to obtain highly informative estimates for change point parameters since probability distribution based results are obtained. Using Bayesian hierarchical models and Markov chain Monte Carlo computational methods, Bayesian estimators of the time and the magnitude of various change scenarios including step change, linear trend and multiple change in a Poisson process are developed and investigated. The benefits of change point investigation is revisited and promoted in monitoring hospital outcomes where the developed Bayesian estimator reports the true time of the shifts, compared to priori known causes, detected by control charts in monitoring rate of excess usage of blood products and major adverse events during and after cardiac surgery in a local hospital. The development of the Bayesian change point estimators are then followed in a healthcare surveillances for processes in which pre-intervention characteristics of patients are viii affecting the outcomes. In this setting, at first, the Bayesian estimator is extended to capture the patient mix, covariates, through risk models underlying risk-adjusted control charts. Variations of the estimator are developed to estimate the true time of step changes and linear trends in odds ratio of intensive care unit outcomes in a local hospital. Secondly, the Bayesian estimator is extended to identify the time of a shift in mean survival time after a clinical intervention which is being monitored by riskadjusted survival time control charts. In this context, the survival time after a clinical intervention is also affected by patient mix and the survival function is constructed using survival prediction model. The simulation study undertaken in each research component and obtained results highly recommend the developed Bayesian estimators as a strong alternative in change point estimation within quality improvement cycle in healthcare surveillances as well as industrial and business contexts. The superiority of the proposed Bayesian framework and estimators are enhanced when probability quantification, flexibility and generalizability of the developed model are also considered. The empirical results and simulations indicate that the Bayesian estimators are a strong alternative in change point estimation within quality improvement cycle in healthcare surveillances. The superiority of the proposed Bayesian framework and estimators are enhanced when probability quantification, flexibility and generalizability of the developed model are also considered. The advantages of the Bayesian approach seen in general context of quality control may also be extended in the industrial and business domains where quality monitoring was initially developed.

WebPut : Efficient web-based data imputation

In this paper, we present WebPut, a prototype system that adopts a novel web-based approach to the data imputation problem. Towards this, Webput utilizes the available information in an incomplete database in conjunction with the data consistency principle. Moreover, WebPut extends effective Information Extraction (IE) methods for the purpose of formulating web search queries that are capable of effectively retrieving missing values with high accuracy. WebPut employs a confidence-based scheme that efficiently leverages our suite of data imputation queries to automatically select the most effective imputation query for each missing value. A greedy iterative algorithm is also proposed to schedule the imputation order of the different missing values in a database, and in turn the issuing of their corresponding imputation queries, for improving the accuracy and efficiency of WebPut. Experiments based on several real-world data collections demonstrate that WebPut outperforms existing approaches.

Supply chain benefits expectation management framework

Organizations invest heavily in Supply Chain Management Systems expecting the benefits promised by the software vendors and the implementation partners. However, both academic and industry reports suggest that there is growing dissatisfaction among client organizations due to an increasing gap in benefits purported by the software vendors and benefits realised by the client. In order to better manage expectations of the client organization, this study proposes a Benefit Expectation Management Framework for Supply Chain Management Systems, based on Expectation-Confirmation Theory. This study derives 60 expected benefits of Supply Chain Management Systems through 41 vendor-reported customer stories and academic papers. Through comparing those benefits with the received benefits by a case organization that has implemented SAP Supply Chain Management Systems for seven years, two salient factors – long timetable and multiple stakeholders – have been identified as the controlling factors affecting the confirmation level of Supply Chain Management System expectations and further impacting the satisfaction of a client organization. The case study also highlights the likely causes for realized benefits and enduring issues in relation to the Supply Chain Management Systems.

Privacy-aware workflow management

Information security policies play an important role in achieving information security. Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability are classic information security goals attained by enforcing appropriate security policies. Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) also benefit from inclusion of these policies to maintain the security of business-critical data. However, in typical WfMSs these policies are designed to enforce the organisation’s security requirements but do not consider those of other stakeholders. Privacy is an important security requirement that concerns the subject of data held by an organisation. WfMSs often process sensitive data about individuals and institutions who demand that their data is properly protected, but WfMSs fail to recognise and enforce privacy policies. In this paper, we illustrate existing WfMS privacy weaknesses and introduce WfMS extensions required to enforce data privacy. We have implemented these extensions in the YAWL system and present a case scenario to demonstrate how it can enforce a subject’s privacy policy.

Querying a building information model for construction-specific spatial information

The design and construction community has shown increasing interest in adopting building information models (BIMs). The richness of information provided by BIMs has the potential to streamline the design and construction processes by enabling enhanced communication, coordination, automation and analysis. However, there are many challenges in extracting construction-specific information out of BIMs. In most cases, construction practitioners have to manually identify the required information, which is inefficient and prone to error, particularly for complex, large-scale projects. This paper describes the process and methods we have formalized to partially automate the extraction and querying of construction-specific information from a BIM. We describe methods for analyzing a BIM to query for spatial information that is relevant for construction practitioners, and that is typically represented implicitly in a BIM. Our approach integrates ifcXML data and other spatial data to develop a richer model for construction users. We employ custom 2D topological XQuery predicates to answer a variety of spatial queries. The validation results demonstrate that this approach provides a richer representation of construction-specific information compared to existing BIM tools.

Improving the usability of standard schemas

Due to the development of XML and other data models such as OWL and RDF, sharing data is an increasingly common task since these data models allow simple syntactic translation of data between applications. However, in order for data to be shared semantically, there must be a way to ensure that concepts are the same. One approach is to employ commonly usedschemas—called standard schemas —which help guarantee that syntactically identical objects have semantically similar meanings. As a result of the spread of data sharing, there has been widespread adoption of standard schemas in a broad range of disciplines and for a wide variety of applications within a very short period of time. However, standard schemas are still in their infancy and have not yet matured or been thoroughly evaluated. It is imperative that the data management research community takes a closer look at how well these standard schemas have fared in real-world applications to identify not only their advantages, but also the operational challenges that real users face. In this paper, we both examine the usability of standard schemas in a comparison that spans multiple disciplines, and describe our first step at resolving some of these issues in our Semantic Modeling System. We evaluate our Semantic Modeling System through a careful case study of the use of standard schemas in architecture, engineering, and construction, which we conducted with domain experts. We discuss how our Semantic Modeling System can help the broader problem and also discuss a number of challenges that still remain.

Deriving construction features from an IFC model

In recent years, there has been a growing interest from the design and construction community to adopt Building Information Models (BIM). BIM provides semantically-rich information models that explicitly represent both 3D geometric information (e.g., component dimensions), along with non-geometric properties (e.g., material properties). While the richness of design information offered by BIM is evident, there are still tremendous challenges in getting construction-specific information out of BIM, limiting the usability of these models for construction. In this paper, we describe our approach for extracting construction-specific design conditions from a BIM model based on user-defined queries. This approach leverages an ontology of features we are developing to formalize the design conditions that affect construction. Our current implementation analyzes the component geometry and topological relationships between components in a BIM model represented using the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to identify construction features. We describe the reasoning process implemented to extract these construction features, and provide a critique of the IFC’s to support the querying process. We use examples from two case studies to illustrate the construction features, the querying process, and the challenges involved in deriving construction features from an IFC model.

Ubiquitous customer relationship management : unforeseen issues and benefits

Convergence of pervasive technologies, techno-centric customers and the emergence of digitized channels, overabundance of user friendly retail applications are having a profound impact on retail experience, leading to the advent of ‘everywhere retailing’. With the rapid uptake of digital complimentary assets and smart mobile applications are revolutionizing the relationship of retailers with their customers and suppliers. Retail firms are increasingly investing substantial resources on dynamic Customer Relationship Management systems (D-CRM / U-CRM) to better engage with customers to sense and respond quickly (Agility of the firm) to their demands. However, unlike traditional CRM systems, engagement with U-CRM systems requires that firms be hyper sensitive to volatile customer needs and wants. Following the notions of firm agility, this study attempts to develop a framework to understand such unforeseen benefits and issues of U-CRM. This research-in-progress paper reports an a-priory framework including 62 U-CRM benefits derived through an archival analysis of literature.

Extracting news blog hot topics based on the W2T methodology

Although topic detection and tracking techniques have made great progress, most of the researchers seldom pay more attention to the following two aspects. First, the construction of a topic model does not take the characteristics of different topics into consideration. Second, the factors that determine the formation and development of hot topics are not further analyzed. In order to correctly extract news blog hot topics, the paper views the above problems in a new perspective based on the W2T (Wisdom Web of Things) methodology, in which the characteristics of blog users, context of topic propagation and information granularity are investigated in a unified way. The motivations and features of blog users are first analyzed to understand the characteristics of news blog topics. Then the context of topic propagation is decomposed into the blog community, topic network and opinion network, respectively. Some important factors such as the user behavior pattern, opinion leader and network opinion are identified to track the development trends of news blog topics. Moreover, a blog hot topic detection algorithm is proposed, in which news blog hot topics are identified by measuring the duration, topic novelty, attention degree of users and topic growth. Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective. These results are also useful for further studying the formation mechanism of opinion leaders in blogspace.

Improving quality management system implementation in Indonesian construction companies

As the Indonesian construction industry is now promising to become the engine of national economic development, achieving quality and higher performance, not only domestically but also in the international market, are becoming crucial issues. Implementing quality management systems (QMSs) based on ISO 9001 are important in helping Indonesian construction companies become more competitive, for it is acknowledged that quality in construction is a major concern in the global construction industry. However, the possession of ISO 9001 certification does not reflect the presence of a well-operated QMS, which is capable of giving customer and project end-users satisfaction. The review of literature found that there is a significant correlation between a company.s organisational culture and the quality performance of contractors. While research into this area has involved many researchers, there is no critical mass of information specifically related to the Indonesian situation. Studies based on contemporary perspectives of the characteristics of the Indonesian construction organisational culture using Cameron and Quinn.s Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) and its relationship with the contractor.s ISO 9001 practices, have not been previously undertaken. This thesis research, therefore, investigated the culture profiles in Indonesian construction organisations, together with the current implementation of ISO 9001 and their performance during implementing QMSs, as information in these areas has a bearing on the poor performance and low levels of competitiveness of Indonesian construction companies. Questionnaire surveys were distributed to selected representative grade 7 civil engineering contractors located in the two provincial capitals of Makassar and Manado, and the national capital, Jakarta, in order to collect responses designed to examine the effectiveness of their QMSs implementation. The survey also aimed to identify current problems within the systems, and examine the performance of companies while implementing their QMSs. The questionnaire contained questions to assess the organisational culture profiles of Indonesian construction companies, adopting the OCAI. The survey results were then used to analyse the influence of different organisational culture profiles on QMSs implementation among respondent companies. The results from the questionnaire survey supported the development of a Culture-based Quality Management System Improvement Implementation Framework, designed to help Indonesian construction companies identify some typical barriers associated with impacting on effective QMSs implementation; to assist them to develop cultural values that can drive effective QMSs implementation; to undertake effective QMSs practices; and to recognise the potential results and longer-term benefits obtainable from implementing effective QMSs. A Focus Group Discussion was conducted with the assistance of a panel of professional construction practitioners, policy makers and academic experts, which further considered and validated the usefulness and applicability of the framework. Based on the outcome from this discussion and on the results of the earlier data analysis, a final version of the framework was developed to assist Indonesian construction companies in improving their capability of construction project delivery, and thereby contribute to providing or improving the competitive advantage of Indonesian construction companies in the local, national and global construction market.

The heterogeneous cluster ensemble method using hubness for clustering text documents

We propose a cluster ensemble method to map the corpus documents into the semantic space embedded in Wikipedia and group them using multiple types of feature space. A heterogeneous cluster ensemble is constructed with multiple types of relations i.e. document-term, document-concept and document-category. A final clustering solution is obtained by exploiting associations between document pairs and hubness of the documents. Empirical analysis with various real data sets reveals that the proposed meth-od outperforms state-of-the-art text clustering approaches.

Safety management in repair, maintenance, minor alteration, and addition works : knowledge management perspective

Safety of repair, maintenance, alteration, and addition (RMAA) works have long been neglected because RMAAworks are often minute and only last for a short period of time. With rising importance of the RMAA sector in many developed societies, safety of RMAA works has begun to draw attention. Many RMAA contracting companies are small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that do not have comprehensive safety management systems. Existing safety legislation and regulations for new construction sites are not fully applicable to RMAAworks. Instead of relying on explicit and well-established safety systems, tacit safety knowledge plays an extremely important role in RMAA projects. To improve safety of RMAAworks, safety knowledge should be better managed. However, safety knowledge is difficult to capture in RMAA works. This study aims to examine safety management practices of RMAA contracting companies to see how safety knowledge of RMAA projects is managed. Findings show that RMAA contracting companies undertaking large-scale RMAA projects have more initiatives of safety management. Safety management of small-scale RMAA works relies heavily on the motivation of site supervisors and self-regulation of workers. Better tacit knowledge management improves safety performance. To enhance safety capability of RMAA contracting companies, a knowledge sharing culture should be cultivated. The government should provide assistance to SMEs to implement proper safety management practices in small-sized projects. Potentials of applying computer software technology in RMAA projects to capture, store, and retrieve safety information should be explored. Employees should be motivated to share safety knowledge by giving proper recognition to those who are willing to share.