Large organizations today face a growing challenge of managing heterogeneous process collections containing business processes. Explicit semantics inherent to domain-specific models can help alleviate some of the management challenges. Starting with concept definitions, designers can create domain specific processes and eventually generate industry-standard BPMN for use in BPMS solutions. However, in such a multi-layered setting, any of these artefacts (concepts, domain processes and BPMN) can be modified by various stakeholders and changes done by one person may influence models used by others. There is therefore a need for tool support to aid in keeping track of changes done and their impacts on different stakeholders. In this paper, we present a multi-context systems based approach that allows inferring impacts of changes, especially in terms of consistency, and executing semantic queries. In contrast to existing work, our framework allows the co-existence of different formalisms, with potentially different characteristics, offering greater flexibility in knowledge base and tool integration.

Most of existing efforts in digital preservation have focused on extending the life of documents beyond their period of creation, without taking into account intentions and assumptions made. However, in a continuously evolving setting, knowledge about the context of documents is nearly mandatory for their continuous understanding, use, care, and sustainable governance. In this work we propose a method that considers the preservation of a number of interdependent digital entities, including documents, in conformance with context related information. A change that influences one of these objects can be propagated to the rest of the objects via analysis of their represented dependencies. We propose to represent dependencies not only as simple links but as complex, semantically rich, constructs that encompass context-related information. We illustrate how this method can aid in fine-grained contextually-aware change propagation and impact analysis with a case study.

This paper defines i/ an RDFS/OWL schema to capture the syntactic structure of marked-up documents and ii/ the (reversible) transposition of any XML/SGML/HTML document into a set of conformant RDF triples that convey the relevant tree information, be it meta-information (structure of the tree, attributes, XML comments...) or basic information (textual content).

In previous work we outlined a mathematical model of the so-called XML editing deltas and proposed a first study of their formal properties. We expected at least three outputs from this theoretical work: a common basis to compare performances of the various algorithms through a structural normalization of deltas, a universal and flexible patch application model and a clearer separation of patch and merge engine performance from delta generation performance. This paper presents the full calculus and reports significant progresses with respect to formalizing a normalization procedure. Such method is key to defining an equivalence relation between editing scripts and eventually designing optimizers compiler back-ends, new patch specification languages and execution models.

This work addresses what we believe to be a central issue in the field of XML diff and merge computation: the mathematical modeling of the so-called "editing deltas" and the study of their formal abstract properties. We expect at least three outputs from this theoretical work: a common basis to compare performances of the various algorithms through a structural normalization of deltas, a universal and flexible patch application model and a clearer separation of patch and merge engine performance from delta generation performance. Moreover, this work could inspire technical approaches to combine heterogeneous engines thank to sound delta transformations. This short paper reports current results, discusses key points and outlines some perspectives.

XPath [5] was introduced by the W3C as a standard language for specifying node selection, matching conditions, and for computing values from an XML document. XPath is now used in many XML standards such as XSLT [4] and the forthcoming XQuery [10] database access language. Since efficient XML content querying is crucial for the performance of almost all XML processing architectures, a growing need for studying high performance XPath-based querying has emerged. Our approach aims at optimizing XPath performance through static analysis and syntactic transformation of XPath expressions.

XPath [3, 5] is a powerful and quite successful language able to perform complex node selection in trees through compact specifications. As such, it plays a growing role in many areas ranging from schema specifications, designation and transformation languages to XML query languages. Moreover, researchers have proposed elegant and tractable formal semantics [8, 9, 10, 14], fostering various works on mathematical properties and theoretical tools [10, 13, 12, 14].We propose here a novel way to consider XPath, not only for selecting nodes, but also for tree rewriting using rules. In the rule semantics we explore, XPath expressions (noted p,p') are used both on the left and on the right side (i.e. rules have the form p → p'). We believe that this proposal opens new perspectives toward building highly concise XML transformation languages on widely accepted basis.

After a brief introduction to the Circus programming language, we present a simple type set to model XML structures. We then describe a transformation that takes a mail as input and produces a reply, showing how subtyping is used in order to refine the type control and specialize the transformation. Conclusions are drawn both on our (easy to use but clearly limited) XML data model and on Circus itself ; expected qualities of the language are verified ; the need for some new features is expressed. Finally, we sketch some language extensions, a richer model for XML structures, and explain our choices and expectations.

The domain of XML transformations is becoming more and more important as a result of the increasing number of applications adopting XML as their format for data exchange or representation. Most of the existing solutions for expressing XML transformations are textual languages, such as XSLT or DOM combined with a general-purpose programming language. Several tools build on top of these languages, providing a graphical environment. Transformations are however still specified in a textual way using the underlying language (often XSLT), thus requiring the user to learn the associated textual language.We believe that visual programming techniques are well-suited to representing XML structures and make the specification of transformations simpler. We present a visual programming language for the specification of XML transformations in an interactive environment, based on a zoomable user interface toolkit. Transformations can be run from the application or exported to two target languages: XSLT and Circus, a general-purpose structure transformation language designed by the second author and briefly introduced in this paper.

CLF/Mekano is a distributed object infrastructure oriented towards the high-level coordination of coarse grain components. Unlike other infrastructures of the same class, such as CORBA or DCOM, coordination in CLF/Mekano is built-in at the lowest level, namely at the inter-component communication protocol level, and not as a side service (such as the event, transaction or negotiation services of Corba). Although the CLF protocol is "lightweight" (it relies on very few concepts and only 8 communication "verbs"), it makes the design and implementation of components more complex, but also more valuable if it can be reused. The Mekano library has been developed in order to deal with this complexity, targeting reusability. It provides ready-to-use generic classes of customizable components, as well as useful component parts which can be reassembled according to application specific needs. Of course, further layers of domain-specific libraries (so called business object libraries), can then be developed on top of Mekano, to provide ready-to-use components dedicated to specific business needs (in the line of Enterprise Java Beans).

In spite of growing needs in many areas, there is a lack of powerful graphical interfaces for interacting with large and complex sets of objects. Debugging, management and monitoring tools for object-oriented distributed systems or databases, for instance, need new interfaces that allow high quality visualization and interaction.