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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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Astract: Ontology and schema matching are well established techniques, which have been applied in various integration scenarios, e.g., web service composition and database integration. Consequently, matching tools enabling automatic matching of various kinds of schemas with various matching techniques are available. In the field of model-driven engineering, in contrast to schema and ontology integration, the in- tegration of modeling languages relies on manual tasks such as writing model trans- formation code, which is tedious and error-prone. Therefore, we propose the applica- tion of ontology and schema matching techniques for automatically exploring seman- tic correspondences between metamodels, which are currently the modeling language definitions of choice. The main focus of this paper is on reporting preliminary results and lessons learned by evaluating currently available ontology matching tools for their metamodel matching potential.

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Astract: UN/CEFACT's modeling methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for modeling global B2B choreographies. The current UMM version comprises three main views for describing a computation independent model from a neutral perspective. Currently, the UMM version is missing a platform independent model showing how each partner has to realize the message exchanges to support the agreed choreography. In this paper we derive such a platform independent model from a UMM business transaction - a key artifact of the computation independent model. The resulting model is based on a state machine describing the local view of a participating business partner. This state machine unambiguously defines how a business partner has to react on incoming messages and on message expected but not received.

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Astract: In business-to-business e-commerce, traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) approaches such as UN/EDIFACT have been superseded by approaches like web services and ebXML. Nevertheless, a precise and common semantic definition of business documents exchanged is needed. In order to become independent from a transfer syntax, we prefer defining the documents as platform independent models. An approach that follows this idea is the UN/CEFACT's core component standard. Core components are reusable semantic building blocks which can be combined in various ways to create shared libraries of interoperable business documents. In order to use standard UML modeling tools we have developed a UML profile for the core components standard. Furthermore, we adapt the UN/CEFACT naming and design rules for the UML profile in order to derive XML schemas for business document exchanges. The overall approach is demonstrated by using a specific example from the field of eCommerce.

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Astract: Not least due to the widespread use of meta modeling concepts, model transformation techniques have reached a certain level of maturity (Czarnecki and Helsen, 2006). Nevertheless, defining transformations in some application areas in our case business process modeling is still a challenge because current transformation languages provide general solutions but do not support issues specific to a distinct area. We aim at providing generic solutions for model transformation problems distinct to the area of horizontal business process model transformations. As a first step in this endeavor, this work reports on the most pressing problems encountered at defining business process model transformations.