Keynote Speakers | EDOC 2011

Keynote Speakers

We are glad to announce the keynote speeches of Prof. Dr. Terry Halpin (A Principal Scientist at LogicBlox, headquartered in Atlanta, and a Professor in Computer Science at INTI International University, Malaysia.), Dr. Richard Hull (Research Manager in Business Informatics, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center) and Prof. Dr. Mike Papazoglou (Chair of Computer Science Executive Director of the European Research Institute in Services Science (ERISS) & Scientific Director of the European Network of Excellence in Software Systems & Services (S-Cube) Tilburg University).

 

Prof. Dr. Mike Papazoglou

Title: "Making Business Processes Compliant to Standards and Regulations"

 

Biography

Michael P. Papazoglou is a Professor at Tilburg University where he is the Executive Director of the European Research Institute in Service Science and the Scientific Director of the European Network of Excellence in Software Services and Systems (S-Cube). He is also a professorial fellow at the Universities of Trento in Italy, Lyon 1 (France), New South Wales (Australia) and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid (Spain).

His research interests lie in the areas of Service Oriented Computing, Web services, large scale data sharing, business processes, and federated and distributed information systems. He has published 22 books (monographs/edited books/international conference proceedings), and approx. 200 journal and conference papers with well over 7,000 citations. He is the co-editor-in-charge of the new Springer-Verlag series in Services Science and the MIT Press series on Information Systems and has served as Program Chair for several high profile international conferences.

His research was/is funded by the European Commission, the Australian Research Council, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and Departments of Science and Technology in Europe and Australia. He is a golden core member and a distinguished visitor of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Science section.

Abstract

Today’ s business environment demands a high degree of compliance in enterprise business processes. Compliance regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, require all enterprises to review their service-enabled applications and ensure that they satisfy the set of relevant compliance requirements. Despite an increasing number of methods and tools, organizations are still struggling to find effective support to ensure that their business processes comply with requirements set forth by regulations, laws, standards, etc. While manual solutions offer limited assurance for compliance, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive framework for managing compliance requirements and ensuring compliance throughout the phases of the business process lifecycle.

In this talk we are going to explain how to cope with business process compliance requirements and present a conceptual model to capture and manage compliance requirements. We shall introduce a declarative Compliance Request Language (CRL) for specifying compliance requirements, which are eventually checked against existing business processes. We shall also examine a set of compliance patterns to support the definition of frequently recurring compliance requirements in the context of business processes. This approach enables the application of automated tools for compliance analysis and verification.

 

Prof. Dr. Terry Halpin

Title: "Fact-Orientation and Conceptual Logic"

 

Biography

Dr. Terry Halpin is a Principal Scientist at LogicBlox (headquartered in Atlanta), and a Professor in computer science at INTI International University, Malaysia. He previously held senior faculty positions in computer science at The University of Queensland (Australia) and Neumont University (USA). His prior industrial experience includes several years in data modeling technology at Asymetrix Corporation, InfoModelers Inc., Visio Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation. His doctoral thesis formalized Object-Role Modeling (ORM/NIAM), and his current research focuses on conceptual modeling and rule-based technology. He has authored over 160 technical publications and six books, including Information Modeling and Relational Databases (Morgan Kaufmann) and has co-edited five books on information systems modeling research. He is a member of IFIP WG 8.1 (Information Systems), is an associate editor or reviewer for several academic journals, is a regular columnist for the Business Rules Journal, and is a recipient of the DAMA International Achievement Award for Education (2002) and the IFIP Outstanding Service Award (2006).

Abstract

Typically, analysis and modeling of an enterprise or business domain is a collaborative process between the business expert, who best understands the business rules and requirements, and the modeler whose main task is to elicit this understanding and capture it in a formal model that can be executed (directly or indirectly via transformation) by an information system. Ideally, the formal model (including its representation of the business rules) should be validated by the business experts. Since business experts are often non-technical, the model needs to be conceptual in nature, cast in language that is intelligible to the business expert while still being formal. Fact-orientation aims to address this communication need in an optimal way.

This presentation provides a state-of-the-art overview of fact-orientation in general and second-generation Object-Role Modeling (ORM) in particular, highlighting its conceptual and visual support for logic-based modeling. It explains ORM’s underlying principles and logical foundations, outlines recent improvements to the methodology and associated tool support, and contrasts fact-orientation with other data modeling and logic-based approaches. Specific topics addressed include: data modeling advantages of fact-orientation over attribute-based approaches such as ER and UML; similarities and differences between ORM and ontology or logic-based languages such as OWL and datalog; graphical and textual languages for constraints and derivation rules; model validation via verbalization and population; join constraints; modality; nominalization flavors; subtyping flavors; temporality; schema transformation and mapping; and exploiting ORM as a front-end to other modeling approaches.
 

Dr. Richard Hull

Title: "Towards Flexible Service Interoperation using Business Artifacts"

 

Biography

Richard Hull joined IBM Research as a Research Manager in 2008.  Hull has broad research interests in the areas of data and information management, workflow and business processes, and web and converged services.  Hull is co-author of the book "Foundations of Databases" (Addison-Wesley); has published over 100 articles in journals, conferences and books; and holds six U.S. patents.  Prior to joining IBM Research, Hull was Director of Computing and Software Principles Research at Bell Labs Research, a division of Alcatel-Lucent.  While there, in addition to pursuing research on semantic web services, converged services, and personalization, Hull was instrumental in developing and transferring new technologies into Alcatel-Lucent's product line, including the Vortex policy engine and the Datagrid data integration tool.  Before joining Bell Labs in 1996 he served for many years on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and was a frequent visitor at INRIA in France.  His research has been supported in part by grants from NSF, DARPA, and
AT&T.  Hull was named Bell Labs Fellow in 2005 and ACM Fellow in 2007.

Hull's current research focus is on the Business Entities with Lifecycles (BEL) approach to modeling business processes and operations.  This includes bringing a declarative style to the BEL approach, developing formal foundations and verification techniques for BEL, and applying the approach to the challenges of case management, service composition, and service interoperation.

Abstract

Most traditional approaches to Business Process Management (BPM) focus primarily on specifying process, and incorporate data modeling, business rules, monitoring, and other aspects almost as an afterthought.  As a result, most BPM design methods and tool environments must work across multiple conceptual models. This adds substantial complexity to an already complex problem space. An alternative is Case Management, which focuses first on the data used to manage some kinds of business operations, and allows for rich run-time flexibility concerning which activities are performed and in which order. Case Management has been used in only a small part of the business operations management space.

In the early 2000's, IBM Research introduced a novel approach to BPM, called Business Entities with Lifecycles (BEL's) (a.k.a. "Business Artifacts").  A BEL describes a class of business-relevant dynamic conceptual entities that flow through the enterprise, often crossing organizational and infrastructure silos.  A BEL specification includes both an information model and a lifecycle model; these are tightly coupled, providing a holistic approach to modeling business operations.  The BEL approach has significant similarities with Case Management, but has been applied in a much wider variety of domains.

This talk will present the BEL approach and describe some of the ways that it has been applied.  The talk will then overview current research on a declarative approach for specifying BEL lifecycles called "Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM)", including the mathematical foundations underlying the semantics, and illustrations of how GSM can support the spectrum from conventional BPM to case management.