DEMO models based automatic workflow process generation

Nowadays, more than half of the computer development projects fail to meet the final users' expectations. One of the main causes is insufficient knowledge about the organization of the enterprise to be supported by the respective information system. The DEMO methodology (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations) has been proved as a well-defined method to specify, through models and diagrams, the essence of any organization at a high level of abstraction. However, this methodology is platform implementation independent, lacking the possibility of saving and propagating possible changes from the organization models to the implemented software, in a runtime environment. The Universal Enterprise Adaptive Object Model (UEAOM) is a conceptual schema being used as a basis for a wiki system, to allow the modeling of any organization, independent of its implementation, as well as the previously mentioned change propagation in a runtime environment. Based on DEMO and UEAOM, this project aims to develop efficient and standardized methods, to enable an automatic conversion of DEMO Ontological Models, based on UEAOM specification into BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) models of processes, using clear semantics, without ambiguities, in order to facilitate the creation of processes, almost ready for being executed on workflow systems that support BPMN.

Organizations redesign and building of information systems

Develop software is still a risky business. After 60 years of experience, this community is still not able to consistently build Information Systems (IS) for organizations with predictable quality, within previously agreed budget and time constraints. Although software is changeable we are still unable to cope with the amount and complexity of change that organizations demand for their IS. To improve results, developers followed two alternatives: Frameworks that increase productivity but constrain the flexibility of possible solutions; Agile ways of developing software that keep flexibility with less upfront commitments. With strict frameworks, specific hacks have to be put in place to get around the framework construction options. In time this leads to inconsistent architectures that are harder to maintain due to incomplete documentation and human resources turnover. The main goals of this work is to create a new way to develop flexible IS for organizations, using web technologies, in a faster, better and cheaper way that is more suited to handle organizational change. To do so we propose an adaptive object model that uses a new ontology for data and action with strict normalizing rules. These rules should bound the effects of changes that can be better tested and therefore corrected. Interfaces are built with templates of resources that can be reused and extended in a flexible way. The “state of the world” for each IS is determined by all production and coordination acts that agents performed over time, even those performed by external systems. When bugs are found during maintenance, their past cascading effects can be checked through simulation, re-running the log of transaction acts over time and checking results with previous records. This work implements a prototype with part of the proposed system in order to have a preliminary assessment its feasibility and limitations.

WAMM: wiki aided meta modelling

All over the world, organizations are becoming more and more complex, and there’s a need to capture its complexity, so this is when the DEMO methodology (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations), created and developed by Jan L. G. Dietz, reaches its potential, which is to capture the structure of business processes in a coherent and consistent form of diagrams with their respective grammatical rules. The creation of WAMM (Wiki Aided Meta Modeling) platform was the main focus of this thesis, and had like principal precursor the idea to create a Meta-Editor that supports semantic data and uses MediaWiki. This prototype Meta-Editor uses MediaWiki as a receptor of data, and uses the ideas created in the Universal Enterprise Adaptive Object Model and the concept of Semantic Web, to create a platform that suits our needs, through Semantic MediaWiki, which helps the computer interconnect information and people in a more comprehensive, giving meaning to the content of the pages. The proposed Meta-Modeling platform allows the specification of the abstract syntax i.e., the grammar, and concrete syntax, e.g., symbols and connectors, of any language, as well as their model types and diagram types. We use the DEMO language as a proofof-concept and example. All such specifications are done in a coherent and formal way by the creation of semantic wiki pages and semantic properties connecting them.

WOW: wiki aided organization draWing

As the world evolves, organizations are becoming more and more complex, and the need to understand that complexity is increasing as well. With this demand, arises organizational engineering, which is a subject that emerged with the purpose to make organizations easier to understand, by putting in practice the concept of organizational self-awareness, which means that that the collaborators who are part of an organization, need to understand it and know what their role in it is. The DEMO methodology (Design Engineering Methodology for Organizations), came up with the purpose of representing these organizations’ self-awareness, through the definition and creation of consistent and coherent diagrams. Semantic wikis have features that can help in enterprise modelling. UEAOM (Universal Enterprise Adaptive Organization Model) is a model that allows the specification and dynamic evolution of languages, meta-models, models, and their representations as diagrams and tables. In this project, it was implemented a system based on UEAOM, and Semantic Media Wiki which allows a graphical creation and edition of diagrams. UEAOM can be divided into the meta-modeling level where a language is defined, and the modelling level where instances of classes of that language are created. The system we developed focuses on the modeling level, but will takes as a basis the project that focuses on meta-modeling. The DEMO language was used as an example for the implementation and tests of a graphical editor, based in web technologies and SVG, integrated with SemanticMediaWiki to allow an intuitive, coherent and consistent navigation and editing of organization diagrams.