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In 2013, the Twente Educational Model (TOM) was introduced in the Bachelor programme of the University of Twente, aiming at increasing the motivation and improving the learning results of the students. TOM prescribed that the programmes should have’integrated thematic modules’ of 15EC. In one of these modules, software design and programming are offered to first-year’Computer Science’ (CS) and’Business Information Technology’ (BIT) students. Since most CS students had prior knowledge and experience in programming and/or were more intrinsically motivated to learn programming than BIT students, the BIT students performed generally much poorer than CS students. This paper discusses our efforts to improve the performance of BIT students by helping them become independent learners. To achieve this, we conceived a new pedagogical design to induce metacognition cycles integrated with a mentoring scheme. To help students self-assess themselves and provide structure to the mentoring scheme, we offered the students a study plan, which is a structured view of the syllabus. We broke the learning objectives down into smaller topics, which are units to be learned in one day, and we assigned three student-friendly rubrics to each topic (entry, intermediate, and target) allowing the students to grade their own proficiency level. Every two weeks, students had to self-assess their proficiency in the topics and discuss it with their assigned mentor. This paper shows that these actions have created an awareness of the learning process and consequently improved the students’ motivation and end results.

Recently a number of IoT platforms have been developed to cope with the big data generated and consumed by sensors and actuators. Some IoT platforms achieve syntactic interoperability by adopting JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to represent the message payload produced by devices.

An early warning system (EWS) is an integrated system that supports the detection, monitoring and alerting of emergency situations. A possible application of an EWS is in epidemiological surveillance, to detect infectious disease outbreaks in geographical areas. In this scenario, a challenge in the development and integration of applications on top of EWS is to achieve common understanding between epidemiologists and software developers, allowing the specification of rules resulted from epidemiological studies. To address this challenge this paper describes an ontology-based model-driven engineering (MDE) framework that relies on the Situation Modelling Language (SML), a knowledge specification technique for situation identification. Some requirements are realized by revisiting SML, which resulted in a complete redesign of its semantics, abstract and concrete syntaxes. The initial validation shows that our framework can accelerate the generation of high quality situation-aware applica tions, being suitable for other application scenarios.

This paper presents an architecture for health information exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. Our architecture has been designed for message exchange by integrating ubiquitous computing technologies, intelligent agents and healthcare standards, in order to provide interoperability between healthcare systems. We conduct controlled experiments at three cardiology clinics, an analysis laboratory, and the cardiology sector of a hospital located in Marilia (Sao Paulo, Brazil). Three scenarios were developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable to facilitate the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful message exchange capabilities. The proposed architecture facilitates health information exchange between various healthcare information systems, contributing in this way to the development of a pervasive healthcare environment that allows healthcare to be available anywhere, anytime and to anyone.

The concept of "service" has been characterized by different disciplines and authors from various points of view. The variety of characterizations reveals that this notion, although an intuitive one, is far from trivial. Given the importance of services in enterprise computing and Service Science in general, we believe that a clear account of services and service-related concepts is necessary and would serve as a basis for communication, consensus and alignment of various approaches and perspectives. In this paper we propose a commitment-based account of the notion of service captured in a core reference ontology called UFO-S. We address the commitments established between service providers and customers, and show how such commitments affect the service lifecycle. We show that the commitment-based account can serve to harmonize different notions of service in the literature.

Future disease outbreaks may spread faster and stronger than recent epidemics, such as Zika, Ebola and Influenza. The integration of multiple existing Early Warning Systems (EWS) is a requirement to support disease surveillance in combating infectious disease outbreaks. In this direction, numerous applications have been developed considering big data from diverse sources. However, big data potential can only be exploited if interoperability challenges are addressed. In this paper we discuss a semantic interoperability problem when using data exchanging standards for EWS integration. Particularly, we identify an issue regarding the distinction between the concepts of situation and event in the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), the OASIS set of standards for disaster management. To cope with interoperability issues we propose an ontology-driven situation-aware approach for the development and integration of EWS. The approach leverages on the OntoEmerge core ontology, in which we incorporate the clear distinction between the concepts of situation and event.

The notion of situation enables designers, maintainers, and users to abstract from lower-level entities and properties and to focus on the higher-level patterns that emerge in time. Situation management concerns a number of tasks including situation specification, situation detection (which may involve composite situation pattern recognition), and situation’s life cycle control. This chapter discusses how to approach situation management from a rule-based perspective. We present a rule-based situation management infrastructure to support the development of situation-aware applications and show its applicability to a scenario in the public health domain, concerning situations for detecting influenza epidemics.

This book presents a design methodology that is practically applicable to the architectural design of a broad range of systems. It is based on fundamental design concepts to conceive and specify the required functional properties of a system, while abstracting from the specific implementation functions and technologies that can be chosen to build the system. Abstraction and precision are indispensable when it comes to understanding complex systems and precisely creating and representing them at a high functional level. Once understood, these concepts appear natural, self-evident and extremely powerful, since they can directly, precisely and concisely reflect what is considered essential for the functional behavior of a system. The first two chapters present the global views on how to design systems and how to interpret terms and meta concepts. This informal introduction provides the general context for the remainder of the book. On a more formal level, Chapters 3 through 6 present the main basic design concepts, illustrating them with examples. Language notations are introduced along with the basic design concepts. Lastly, Chapters 7 to 12 discuss the more intricate basic design concepts of interactive systems by focusing on their common functional goal. These chapters are recommended to readers who have a particular interest in the design of protocols and interfaces for various systems. The didactic approach makes it suitable for graduate students who want to develop insights into and skills in developing complex systems, as well as practitioners in industry and large organizations who are responsible for the design and development of large and complex systems. It includes numerous tangible examples from various fields, and several appealing exercises with their solutions.

A service registry is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) component that keeps a ‘catalogue’ of available services. It stores service specifications so that these specifications can be found by potential users. Discussions on the design of service registries currently focus on technical issues, while service registries should take into consideration information needs of business domain users. In this regard, the authors consider service registries as information services and develop a comprehensive framework for designing service registries. This framework introduces aspects that determine a design space for service registries. In this design space, the authors identify views, requirements, processes, and means in the design of a service registry that supports the lifecycle information of a service. A vital part of these requirements is further implemented and demonstrated in a prototype built as a ‘proof-of-concept’ for the framework. This paper also discusses a case study used to evaluate the prototype. In this case study, a registry prototype has been populated with realistic services of a large insurance company, and 21 experienced IT and business professionals from a consultancy organization evaluated the prototype for its user satisfaction.

Over time Business Process has become an asset for organization since it allows managing what happens within their environments. It is possible to automate some activities of the business process using information systems and accordingly decrease the execution time and increase the production. How- ever, information systems often suffer maintenance over time and become obsolete and a re-engineering process is necessary. In this case, the business knowledge, located more accurately the reality in source code, should be maintained. Thereof, this paper propose an approach to support the business process recovery from source code. For this purpose, the approach uses KDM standard with a set of heuristic rules to identify relevant code elements to the business layer. As result, the models are generated according to the BPMN specification that, together with other artifacts, provide more subsidies to the professionals involved. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, a case study was performed in an Academic Management System.

An MDA-based design approach should be able to accommodate designs at different levels of platform-independence. We have previously proposed a design approach [2], which allows these levels to be identified. An important feature of this approach is the notion of abstract platform. An abstract platform is determined by considering the platform characteristics that are relevant for applications at a certain level of platform-independence as well as the various design goals. In this paper, we discuss how our design approach can be supported using the MDA standards UML 2.0 and MOF 2.0. Since our methodological framework is based on the notion of abstract platform, we pay particular attention to the representation of abstract platforms and the language requirements to specify abstract platforms.

This paper proposes an architectural model to facilitate the design of component-based groupware systems. This architectural model has been defined based on (1) three pre-defined component types, (2) a refinement strategy that relies on these component types, (3) the identification of layers of collaboration concerns, and (4) rules for the coupling and distribution of the components that implement these concerns. Our architectural model is beneficial for controlling the complexity of the development process, since it gives concrete guidance on the concerns to be considered and decomposition disciplines to be applied in each development step. The paper illustrates the application of this architectural model with an example of an electronic voting system.

This paper proposes an approach to develop applications in the Pervasive Healthcare environment, through the use of Archetypes. Materials and methods: Pervasive Healthcare focuses on the use of new technologies, tools, and services, to help patients to play a more active role in the treatment of their conditions. Pervasive Healthcare environments demand a huge amount of information exchange, and specific technologies have been proposed to provide interoperability between the systems that comprise such environments. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to fully adopt them and to migrate Centered Healthcare Environments to Pervasive Healthcare Environments. Results: This approach was demonstrated and evaluated in a controlled experiment that we conducted in the cardiology department of a hospital located in the city of Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). Conclusion: An application was developed to evaluate this approach, and the results showed that the approach is suitable for facilitating the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful approach capabilities.

The application of ICT in healthcare sector activities, known as e-Health, can simplify the access to healthcare services and will only be acceptable for realistic scenarios if it supports efficient and secure information exchange amongst the caregivers and their patients. The aim of this paper is to present an approach for message exchange to realistic scenarios.

Aims: This paper proposes an architecture for the exchange of context-aware messages in Pervasive Healthcare environments. Materials and methods: In Pervasive Healthcare, novel information and communication technologies are applied to support the provision of health services anywhere, at anytime, and to anyone. Ubiquitous Computing technologies allow efficient and safe information exchange amongst caregivers and their patients in communities, homes and hospitals. Since health systems may offer their health records in various electronic formats, the openEHR foundation has proposed a dual model to achieve semantic interoperability between such systems. Intelligent Agents is a technology that has been applied to simulate human skills in healthcare procedures. This architecture is based on technologies from Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligent Agents, and complies with the openEHR dual model. Results: This architecture was demonstrated and evaluated in a controlled experiment that we conducted in the cardiology department of a hospital located in the city of Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). Conclusion: An application was developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable for facilitating the development of healthcare systems by offering generic resources and powerful solution to integrate these systems.

This paper presents some basic design concepts for the design of open distributed systems. These concepts should form the basis for the development of effective design methodologies. The paper discusses how design concepts, such as interaction, action and causality relation, can be used for modelling and structuring behaviours of functional entities in a distributed environment. The paper also addresses some consequences of the application of these design concepts such as the choice of language elements and operations to represent behaviour structure, the structuring of the design process, and the definition of design operations for behaviour refinement.

The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recognized in the management literature and on a recent proposal to extend ArchiMate, which includes these concepts in order to improve ArchiMate’s coverage of portfolio management. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the concepts introduced in that proposal, focusing in particular on the resource, capability and competence concepts. As a result, it proposes well-founded recommendations for improvements, enhancing its suitability and integration possibilities.

The application of ICT on the whole range of health sector activities, known as e-health, can simplify the access to health care services and will only be acceptable for realistic scenarios if it supports efficient information exchange amongst the caregivers and their patients. The aim of this paper is present an approach for message exchange to realistic scenarios.

The main objective of this paper is to present a reusable architecture for message exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. This architecture has been designed by integrating different concepts and technologies of ubiquitous computing, software agents, and openEHR archetypes, in order to provide interoperability between healthcare systems. The architecture was demonstrated and evaluated in controlled experiments that we conducted at three cardiology clinics, an analysis laboratory, and the cardiology sector of a hospital located in Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). Three applications were developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable to facilitate the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful message exchange capabilities. The reusable architecture speeds up the development of new applications, reducing the number of mistakes and the development time. The proposed architecture facilitates message exchanging between caregivers, contributing in this way to the development of pervasive healthcare systems that allow healthcare to be available anywhere, anytime, and to anyone.

Pervasive Healthcare focuses on the use of new technologies, tools, and services, to help patients to play a more active role in the treatment of their conditions. Pervasive Healthcare environments demand a huge amount of information exchange, and specific technologies has been proposed to provide interoperability between the systems that comprise such environments. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to fully adopt them and to migrate Centered Healthcare Environments to Pervasive Healthcare Environments. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to develop applications in the Pervasive Healthcare environment, through the use of Archetypes. This approach was demonstrated and evaluated in a controlled experiment that we conducted in the cardiology department of a hospital located in the city of Marilia (Sao Paulo, Brazil). An application was developed to evaluate this approach, and the results showed that the approach is suitable for facilitating the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful approach capabilities.

This is the report on the ‘Workshop on Selected applications and methods for Enterprise Interoperability, which has been organized in conjunction with the IWEI Conference 2013 (Enschede, the Netherlands). This workshop has taken place on 26 March 2013 and was attended by around 15 people.

In today’s global market, the competitiveness of enterprises is strongly dictated by their ability to collaborate with other enterprises. Ontologies enable common understanding of concepts and have been acknowledged as a powerful means to foster collaboration, both within the boundaries of an individual enterprise (intra-enterprise) as outside these boundaries (inter-enterprise). This paper argues that the use of ontologies can be beneficial for enterprise interoperability in the logistics domain, to improve communication and foster knowledge reuse, to facilitate the integration of existing systems and to support the development process of software solutions. Our experience shows that the development of ontologies for logistics is not a trivial task, and guidelines and best practices are necessary in this domain, especially to bridge the gap between theory and practice. On the one hand, proper theoretical and methodological support for ontology engineering is necessary in order to deliver precise, consistent and well-founded solutions to the market. On the other hand, solutions to practical issues should be provided and not take too long to be produced in order not to be detached from the original real market needs. This paper proposes an ontological approach for logistics that balances the trade-off between precision and pragmatism, by combining top-down and bottom-up practices for ontology engineering. From a top-down perspective, we promote the reuse of existing general-purpose (upper) ontologies and specialize them for the purpose of logistics. From a bottom-up perspective, we reuse code lists and classifications that already exist in logistics to support the creation of instances of our upper level concepts. The paper also presents a representative fragment of our core ontology for logistics and identifies areas for further work in ontology engineering for logistics.

Two orchestrated processes interacting with each other have to maintain their own states. Messages are used to synchronize states between orchestrated processes. Server crash and network failure may result in loss of messages and therefore result in a state change performed by only one party. Thus, the states of the parties are no longer synchronized, resulting in state inconsistencies and in worst case deadlocks. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for guaranteed state synchronization of orchestrated processes with system and network failures. Our mechanism is based on interaction patterns and process transformations. The basic idea is to redesign the original processes into their state synchronization-enabled counterparts via process transformations that can be automated. The transformation mechanism is formalized based on Colored Petri Nets. We present the formal proof of the correctness of our mechanism and give the overhead analysis to illustrate its practicability.

Service composition has been acknowledged as a promising approach to create new (composite) services that are capable of supporting multiple needs of service users. Service composition has been used quite extensively to support complex but relatively stable enterprise processes. More recently, service composition is also being applied to support the personalization of services delivered to human end-users. In these situations, the aim is to create service compositions on demand, at runtime, that match the specific requirements of each individual end-user, characterizing user-centric dynamic service composition processes. The most common approach to dynamic service composition aims at creating service compositions that once obtained must be deployed and executed by some sort of orchestration engine. In this approach, the service composition life-cycle is fixed, with serious limitations to its applicability in more realistic situations. This paper presents the A-DynamiC oS framework, which applies a novel approach to user-centric service composition by providing flexible support to the different activities of the service composition life-cycle. In this approach, components that perform service discovery, composition and execution activities are orchestrated, breaking the traditional rigid life-cycle (discover, then compose, then deploy and finally execute). We claim that dynamic orchestration of service composition activities enables true user-centric service delivery. This paper motivates and justifies the development of A-DynamiC oS, and presents use cases that demonstrate our claims.

During a stateful interaction, a partner service may become unavailable because of a server crash or a temporary network failure. Once the failed service becomes available again, the interaction partners do not have any knowledge about each other's state, possibly resulting in errors or deadlocks. This paper proposes an approach to the recovery of stateful interactions based on service interaction patterns and process transformations. Our recovery approach works without a central management node and without additional communication protocols. We also minimize the changes to the description of the service supported by the recovery-enabled process. Our approach allows one partner process to be modified in order to support failures in a way that interaction with the other (unchanged) processes is still possible.

Nowadays, many organizations use BPM for capturing and monitoring their business processes. The introduction of BPM in an organization may become expensive, because of the upfront investments on software and hardware. Therefore, organizations can choose for a cloud-based BPM system, in which a BPM system can be used in a pay-per-use manner. Opting for cloud-based solutions may normally raise concerns in organizations such as privacy, security, legal constraints and control. By combining cloud-based and traditional BPM, organizations can benefit from the best of both worlds. This paper proposes a distribution solution in which a business process is separated into individual business processes to be executed in the cloud and on-premise. This solution gives users the freedom to place sensitive data and non-computation-intensive activities within the borders of their organization, whereas less sensitive data and computation-intensive activities can be placed in the cloud. In our proposed approach, the business processes for both on-premise and the cloud are created by performing a transformation on the original business processes, guided by a distribution list in which the placement of each activity and data element is defined. This paper discusses the challenges of implementing this transformation.

This project aims to investigate the deployment of business processes in cloud environments, using the Process-as-a-Service model. This model allows a business process to be entirely or partially executed in a cloud computing environment. Due to security requirements, for example, in healthcare applications, certain data or activities of a business process should be kept within the premises of the user, while other data or activities can be allocated in a computing cloud, requiring a decomposition of this process.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as an architectural style to foster enterprise interoperability, as it claims to facilitate the flexible composition of loosely coupled enterprise applications and thus alleviates the heterogeneity problem among enterprises. Meanwhile, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) aims at facilitating the development of distributed application functionality, independent from its implementation using a specific technology platform and thus contributes to deployment in different platforms. In this paper we propose an MDA-based transformation technique for service composition. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, our approach shows how enterprise interoperability is supported by service composition at two different technical levels, namely at choreography and orchestration level. Second, the approach contributes to the management of changes that affect enterprise interoperability, by defning a (semi-)automated transformation from choreography to orchestrations in which the interoperability constraints specified at the choreography level are preserved.

In recent years, public organisations have been challenged to offer electronic services. This has caused a proliferation of disconnected web sites or web portals, often reflecting the internal structures (departments or sections) of these organizations. This paper shows that electronic public services can be improved if these services are designed based on the citizens’ life events, and are supported by a user-centric dynamic service composition approach. A user-centric service composition approach aims at creating orchestrations of available public services at runtime, according to the requirements of the citizens that ultimately use these services. This paper presents, evaluates and justifies our service composition approach, and discusses the prototype that we developed to demonstrate and evaluate this approach. It also shows that the life events strategy supported by our user-centric service composition approach is able to improve the overall experience of public services.

In a user-centric service creation process, users should drive the service creation, in which services can be composed out of existing services. However, the creation is expected to take place also at runtime and possibly be performed by non-technical users. These users require support in the composition process, since they cannot deal with all the technical details of service composition. Furthermore, users have different characteristics and properties. In this paper we propose a classification of users in terms of their application domain and technical knowledge in order to identify different types of users and their requirements in the service composition process. These requirements can be used to design and build suitable supporting composition environments. Although our classification of users may seem trivial at first sight, it is quite essential for identifying users requirements and derive the appropriate supporting environment. Nowadays most of the approaches are technology-driven rather than user-oriented. We argue that only by taking the user into account a truly user-centric service creation and delivery can be achieved.