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Keywords: Web Service, Transactions, business activities, WS-BusinessActivity-Initiator, Apache Kandula, WS-Transaction, Web Services Business Activity, Web Service transactions
Astract: Businesses tend to support and automate parts of their business processes with complex IT systems. Up until now, automated systems were restricted to calculations based on already available data or dependent on custom interfaces to other software.
The Web Services technology allows easy integration of otherwise independent computer programs and thus the use of computer services offered by business partners. Doing real business between computer programs requires the use of transaction protocols like WS-AT or WS-BA to ensure that both partners share a consistent view of the common activity.
This work presents theWeb Services Transactions protocol family and describes the development of an extension to the WS-BusinessActivity (WS-BA) protocol, the WS-BusinessActivity-Initiator (WS-BA-I) protocol.
A reference implementation in the Apache Kandula project demonstrates the use of these protocols in a serviceoriented architecture environment. The deliverables include a Coordinator Web Service, a library for using the coordination service as well as another library for developingWS-BA enabledWeb Services.
The development of the WS-BusinessActivity-Initiator procotol focused on the clear separation of the initiator and coordinator roles.
Coordination services may nowbe provided by a trusted third party. The extended specification follows the concept of the separation of concerns and hence increases the software components' quality and reuseability.

Keywords: Data Warehouse, Business Metadata, Enterprise Modeling, Model Weaving, Business Intelligence, UML, Multidimensional Model, Goal Model, Data Warehouse Usage, Business Process
Astract: Data warehouse systems are used by decision makers for performance measurement and decision support. Measures such as the number of transactions per customer or the increase of sales during a promotion are used to recognize warning signs and to decide on future investments with regard to the strategic goals of the organization. Currently, the main focus of the data warehouse research field is on database issues. The data warehouse's interaction with the organization and the way it supports the organization's strategic goals have not yet been considered in depth.
Conceptual models that describe the data warehouse from various viewpoints, including an outside view of the data warehouse system, its environment and expected usage, are missing. Moreover, even though the data in the data warehouse by its very nature has to be closely related to the concerns of the organization, current data warehouses also lack sufficient business metadata that would inform users about the organizational context and implications of what they are analyzing.
This thesis targets the relationship between data warehouses and the structure, behavior and goals of the organization. In order to describe this relationship, a conceptual modeling language was developed. It consists of models for describing the interdependencies between data warehouses and business processes, including active and (near-) real-time data warehouse solutions; a model for identifying business objects such as customers and products in the data warehouse data model, and for constructing data models that comply to the state models of such business objects; and a model of data warehouse usage, which includes modeling the users, user groups, and user skill levels, the intensity with which they use the data warehouse infrastructure, temporal issues such as the required time and urgency of data access, as well as indicators of the relative importance of data warehouse usage.
This thesis also provides an approach to using models to enhance the way users access the data in the data warehouse. It presents a model-based approach to business metadata, which links enterprise models such as business process models or goal models to the data model of the data warehouse though the mechanism of model weaving. A prototype illustrating how models can be weaved and used for business metadata in a business intelligence tool has been developed as part of this thesis.

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Astract: Aspect-orientation provides a new way of modularization by clearly separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones. While aspect-orientation originally has emerged at the programming level, it now stretches also over other development phases. There are, for example, already several proposals to Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM), most of them pursuing distinguished goals, providing different concepts as well as notations, and showing various levels of maturity. Consequently, there is an urgent need for both, academia and practice, to provide an in-depth survey, clearly identifying commonalities and differences between current AOM approaches. Existing surveys in this area focus more on comprehensibility with respect to development phases or evaluated approaches rather than on comparability at a fine-grained level. This paper tries to fill this gap. As a prerequisite for an in-depth evaluation, a conceptual reference model is presented, capturing the basic concepts of AOM and their interrelationships in terms of a UML class diagram. Based on this conceptual reference model, an evaluation framework has been designed by deriving a detailed and well-defined catalog of evaluation criteria. The actual evaluation by means of this criteria catalog and by employing a running example is done on the basis of a carefully selected set of eight AOM approaches, each of them having already reached a certain level of maturity. This per approach evaluation is complemented with an extensive report on lessons learned, summarizing the approaches´ strengths and shortcomings.

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