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The quest for sustainability in industry leads to interdisciplinary concepts such as industrial symbiosis, which refers to the exchange of resources between industrial plants to turn the waste of one plant into the input of the other. Identifying, evaluating and comparing potential exchanges requires the collection of large amounts of heterogenous data from different data sources, a shared understanding of the system and a common terminology between the different sciences. However, research is still faced with the challenge of establishing a uniform terminology and understanding of concepts in the domain. The lack of common understanding and data and the complexity of industrial symbiosis leads to poor communication and limited understanding. In the area of IT, it leads to insufficient interoperability, reusability and integration of IT artifacts. To address these problems, we aim to provide a domain-specific terminology capable to represent the domain’s structure and to create a common understanding of industrial symbiosis. Our approach is an ontology, which uses a consolidated terminology. The analysis of existing ontologies shows that they present different concepts, use different terminology and cover different parts of the domain. Therefore, we synthesize these ontologies and the literature to obtain a more comprehensive representation. Furthermore, we incorporate external elements of the system and introduce a differentiated view of the technological level and the logistic infrastructure. Our ontology serves as terminological base for the community and structures industrial symbiosis systems. In a further step, it has to be formalized to transform it into the means of information technology.

The analysis of Online Social Networks (OSN) like Facebook is an emerging field of research and of high relevance for businesses in order to derive information about current and prospective customers. Generally, OSN analysis requires the participation of different stakeholders; for example domain experts, data mining experts and IT engineers. Each of these groups operates with specific modeling approaches what can cause communication problems, redundancy or model discrepancies. We proclaim the design of an integrated ontology for OSN analysis in order to avoid these problems. Therefore, a set of requirements on the aimed ontology is evolved based on characteristic use cases coming from specific business purposes. In a second step, a range of existing ontologies are examined and compared with the elaborated requirements. Finally, the OntOSN ontology is designed.

BPMN is the prevalent process modeling language and a lot of domain-specific BPMN extensions have evolved during the last couple of years. Due to the plenty of extensions and elements within BPMN, it is promising to consider complexity reduction mechanisms in order to provide appropriate, purpose-specific views on BPMN models. We therefore analyze capabilities of BPMN in regard of the definition of additional perspectives and diagrams in order to provide dedicated views on aspects of business processes (e.g., separate resource diagrams). As both BPMN and BPMN-defining MOF reveal shortcomings regarding to the definition of perspectives, we introduce a BPMN meta model extension in order to allow an integrated definition of new perspectives and their respective graphical elements. We further provide methodical guidance by conducting and customizing the BPMN extension method of Stroppi et al. (2011).

During the last years, various MOF-based modeling languages became de-facto standards in their field of application. Due to their common application and dissemination the need for extending these languages also increased in order to integrate domain-specific concepts or facilitate interoperability and tool support. However, only the minority of MOF-based modeling languages provides an extension mechanism and even those defining one, reveal some syntactical issues e.g., BPMN. Also MOF itself does not provide an integrated and consistent extension mechanism. We therefore proclaim the application of the UML-based profile mechanism for extending the abstract syntax of MOF-based languages while keeping their original meta models unaffected. Further, the application of the Diagram Definition DD standard for extending the concrete syntax is outlined and both aspects are integrated. The research article proposes a generic extension method for MOF-based languages based on existing concepts and constructs from the MOF environment. In this context, the article also discusses the positions of the Profiles package and the Diagram Graphics DG package within the OMG meta hierarchy.

Design Science Research DSR still reveals several methodical shortcomings, which need to be remedied in order to enhance the maturity of DSR and its derived artifacts. For instance, there is a remarkable lack in methodical support for problem formulation. Also, DSR does not provide detailed procedure models, which can be operationalized appropriately. This compromises rigor within the design process and hampers demarcation from professional practice. In order to tackle these issues, we propose the adaptation of Requirements Engineering for structuring the problem space and deriving design decisions systematically. Requirements are also intended to work as glue between single design stages in order to keep the design process comprehensible and transparent. We therefore justify an ontology-based analogy between requirements analysis and DSR parts and provide a requirements-driven DSR framework based on a four-part ontology that especially focuses problem analysis and design preparation. Moreover, a detailed state of the art is presented and our approach is discussed within a critical appraisal.

Conceptual modeling languages are valuable means for analyzing, designing and controlling information systems. In recent years, some languages became de facto standards in their particular field of application, which simultaneously leads to an increasing demand for domain-specific extensions in order to both benefit from dissemination and apposite concepts. However, recent studies reveal a remarkable lack of methodical support for language extensibility, which hampers systematic extension design, comprehensibility and interoperability. This research article therefore aims to outline different meta model extension mechanisms based on an analogy to extension principles from the field of Software Engineering. The techniques of hooking, aspects, plug-ins and add-ons are presented and their adaptation is elaborated by the definition of additional extension packages within the Meta Object Facility MOF in order to provide constructs for the definition of extensible meta models.

The approaches to the correction and/or compensation of thermally caused machining errors developed in the CRC/TR 96 have different effects on the accuracy that can be achieved and on the throughput capacity. Consequently, the approaches generate different benefits. At the same time, the costs and time required for their generation and application differ as well. As a result, not only the technical, but also the economic consequences of each method in terms of its usability for practice-relevant applications are of interest to potential users. Methods for comparing the various approaches are developed in subproject C05. These methods are based on the technical and economic benchmarking guidelines introduced in the paper.

Model migration is needed to transform a model from one modelling language to another to reuse these models and thus, to reduce the costs of building new models. This topic has received much attention mainly because of the OMG’s MDA initiative. However, these approaches are tailored to transform design models. In this paper, we argue that this approach cannot be applied to the field of domain modelling. Therefore, we propose a theoretical framework for model migration, which extends the existing approaches adding a role and a process model to satisfy the requirements of model migrations in a material problem domain.