Business process management employs process models and event logs to represent the behavior of the information systems under study. Traditional case-centric notions consider the order of activities and events in isolated process instances. The emerging field of object-centric processes challenges this assumption by putting objects in the center. Object-centric process mining and modeling approaches identify the structure of co-evolving data objects that influence the behavior of an information system to provide a comprehensive view of the system behavior. Object-centricity has been investigated independently in process modeling and in process mining, which resulted in the coexistence of seemingly contradictory assumptions and definitions. As a community effort, this research manifesto relates and aligns existing terminologies, definitions, and perspectives to provide a common ground for current and future research in object-centric business process management. Based on the current state of research, we propose a conceptualization that sets process models and event logs in relation to the information system’s behavior and the execution data it generates. The conceptualization aims at aligning different terminologies and, thus, providing a basis to model and analyze behavioral characteristics. Building on this common ground, we identify open research challenges along the most relevant research areas in object-centric process management. For each research area, its current status is investigated and an outline of the most relevant research challenges is presented.

Lack of shared understanding among stakeholders is a commonly cited drawback in enterprise architecture development. Stakeholders need to have shared understanding of requirements and principles for an enterprise architecture, and the extent to which the resultant architecture addresses their concerns. However, existing approaches for enterprise architecture development lack adequate capabilities for managing aspects associated with creating shared understanding among stakeholders. Although such aspects can be largely managed by approaches for collaborative decision making and soft systems thinking, these approaches lack details on the enterprise architecture process and its products. Therefore, this paper explores ways of mutually diminishing these gaps through adopting situational method engineering, to guide the development of a situational method for enabling stakeholders to acquire shared understanding of requirements for an enterprise architecture. The situational method presented herein is a component of a broader method for supporting collaboration between stakeholders and architects during enterprise architecture creation. Although the latter was successfully evaluated in 6 enterprises, it exhibited highest performance scores in two enterprises after it was amended with the situational method. Therefore, this paper also presents key findings from evaluating the situational method in the two agencies that are located in Uganda.

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Defining complex system dynamics (SD) models in complex organizational settings is hard. This is so because the numbers of variables to consider are many and the question of causation is complicated to untangle. Second, SD models are ambiguous and hard to conceptualize. In this paper, we explore the use of a domain modeling method object-role modeling (ORM) in the process of developing SD models. We do so, because domain modeling methods help to identify relationships among entities within the scope of the problem domain and provide a structural view of the domain. The addition of a domain modeling method to the process of developing SD models is to improve SD model conceptualization, enable transformation and reuse of information plus underpin SD with a domain modeling method that allows creation of database. To realize this, we come up with a procedure in our overall research which we refer to as grounded system dynamics (GSD) a combination of ORM and SD. To reason about the combination of SD with a domain modeling method (ORM), we identify and evaluate relationships between their constructs. Basing on the identified relations, ORM to stock and flow diagram (SFD) steps are defined and applied to a real-life case study national medical stores (NMS) situated in Uganda. On completion, we draw conclusions.

Gartner advises that for enterprise architecture development to be successful, it is vital that enterprise architects ensure effective communication and also form virtual teams that create and agree on enterprise architecture content. One of the ways to achieve this is to enforce Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) during enterprise architecture creation. Guided by Design Science, we are developing a method referred to as Collaborative Evaluation of (Enterprise) Architecture Design Alternatives (CEADA) to enable CDM during enterprise architecture creation. The method attempts to resolve challenges in enterprise architecting that are caused by ineffective collaboration between enterprise architects and organizational stakeholders. Requirements for CEADA have been defined based on the causality analysis theory, the generic decision-making process, enterprise architecture frameworks (and literature), and the CDM theory. In addition, Collaboration Engineering has been used to design a collaboration process to address these requirements. Models describing the requirements and the design of the collaboration process, have been evaluated using the analytical, experimental, and observational methods. This paper discusses the implications of findings from these evaluations and presents the validated requirements for realizing CDM in enterprise architecture creation. Thus, this research generally attempts to strengthen enterprise architecting guidelines with collaborative activities, so as to enable effective execution of collaboration-dependent tasks.

The amount of information available to us via the Web has increased enormously over the last few years. Even more, it seems that we are more and more dependent on this Web information in our day to day lives. Often we retrieve this information by querying the Web: data resources found on the web may provide the information that we are looking for. This implies that the Web may be seen as an information market: authors supply information and searchers may find it. In this article we present a formal reference model for the syntactic aspects of the information market. We explore the information landscape using a modeling approach. An important part of this model is a (syntactic) framework for transformations, which allows us to deal with the heterogeneity of the data resources found on the Web. Last but not least, we attempt to give an outline how our model may lead to a better understanding of how information is supplied via the Web. For this we use an example from the field of information retrieval.

Traditionally, information retrieval aims to find information carriers, such as documents, that best match some query or some other (intentional) description of a searcher's information need. In this article, we take the approach that searchers turn to an information retrieval system with the aim of finding several alternatives that completely satisfy their (complex) information need. In other words, searchers expect the retrieval system to help them in covering their information need, rather than merely providing them with a myriad of hopefully relevant information carriers. Ideally, the system should respond by advising one or more packages of information carriers with the requested cumulative effect. This also enables searchers to better trade off between the costs of acquiring and reading/internalizing information carriers versus the expected informational benefits. This article focuses on a theory that aims to clarify the underlying problem area. The theory may consequently be used to enhance information retrieval systems in general and teaching and learning systems in particular, with abilities to better cover a searcher's information need. In the theory presented, we also cater to the fact that searchers may be in different mental moods. The consequence of searchers being in different moods is that information carriers are processed differently. Identifying this influence gives the opportunity to advise users according to their specific moods. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 1155–1188, 2007.

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The Internet has led to an increase in the quantity and diversity of information available for searching. Furthermore, users are bombarded by a constant barrage of electronic messages in the form of e-mail, faxes, etc. This has led to a plethora of search engines, “intelligent” agents, etc., that aim to help users in their quest for relevant information, or shield them against irrelevant information. All these systems aim to identify the potentially relevant information in among a large pool of available information. No unifying underlying theory for information discovery systems exists as yet. The aim of this article is to provide a logic-based framework for information discovery, and relate this to the traditional field of information retrieval. Furthermore, the often ignored user receives special emphasis. In information discovery, a good understanding of a user's (sometimes hidden) needs and beliefs is essential. We will develop a logic-based approach to express the mechanics of information discovery, while the pragmatics are based on an analysis of the underlying informational semantics of information carriers and information needs of users.

Provides a general theory for evolving information systems. This theory makes a distinction between the underlying information structure at the conceptual level, its evolution on the one hand, and the description and semantics of operations on the information structure and its population on the other hand. The main issues within this theory are object typing, type relatedness and identification of objects. In terms of these concepts, we propose some axioms on the well-formedness of evolution. In this general theory, the underlying data model is a parameter, making the theory applicable for a wide range of modelling techniques, including object-role modelling and object-oriented techniques.