While business process definition is becoming more and more popular as an instrument for describing human activities, there is a growing need for software tools supporting business process abstractions to help users organize and monitor their desktop work. Tools are most effective when they embed some knowledge about the process, e.g., in terms of the typical activities required by the process, so that users can execute the activities without having to define them. Tools must be lightweight and flexible, so as to enable users to create or change the process as soon as there is a new need. In this article, we first describe an application-independent approach to flexible process support by discussing the abstractions required for modeling, creating, enacting, and modifying flexible processes. Then, we show our approach at work in the context of project-centered learning. In this application, learners are challenged to perform concrete tasks in order to master specific subjects; in doing so, they have to conduct significant projects and cope with realistic (or even real-life) working conditions and scenarios. Often, students are geographically dispersed or under severe timing constraints, because these activities intertwine with their normal university activity. As a result, they need communication technology in order to interact and workflow technology in order to organize their work. The developed platform provides a comprehensible, e-learning-specific set of activities and process templates, which can be combined through a simple Web interface into project-centered collaboration processes. We discuss how the general paradigm of flexible processes was adapted to the learning concept, implemented, and experienced by students.

Many data integration solutions in the market today include tools for schema mapping, to help users visually relate elements of different schemas. Schema elements are connected with lines, which are interpreted as mappings, i.e. high-level logical expressions capturing the relationship between source and target data-sets; these are compiled into queries and programs that convert source-side data instances into target-side instances. This paper describes Clip, an XML schema mapping tool distinguished from existing tools in that mappings explicitly specify structural transformations in addition to value couplings. Since clip maps hierarchical XML schemas, lines appear naturally nested. We describe the transformation semantics associated with our "lines" and how they combine to form mappings that are more expressive than those generated by Clio, a well-known mapping tool. Further, we extend Clio's mapping generation algorithms to generate Clip's mappings.

Many data integration solutions in the market today include visual tools for schema mapping. Users connect schema elements with lines that are interpreted as high-level logical expressions capturing the relationship between source and target data-sets. These expressions are compiled into queries or programs that convert source-side data instances into target-side instances. In this demo we showcase Clip, an XML Schema mapping tool. Clip is distinguished from existing tools in that mappings explicitly specify structural transformations in addition to value correspondences. We show how Clip's users enter mappings by drawing lines and how these lines are translated into XQuery.

XQBE (XQuery By Example) is a visual XML query language which, coherently with the hierarchical XML data model, uses tree-shaped structures to express queries and transformations over XML documents. These structures are annotated to express selection predicates; explicit bindings between the nodes of such structures visualize the input/output mappings.XQuery and XSLT, the standard query and transformation languages for XML, happen to be too complex for most occasional or unskilled users who might need to specify queries, schema mappings, or document transformations, if they are only aware of the basics of the XML data model. The implementation of XQBE allows to generate the XQuery and XSLT translations of the visual queries, assisting the user in several aspects of the interaction (e.g. providing interactive access to schema information); therefore, XQBE provides an integrated environment where users can edit the visual queries and their textual counterparts, executing them on several engines. Alternating among different representations of the same query is valuable for training beginners, as we have experienced in our database courses.