Depositing publications with UQ eSpace - instructions for liaison librarians

This document is for UQ Library liaison staff who will act as Community Administrators for their schools and centres.

Modeling control objectives for business process compliance

Business process design is primarily driven by process improvement objectives. However, the role of control objectives stemming from regulations and standards is becoming increasingly important for businesses in light of recent events that led to some of the largest scandals in corporate history. As organizations strive to meet compliance agendas, there is an evident need to provide systematic approaches that assist in the understanding of the interplay between (often conflicting) business and control objectives during business process design. In this paper, our objective is twofold. We will firstly present a research agenda in the space of business process compliance, identifying major technical and organizational challenges. We then tackle a part of the overall problem space, which deals with the effective modeling of control objectives and subsequently their propagation onto business process models. Control objective modeling is proposed through a specialized modal logic based on normative systems theory, and the visualization of control objectives on business process models is achieved procedurally. The proposed approach is demonstrated in the context of a purchase-to-pay scenario.

Compliance aware business process design

Historically, business process design has been driven by business objectives, specifically process improvement. However this cannot come at the price of control objectives which stem from various legislative, standard and business partnership sources. Ensuring the compliance to regulations and industrial standards is an increasingly important issue in the design of business processes. In this paper, we advocate that control objectives should be addressed at an early stage, i.e., design time, so as to minimize the problems of runtime compliance checking and consequent violations and penalties. To this aim, we propose supporting mechanisms for business process designers. This paper specifically presents a support method which allows the process designer to quantitatively measure the compliance degree of a given process model against a set of control objectives. This will allow process designers to comparatively assess the compliance degree of their design as well as be better informed on the cost of non-compliance.

Ubiquitous travel service delivery

Free independent travelers require flexible, reactive service delivery due to their regularly changing location and activities and the lack of a wired Internet connection. A ubiquitous travel service delivery system that is able to dynamically deliver services in response to relevant events, such as changing location, availability of new last-minute specials, work opportunities, and safety issues can provide added value while retaining the flexibility that is so important to independent travelers. This article describes such a system. An engineering design research approach has been adopted to design the system. Issues addressed include traveler and service states and events, contexts, situations, and situation-action rules. An architecture is proposed that is based on distributed, cooperating software agents and mobile data technologies. The role of these agents is to continuously monitor situations that are occurring in the physical and virtual service spaces and to take the required action for any situations that are relevant to the traveler.

Document retrieval for e-mail search and discovery using Formal Concept Analysis

This paper discusses a document discovery tool based on Conceptual Clustering by Formal Concept Analysis. The program allows users to navigate e-mail using a visual lattice metaphor rather than a tree. It implements a virtual. le structure over e-mail where files and entire directories can appear in multiple positions. The content and shape of the lattice formed by the conceptual ontology can assist in e-mail discovery. The system described provides more flexibility in retrieving stored e-mails than what is normally available in e-mail clients. The paper discusses how conceptual ontologies can leverage traditional document retrieval systems and aid knowledge discovery in document collections.

An approach to ontology for institutional facts in the semantic web

Refinement in software engineering allows a specification to be developed in stages, with design decisions taken at earlier stages constraining the design at later stages. Refinement in complex data models is difficult due to lack of a way of defining constraints, which can be progressively maintained over increasingly detailed refinements. Category theory provides a way of stating wide scale constraints. These constraints lead to a set of design guidelines, which maintain the wide scale constraints under increasing detail. Previous methods of refinement are essentially local, and the proposed method does not interfere very much with these local methods. The result is particularly applicable to semantic web applications, where ontologies provide systems of more or less abstract constraints on systems, which must be implemented and therefore refined by participating systems. With the approach of this paper, the concept of committing to an ontology carries much more force. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Specification and validation of process constraints for flexible workflows

Workflow systems have traditionally focused on the so-called production processes which are characterized by pre-definition, high volume, and repetitiveness. Recently, the deployment of workflow systems in non-traditional domains such as collaborative applications, e-learning and cross-organizational process integration, have put forth new requirements for flexible and dynamic specification. However, this flexibility cannot be offered at the expense of control, a critical requirement of business processes. In this paper, we will present a foundation set of constraints for flexible workflow specification. These constraints are intended to provide an appropriate balance between flexibility and control. The constraint specification framework is based on the concept of pockets of flexibility which allows ad hoc changes and/or building of workflows for highly flexible processes. Basically, our approach is to provide the ability to execute on the basis of a partially specified model, where the full specification of the model is made at runtime, and may be unique to each instance. The verification of dynamically built models is essential. Where as ensuring that the model conforms to specified constraints does not pose great difficulty, ensuring that the constraint set itself does not carry conflicts and redundancy is an interesting and challenging problem. In this paper, we will provide a discussion on both the static and dynamic verification aspects. We will also briefly present Chameleon, a prototype workflow engine that implements these concepts. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.