It is a fundamental right of every natural person to control which personal information is collected, stored and processed by whom, for what purposes and how long. In fact, many (cloud based) services can only be used if the user allows them broad data collection and analysis. Often, users can only decide to either give their data or not to participate in communities. The refusal to provide personal data results in significant drawbacks for social interaction. That is why we believe that there is a need for tools to control one's own data in an easy and effective way as protection against economic interest of global companies and their cloud computing systems (as data collector from apps, mobiles and services). Especially, as nowadays everybody is permanently online using different services and devices, users are often lacking the means to effectively control the access to their private data. Therefore, we present an approach to manage and distribute privacy settings: PRIVACY-AVARE is intended to enable users to centrally determine their data protection preferences and to apply them on different devices. Thus, users gain control over their data when using cloud based services. In this paper, we present the main idea of PRIVACY-AVARE.

Goal models and business process models are used to document the business requirements. Goal models describe the organizational concepts using a high abstraction level. They are modeling the intentions and strategies of stakeholders. Business process models, on the other hand, provide detailed descriptions on how these organizational goals are to be fulfilled. To ensure consistency among organizational goals and business process models several approaches to derive business processes from goal models have been proposed. However, a key weakness of these approaches is that they don't express quality requirements in business process models. Thus, in this paper we present AAISP a new approach for aligning information systems perspectives. We first define an extended goal model that comprises the relevant stakeholder requirements. Then, we list mapping rules for the extended goal model and the business process concepts and finally, based on these rules we present an algorithm to transform the extended goal model into a BPMN model.

Abstract Knowledge transfer is a critical factor in ensuring the success of offshore outsourcing software development projects and is, in many cases, neglected. Compared to in‐house or co‐located projects, however, such globally distributed projects feature far greater complexity. In addition to language barriers, factors such as cultural differences, time zone variance, distinct methods and practices, as well as unique equipment and infrastructure can all lead to problems that negatively impact knowledge transfer, and as a result, a project's overall success. In order to help minimise such risks to knowledge transfer, we conducted a research study based on expert interviews in six projects. Our study used German clients and focused on offshore outsourcing software development projects. We first identified known problems in knowledge transfer that can occur with offshore outsourcing projects. Then we collected best‐practice solutions proven to overcome the types of problems described. Afterward, we conducted a follow‐up study to evaluate our findings. In this subsequent stage, we presented our findings to a different group of experts in five projects and asked them to evaluate these solutions and recommendations in terms of our original goal, namely to find ways to minimise knowledge‐transfer problems in offshore outsourcing software development projects. Thus, the result of our study is a catalog of evaluated solutions and associated recommendations mapped to the identified problem areas.

Information Systems Research (“Wirtschaftsinformatik”) basically follows two research approaches: the behavioristic approach and the design-oriented approach. In this memorandum, 10 authors propose principles of design-oriented information systems research. Moreover, the memorandum is supported by 111 full professors from the German-speaking scientific community, who with their signature advocate the principles specified therein.

Knowledge transfer is one of the most critical success factors in IT offshore outsourcing projects and in many cases extremely underestimated. Compared to in-house or onsite projects, a much higher complexity appears in globally distributed projects. Not only language barriers but also other challenges such as cultural differences, diverse time-zones, distinct methods and approaches, as well as varied infrastructural equipment, may cause problems which negatively impact knowledge transfer, and in consequence, the overall success of a project. In order to minimize risks during knowledge transfer, we conducted a research study based on a literature review and expert interviews. The result of our study was a collection and description of best practices and the development of recommendations by linking proven solutions to identified problem areas.

The Internet bears various unused potentials for actors in global exchange processes which are limited by information asymmetries and opportunism. In order to exploit these potentials it is necessary to mitigate underlying uncertainties. For this reason, we propose a Web services-based architecture of a so called reputation information management system (RIMS), whose goal is to reduce behavior and quality uncertainties by collecting and transforming reputation-related information available on the Internet. The demand-driven and adaptive architecture of our system flexibly collects, manages and enriches reputation information according to the individual preferences of its users. In doing so, it facilitates the process of finding trusted interaction or transaction partners, qualitative goods or other targeted objects. The separation of the logical view of reputation processes from the physical implementation enables the proposed architecture to be adaptable to different types of requests. The architecture can be leveraged as a reusable service in different applications.

The specification of an information system should include a description of structural system aspects as well as a description of the system behavior. In this article, we show how this can be achieved by high-level Petri nets—namely, the so-called NR/T-nets (Nested-Relation/Transition Nets). In NR/T-nets, the structural part is modeled by nested relations, and the behavioral part is modeled by a novel Petri net formalism. Each place of a net represents a nested relation scheme, and the marking of each place is given as a nested relation of the respective type. Insert and delete operations in a nested relational database (NF2-database) are expressed by transitions in a net. These operations may operate not only on whole tuples of a given relation, but also on “subtuples” of existing tuples. The arcs of a net are inscribed with so-called Filter Tables, which allow (together with an optional logical expression as transition inscription) conditions to be formulated on the specified (sub-) tuples. The occurrence rule for NR/T-net transitions is defined by the operations union, intersection, and “negative” in lattices of nested relations. The structure of an NR/T-net, together with the occurrence rule, defines classes of possible information system procedures, i.e., sequences of (possibly concurrent) operations in an information system.

A novel graphical query language for temporal relational data is presented. The query language GTL combines capabilities of temporal and graphical database languages. GTL-queries may be related to single database states (e.g. is there a database state where condition c1 holds?) or to sequences of database states (e.g. is there a database state sequence where first c1 holds, then c2, and finally c3?). In GTL, relations are represented by graphical symbols and temporal relationships between database states can be expressed along an implicit time axis. The underlying temporal data model abstracts from implementation aspects, e.g. it is not relevant whether tuple time stamping or attribute time stamping, single- or double-time stamping is used.>

In this paper a new type of high level Petri nets is introduced for modelling procedures in complex object database applications. Places in these so-called nested relation/transition nets (NR/T-nets) represent schemes of unnormalized (nested) relations. The marking of each place is a nested relation of the respective type. Each transition represents a specific type of operation on the relations in the adjacent places. These operations may not only operate on whole tuples of a given relation but also on sub-tuples of existing tuples. Arcs in a net are inscribed with so-called filter tables which allow to formulate conditions on the specified (sub-) tuples. Each NR/T-net defines a class of possible system procedures.>