Generation of WebML web application models from business process specifications

While buildingWeb applicationmodels fromscratch iswell-supported, reuse in Web application modeling is still in its infancy. A promising approach in this respect is aspect-oriented modeling to separate certain concerns from the base application, typically cross-cutting ones, and reuse them in various applications. A few Web modeling languages targeting the design phase have been already equippedwith aspect-orientation.However, languages for the early phases of Web modeling lack such support, but especially these phases would tremendously benefit from aspect-orientation. Moreover, all the existing solutions are tailored to a specific modeling language. To improve this situation, we consider aspectorientation itself as an aspect. This allows us to weave aspect-oriented language features into already existing Web modeling languages. We introduce a generic metamodel module comprising the main concepts of aspect-orientation as well as a tool-supported process to weave it into existing base languages. By having this systematic metamodel weaving process, dedicated modeling as well as designtime weaving support is provided for aspects out-of-the-box. We demonstrate our approach by aspectifying aWeb requirements modeling language based on i* and applying the aspectified version of it to a case study.

This paper presents WebRatio BPM, an Eclipse-based tool that supports the design and deployment of business processes as Web applications. The tool applies Model Driven Engineering techniques to complex, multi-actor business processes, mixing tasks executed by humans and by machines, and produces a Web application running prototype that implements the specified process. Business processes are described through the standard BPMN notation, extended with information on task assignment, escalation policies, activity semantics, and typed dataflows, to enable a two-step generative approach: first the Process Model is automatically transformed into a Web Application Model in the WebML notation, which seamlessly expresses both human- and machine-executable tasks; secondly, the Application Model is fed to an automatic transformation capable of producing the running code. The tool provides various features that increase the productivity and the quality of the resulting application: one-click generation of a running prototype of the process from the BPMN model; fine-grained refinement of the resulting application; support of continuous evolution of the application design after requirements changes (both at business process and at application levels).KeywordsBusiness ProcessModel TransformationApplication ModelSite ViewBPMN ModelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The goal of disseminating and manipulating spatial knowledge over the Internet, has led to the development of Web applications, known as Web Geographic Information Systems (Web GIS). Web GIS can be considered as a particular class of data-intensive Web applications, since they are mainly devoted to handle (spatial) information to and from the user. The success of WebML (Web Modeling Language) for designing traditional data-intensive web applications suggested use to extend this visual formalism to model relevant interaction and navigation operations typical of Web GIS. In the paper, we describe the proposed extension and provide an example of its application.

Business processes, the next-generation workflows, have attracted considerable interest in recent years. Several XML-based languages have been proposed for specifying and orchestrating business processes. WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), which is widely used in business process specification, cannot support authorization policies on the execution of activities. In this paper, we propose an approach that extends WS-BPEL with ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) model to satisfy the access control requirements of business processes. We introduce an access control framework for Web services in business processes, and through integrating ABAC and WS-BPEL, we make it possible to make access control policies for business processes.

Welcome to this installment of ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today we are at the L3S Research Institute in Hannover, Germany, where I am spending the fall of 2006. I have here with me Stefano Ceri, who is a Professor of Information Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. Stefano's research interests include distributed, deductive, active, and object-oriented databases, and XML query languages; his recent work is on the design of Web applications. He is a co-inventor of WebML (Web Modeling Language), and has a startup company that is commercializing WebRatio, a product based on WebML. Stefano was a founder of EDBT and is still a member of the EDBT Endowment, and he has been a member of the VLDB Endowment for twelve years. He was an editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering . He is a coauthor of 9 books, and his PhD is from the Politecnico di Milano. So, Stefano, welcome!

Nowadays, the problem in business process management (BPM) is that BPM systems should both be easy to use for business process developers and be based on a sound formal method. Business process management systems are often based on semiformal modeling techniques such as event-driven process chains (EPC) or UML. Unlike semiformal modeling techniques, the process calculus CSP comes with mature verification sup- port. Surprisingly little work has been done on using CSP for business process modeling and management. In this paper, we present our approach to business process management, which is based on the observation that CSP is well suited not only for specifying business processes and verifying work???ows but also for executing work???ows using our CSP4J framework. We report on a work???ow server, which is specified in CSP and implemented using our CSP4J framework. The server accepts work???ows that are modeled in CSP and also implemented using CSP4J. This allows us to integrate the mature verification support of CSP into both the management system itself and the development process of the end users’ business process definitions.

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

Semantic web Racer: Dynamic security testing of the web application against race condition in the business layer

Despite the prevalence of cloud and edge computing, ensuring the satisfaction of time-constrained business processes, remains challenging. Indeed, some cloud/edge-based resources might not be available when needed leading to delaying the execution of these processes? tasks and/or the transfer of these processes? data. This paper presents an approach for specifying, verifying, and deploying time constrained business processes in a mono-cloud, multi-edge context. First, the specification and verification of processes happen at design-time and run-time to ensure that these processes? tasks and data are continuously placed in a way that would mitigate the violation of time constraints. This mitigation might require moving tasks and/or data from one host to another to reduce time latency, for example. A host could be either a cloud, an edge, or any. Finally, the deployment of processes using a real case-study allowed to confirm the benefits of the early specification and verification of these processes in mitigating time constraints violations.

Nowadays, business processes (BP) are important in the maintenance of competitiveness within enterprises. Moreover, security is a crucial issue in business performance. In the last few years, the languages used for BP representation have been improved and new notations have appeared. Proposals for security requirement specifications at this high level of abstraction have also appeared. Nevertheless, these models have not been transformed into concrete models that can be used in a software development process. In our proposal, we will obtain analysis-level classes from a business process specification in which security requirements are included. Model transformations are within the scope of MDA and they are specified by using the QVT standard. Finally, we shall apply this approach to a typical health-care business process.

Business information systems and enterprise applications have continuously evolved into Business-IT systems over the last decades, directly linking and integrating Business Process Management with recent technology evolutions such as Web services and Service-Oriented Architectures. Many of these technological evolutions include areas of past academic research: Business rules closely relate to expert systems, Semantic Web technology uses results from description logics, attempts have been made to compose Web services using intelligent planning techniques, and the analysis of business processes and Web service choreographies often relies on model checking. As such, many of the problems that arise with these new technologies have been solved at least in principle.However, if we try to apply these “in principle” solutions, we are confronted with the failure of these solutions in practice: many proposed solution techniques do not scale to the real-world requirements or they rely on assumptions that are not satisfied by Business-IT systems.As has been observed previously, research in this area is fragmented and does not follow a truly interdisciplinary approach. To overcome this fragmentation, we propose the vision of a compiler for Business-IT systems that takes business process specifications described at various degrees of detail as input and compiles them into executable IT systems. As any classical compiler, the parsing, analysis, optimization, code generation and linking phases are supported. We describe a set of ten research problems that we see as critical to bring our compiler vision to reality.KeywordsBusiness ProcessBusiness Process ManagementBusiness Process Execution LanguageBusiness Process Modeling NotationAbstract Syntax TreeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The early attainment of requirements in a software development process allows us to improve the quality of the product. Although many methods through which to elicit requirements exist, few of them are specifically designed for security requirements. This paper describes a method - M-BPSec - which permits the elicitation of security requirements which form part of a business process description carried out with a UML 2.0 Activity Diagram. MBPSec is made up of stages, actors, tools and artifacts which, when applied in a coordinated manner, allow us to specify security requirements in business processes and to obtain class and use cases from this specification.

The stability of the region's development, like any system, depends on the effective balance of its subsystems. The effectiveness of subsystems is enhanced by the effective performance of a set of their key components, which depends on the optimization of certain elements by establishing rational relationships between them. Accordingly, the object of the study is the process of rationalization of the constituent elements of territorial community development programs. To solve this issue, a methodical approach to determining the level of development of the region and ensuring its stability in the strategic period is proposed through the rationalization of the effects of mutually determined implementation of business processes of alternative development projects of territorial communities. The expediency of using the coefficient of synchronicity of business processes of certain regional development projects to determine the level of regional development was substantiated. The use of the synchronicity coefficient to ensure the stable development of the respective region is due to the obtained possibility of balancing the specific competitive advantages of territorial communities strengthened by certain effects. These effects are the results of the implementation of optimally formed portfolios of development projects through rational relationships between specific business processes based on the principle of maximum adaptability of their components. The value of the coefficient of synchronicity of the business processes of the portfolio of development projects of Zabolottivsʹka UTC (0.637) made it necessary to take possible measures for their rationalization by implementing individual effects from the interaction of specific business processes. That has made it possible to increase the synchronicity of these business processes to 0.816 and to determine the direction of the possible integration of the studied UTC with other communities with the help of the formed development potential reserves

Nowadays, Web Applications (WAs) are complex software sys- tems, used by multiple users with different roles and often devel- oped to support and manage business processes. Due to the chang- ing nature of the supported processes, WAs need to be easily and quickly modified, to adapt and align them to the processes they support. In recent years, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) ap- proaches have been proposed and used to develop and evolveWAs. However, the definition of appropriate MDE approaches for the de- velopment of flexible process-centric WAs is still limited. In par- ticular, (flexible) workflow models have never been integrated with the models (e.g., presentation, information models) used in MDE approaches to develop this type of applications. In this paper, we present M3D (Model Driven Development with Declare), a tool for developingWAs that integrates three MDE metamodels used to represent the main components of aWA with the metamodel of De- clare, a declarative language to model business processes. The tool exploits and combines the declarative nature of Declare and the ad- vantages of MDE to get an efficient roundtrip engineering support to develop and evolve flexible process-centric WAs.

Significant effort is currently invested in application integration, enabling business processes of different companies to interact and form complex multiparty processes. Web service standards, based on WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), have been adopted as process-to-process communication paradigms. However, the conceptual modeling of applications using Web services has not yet been addressed. Interaction with Web services is often specified at the level of the source code; thus, Web service interfaces are buried within a programmatic specification.In this article, we argue that Web services should be considered first-class citizens in the specification of Web applications. Thus, service-enabled Web applications should benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have long been advocated for Web application design and implementation. To this end, we extend a declarative model for specifying data-intensive Web applications in two directions: (i) high-level modeling of Web services and their interactions with the Web applications which use them, and (ii) modeling and specification of Web applications implementing new, complex Web services.Our approach is fully implemented within a CASE tool allowing the high-level modeling and automatic deployment of service-enabled Web applications.