Keywords: Mashups, Semantic Web, SOA, BPEL, XForms
Astract: Managing lifetime memories has been a blurry challenge ever since it was originally proposed by Vannevar Bush in his seminal paper (1945). At the time, the concept was extremely speculative and indeed, Memories for Life has remained a challenging problem for the next five decades. Recently this idea was declared one of the grand challenges in computing research where its scope has been expanded and the problem has been outlined as a multidisciplinary problem that should address issues such as knowledge and databases, information retrieval, security/privacy, and human-computer interaction. New possibilities for Memories for Life emerged with the introduction of Semantic Web technologies that make it possible to model a diverse range of memory items and their associations in so-called Semantic Desktops. Today, there are a handful of Semantic Desktops that are to some extent able to organize and manage personal life items. However, their application is limited to the storage and retrieval of various personal items. The next step towards the goals of the Memories for Life grand challenge is to integrate this organized information in the business and social network services. With the emergence of complex business processes, there is a growing need to automatically map and embed the user's information context into global business services. This aspect of lifetime memories, which may have a great effect on extending the footprint of such memories for interactions with global and social network services, has not yet been explored. In order to realize such use cases, the major obstacle to face, is providing a secure and comprehensible service layer that can be easily used by both end-users and business processes. In this proposal some information integration approaches will be introduced and among them the Mashups architecture will be explored in more details. The Mashup architecture utilizes the advantages of Web 2.0 that has recently hit the mainstream of Internet computing and continues its rapid evolution. Web 2.0 has introduced new possibilities for a better human computer interaction via rich applications such as Mashups that provide a user-driven micro-integration of web-accessible data. Mashup envisions building effective and light-weight information processing solutions based on the exposed Web Services of organizations. Such Web Services may range from simple Web Services such as RSS and REST based services to complex BPEL services for more serious use cases.
The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to bridge the gap between the personal information world and the global business world by introducing semantically-aware Mashups that on one hand facilitates the secure and intuitive creation and sharing of information and new services based on lifetime personal information, and on the other hand fosters the Internet computing paradigm via business processes that take advantage of user-generated personal services.

Keywords: business documents, XML Schema, model-driven development, UN/CEFACT's Core Components, UML Profile for Core Components, UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology, service-oriented architectures, process choreographies, domain specific languages, UML
Astract: Automated business-to-business (B2B) interactions between companies are constantly superseding old paper-based processes. This automation of inter-organizational processes requires a two-fold agreement between the participating business partners. First of all, business partners must agree on a common process choreography, unambiguously defining the exact exchange order of business documents in an inter-organizational business process. Consequently, business partners must agree on the structure of the exchanged business information as well. The two main business document paradigms, which are we elaborate on in this thesis, are top-down business document standards and bottom-up business document standards. The research question, this thesis aims to solve, is how to provide appropriate methods for the definition of business documents for inter-organizational business processes. Due to their special characteristics, such as the involvement of various stakeholders from different companies, the definition of business documents for inter-organizational business processes is not as straightforward as the definition of business documents for intra-organizational business processes. For the definition of inter-organizational business documents we employ two different approaches - a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. For both approaches we provide appropriate methods for the definition of business documents, the mapping between different business document definitions, and the derivation of XML-based deployment artifacts from business document definitions. We thoroughly cover state-of-the art in the domain of inter-organizational business documents and inter-organizational business processes. This thesis starts by giving an introduction to the domain of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and shows the transition of data-centric EDI solutions to modern B2B systems in Chapter 1. Thereby, the specific requirements for B2B interactions are elaborated - in particular in regard to the definition of the exchanged business information. We motivate the findings of this thesis using an accompanying example from the domain of pan-European waste transport, which is introduced in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 we provide a survey of current state-of-the-art in business documents standards. Chapter 4 provides an introduction to UN/CEFACT's Core Components, a top-down business document standard which is key to this thesis. In a nutshell, core components are implementation neutral building blocks for assembling business documents. Although this implementation neutrality is one of the strengths of core components, it hinders a broad diffusion of the standard, since no common representation format for core components is available. To address this issue, this thesis provides three reference representation formats for core components: (i) a UML Profile for Core Components (Chapter 5), (ii) a Domain Specific Language for Core Components (Chapter 6), (iii) and a Web Ontology Language representation for Core Components (Chapter 7). The derivation of XML Schema artifacts from core components, which may be deployed to IT systems, is covered in Chapter 8. A successful diffusion of core Components may only be achieved if a broad user community has access to the necessary core component definitions. Consequently, we provide a registry meta-model for core components in Chapter 9. Bottom-up business document standards are subject to discussion in the second part of this thesis. Thereby, domain specific extensions to bottom-up document standards are introduced in Chapter 10. Consequently, we examine how to map bottom-up standard definitions to core component based top-down standard definitions in Chapter 11. Finally, we show how to combine business choreography models and business document models in Chapter 12.
Related work is discussed in Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 concludes the contributions of this thesis. In summary this thesis provides the following seven contributions: (1) An overview of business document standards, based on standard clusters; (2) three reference representation formats for core components using the Unified Modeling Language, Domain Specific Languages, and Web Ontology Language for Core Components; (3) an unambiguous derivation of XML Schema artifacts from UML based core component models; (4) a registry meta-model for a core component registry; (5) domain specific extensions for an XML based bottom-up business document standard; (6) a mapping of bottom-up business document standards to top-down business documents standards; (7) an integration of UML based core component models in UML based business choreography models. In short the overall approach facilitates the definition of business documents in an inter-organizational context and fosters reuse of existing business document definitions.

Keywords: Electronic Commerce, B2B, Business Process Modeling, Business Modeling, UML, Model-Driven Software Development, Business-to-Business
Astract: Business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce builds upon inter-organizational business processes that cross the borders of enterprises. Their design and implementation presupposes a different approach than intra-organizational processes do. Experience shows that bottom-up approaches starting from the IT layer of a single enterprise - expecting that all other business partners adjust to it - do not work out. Instead, a prolific B2B design approach must consider three layers in a top-down manner: First, the economic perspective identifies the players and their value exchanges within a business network resulting in a business model. Second, business collaboration models specify the choreography of inter-organizational business processes in accordance with the business model. Finally, the business collaboration models are transformed to deployment artifacts to be interpreted by IT systems. In this thesis, we propose a design approach for B2B integration based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) considering all three layers.

Keywords:
Astract: In the development process of a B2B system, it is crucial that the business experts are able to express and evaluate agreements and commitments between the partners, and that the software engineers get all necessary information to bind the private process interfaces to the public ones. UN/CEFACT's modeling methodology (UMM) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile for developing B2B processes. The formalisms introduced by UMM's stereotypes facilitate the communication with the software engineers. However, business experts-who usually have a very limited understanding of UML-prefer expressing their thoughts and evaluating the results by plain text descriptions. In this paper,we describe an approach that presents an equivalent of theUMMstereotypes and tagged values in text-based templates called worksheets. This strong alignment allows an integration into a UMM modeling tool and ensures consistency. We show how a specially designed XML-based worksheet definition language allows customization to special needs of certain business domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate how information kept in worksheets may be used for the semi-automatic generation of pattern-based UMM artifacts which are later transformed to web service definition language and business process execution language code.

Keywords: business process, automation, economic process automation, framework for selecting business processes, economic automation, Workflow Management System
Astract: Workflow technology promises an increase in efficiency in the execution of business processes. The technology is widely accepted, but often the high costs exceed the promised benefits. Most companies perform an evaluation of workflow management systems (WFMS) tools before selecting their tool of choice. However, they usually do not carefully select the business processes for automation by WFMS. Accordingly, they choose processes that have an inappropriate structure for automation and/or that are of less strategic and operational relevance. Even if appropriate processes are selected, it is of great importance to justify the planned investments into WFMS support by a profitability analysis before starting the implementation. This is rarely performed by any company. Further no adequate procedure for selecting the right business processes exists.
In this thesis a framework for the planning phase of the support of business proc-esses by WFMS is presented. This framework covers all three main modules: selec-tion of appropriate business processes (module 1), the selection of an appropriate WFMS (module 2), and the calculation of the profitability of the planned investment (module 3). The first module, the selection of appropriate business processes, is based on a multi factor analysis of technical, economic and organizational criteria leading to a process-automation-portfolio enabling the selection of appropriate business processes. The WFMS selection in the second module is based on a criteria catalogue covering aspects of functionality, architecture, integration, robustness, and secured prospects. The profitability analysis in the third module is based on the selected business proc-esses of module 1 and the chosen WFMS of module 2. This analysis is predicted on simple measurable performance indicators that consider the tangible calculation of costs as well as the quantitative and qualitative benefits. Long time practical experience in implementing and operating workflow management supported the design of the framework. The presented framework has been successfully used in the IT company of a banking corporation.