Contributions in Merlin

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The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. As the sheer number of such services increases it will become increasingly more important to provide tools that allow people (and software) to quickly find the services they need, while minimizing the burden for those who wish to list their services with these search engines. This can be viewed as a critical enabler of the ‘friction-free’ markets of the ‘new economy’. Current service retrieval technology is, however, seriously deficient in this regard. The information retrieval community has focused on the retrieval of documents, not services per se, and has as a result emphasized keyword-based approaches. Those approaches achieve fairly high recall but low precision. The software agents and distributed computing communities have developed simple ‘frame-based’ approaches for ‘matchmaking’ between tasks and on-line services increasing precision at the substantial cost of requiring all services to be modeled as frames and only supporting perfect matches. This paper proposes a novel, ontology-based approach that employs the characteristics of a process-taxonomy to increase recall without sacrificing precision and computational complexity of the service retrieval process.

This thesis presents a methodology extension named MeTHOOD (Measures, Transformation Rules and Heuristics for Object-Oriented Design) that supports the design of objectbases. MeTHOOD integrates measures describing the design objectives, heuristics showing design alternatives and transformation rules that enable design transformations. MeTHOOD makes design knowledge for conceptual objectbase schemas (conceptual object-oriented class schemas) more tangible. Although a large amount of this important knowledge is available in the literature, it is hardly usable for designers because it is very scattered, on different levels of abstraction and not integrated. Thus, the objective of this thesis is to enable a design process for efficient and continuous quality inspection and improvement of conceptual class schemas by efficiently providing design knowledge. The core of MeTHOOD is a catalogue of integrated design knowledge consisting of already existing as well as new object-oriented design heuristics, transformation rules and measures. This knowledge is the base for the iterative MeTHOOD design process. It consists of the main activities measurement, design inspection and design transformation. Using measurement, important properties of the schema are assessed. Based on the measured values and the heuristics, it is possible to inspect the schema systematically. The result of the inspection is a set of potential design flaws. The actual design flaws (identified by the designer) can then be eliminated using schema transformation. The result is a new schema that can be compared to the old one using new and old measures. These activities are supported by concrete measures and heuristics acting as a driver for transformations. The process is supported by a design support system called MEx (MeTHOOD Expert). MEx provides semi-automatic design monitoring, heuristic checking and design transformation using the design knowledge of the MeTHOOD catalogue.

With on-line ordering and electronic commerce, the Internet moves from a passive information role to an active role as a computational medium for supporting the execution of business processes. This study is motivated by this trend and it investigates agent oriented and role based business process management for computational media. In this thesis, a conceptual framework for agent oriented and role based business process management has been established. We view a business process as a collection of autonomous, problem solving agents which interact with other agents when they have interdependencies. In particular, we model a process as a set of roles and a set of conversations among roles. A protocol defines a set of rules governing role-interaction in a conversation. We define roles in term of goals, qualifications, obligations, permissions, and relations to other roles, etc. Roles are assigned to agents based on the evaluation of qualifications and agents' capabilities. Once a role is assigned to an agent, the agent becomes the subject of the rights and duties specified by that role. Coordination of processes is achieved by communication among agents. Moreover, the main constructs of the role-based process description language have been identified. The role based approach for developing agent oriented business process management systems has been developed. An agent is an active entity whose state is viewed as consisting of mental components such as beliefs, capabilities, choices, and commitments. We have shown our role model matches with the agent's mental components perfectly. We supplemented our conceptual framework with practical dimension which leads us to build the agent enhanced peer review process management system. In the case study, we have presented the standard peer review process, discussed the administrative peer review process and ad hoc peer review process, and analyzed the Internet peer review process. Thereafter, the agent enhanced peer review process has been developed. We have modeled the process with Role Activity Diagrams and Finite States Machines. Then obligations of roles and protocol rules of conversations have been derived from them. Furthermore, a general set of messages for the agent enhanced peer review process has been defined and a deontic specification of the protocols has been shown. Finally, the peer review process management system is designed as a Multi-agent system. The work has both practical and theoretical implications. The result contributes to the study of Computational Media, Multi-agent systems, and Business Process Management as well. From the work, we have found that agent oriented processes take a distributed, and thus a more robust, flexible, and scaleable approach to business process management. Business processes and the Internet are more effective in combination than alone. Electronic Commerce and many other ""Virtual organization"" applications can be easily imagined.

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