Business Information Systems Workshops

The successful start of the scientific workshop on Applications of Knowledge-Based Technologies in Business (AKTB) last year in Poznan, inspired to call for the second time the researchers and practitioners, specialists and market analysts to share their research expertise and advanced knowledge in modeling innovative solutions for enterprise systems and processes, provide analytic insights and demonstrate experimental research results of implementing computational intelligence methods in various areas of business- related problems.

The CELESC R&D Management Systems is a case-based system for information management and retrieval associated with an ontological process of knowledge representation. The system was built to support R&D project management and was developed inside CELESC Company, to meet requirements of XML information standards of the National Agency for Electric Energy Companies (ANEEL). The database system has projects developed since 2001, inside CELESC. Developed for web environments, the system allows a wide knowledge diffusion of its content and results.

This article presents a method joining Support Vector Machines (SVM), genetic search and multivariate analysis for identification of bankrupt companies. This study proposed to join widely used Altman Z-Score with Support Vector Machines to create a classifier that might be used to evaluate and forecast possible bankrupt companies. A genetic search algorithm is employed for relevant attribute selection to reduce the dimensionality of data.

Several recent years have been marked by challenges to financial markets. It is especially applicable to real estate markets. The article analyses the development of prices in real estate market in the USA during last 35 years concentrating on the changes in the last decade. Employing the logistic theory of capital management, the authors identify the problematic stages of crises and to highlight the stages of their formation and problems occurred. The article emphasizes the problem of market capacity and sequential growth. The data is processed by using the system ‘Loglet Lab2’. Modeling reveals the main issues in market saturation.

Reuse of business process models is the act of designing business processes by using existing process models. Reuse of business process models has been considered as a way to reduce the cost of modeling business processes from scratch. In order to support reuse of process models, a critical mass of process models is required which justifies the effort of maintaining a process model repository. While there are several process modeling languages, no single language is widely accepted. So in order to make process models usable, the stored process models must be presented in a language understandable by users. The purpose of this work is to apply multi-criteria decision making to choose process representation format for a process model repository.

Adoption of advanced technology, improved access to real-time data, integrated people and organizations and changed work processes enable better and faster decision-making. However, the challenge is how to measure them, which becomes even more complex in new business areas that are not influenced by earlier experience. In this paper we propose a pragmatic decision analytic valuation method for monetary evaluation of integrated operations.

The main goal of the article is to explore methods of solving problem of the gaps, occurring during execution of enterprise process workflows due to lack of information for making unambiguous decisions in various stages of business process scenarios. The suggested method integrates application of computational intelligence methods for processing historical information of business processes and extracting scenarios used for their performance, evaluation of process risk and generating fuzzy rules for solving possible process gaps and leading to successful execution of the process workflow. The process risk and fuzzy rules modules register data of process modifications and solutions which were applied while executing business processes.

Enhancement of MDA process with Knowledge Base Subsystem is aimed to reduce risk of project failures caused by inconsistent user requirements caused by insufficient problem domain knowledge. The enhancement of IS development environment with Enterprise Knowledge Base is discussed in this article. The major parts of Knowledge Base Subsystem are Enterprise Meta-Model, Enterprise Model and transformation algorithms.

Motivated by a rising demand for feasible and practical decision aids this article relaxes the need for complete pairwise comparisons in Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based approaches regularly applied in multiple criteria decision making practice. We propose a method based on the

k

-walk procedure from Graph Theory to extract a weighted ranking profile from an incomplete pairwise comparison matrix offering increased flexibility and practicability to the user. Our simulation tests show relative advantages over Harker’s method. The connection into Graph Theory offers an understandable interpretation of weight vectors derived from either complete, incomplete, consistent or inconsistent pairwise comparison data.

The main task of this paper is to show the results of stock market trading strategy based on short term chart pattern. Proposed short term chart pattern is a trend following pattern and is relative to fractal formations and chaos theory. The proposed trading strategy consists of two steps: on the first step the stock screening algorithm is used to select volatile stocks in Nasdaq Biotechnology market; on the second step technical analysis and mathematical calculations for selected stocks are applied and profitability of strategy is calculated. The proposed trading strategy based on short term chart pattern was tested using historical data records from the USA Nasdaq Biotechnology market (2008-2010). The trading strategy applied in Biotechnology stock market had given higher returns if compared to the main USA stock market indexes (Dow Jones, S&P, Nasdaq).

Human resource strategy can emerge within a decentralized decision structure that gives managers autonomy to take responsive actions while overall strategic direction is considered within a strategic planning process. This study defines the concept of employee selection (especially strategic employee selection) and hypothesizes on the positive correlation between innovation characteristic in SME and value of strategic employee (the so called personnel usefulness function). An empirical study illustrates the importance of both elements in an integrative human resource strategy formation process particularly for firms operating in the international environments.

This paper introduces our work regarding the mining of decision activity logs generated by the users of a decision support system-like environment. We will show that a DSS can be modified in order to become “decision-aware. If the system offers support for all the data and information needs of the decision maker, how the user interacts with the software can provide us with a new perspective over the implicit and explicit knowledge employed in the decision process, as well as the decision patterns and strategies used for that decisional situation. All this valuable information will be stored as activity logs. Those logs need to be mined in order to build a graphical representation of the decision process. As proof-of-concept we focus on the enterprise loan contracting decision situation. We will show some of the models we created using several process mining algorithms and our own approach. Based on those models, we argue the new insights we can provide into the decision making process and the knowledge that is now explained and depicted as diagrams.

The paper presents analysis of the possibilities to implement some voice based informative services in public sector of Lithuania. The paper reveals the applications in the public sector where the implementation of voice based modality may contribute significantly to the convenience and the popularity of the service. Possible solutions for the cases when Lithuanian speech will be used as the main speech in the service are evaluated both from technological and economical point of view. Several solutions how the obstacles related with the insufficient recognition accuracy of the Lithuanian voice commands may be lessened are revealed also. It is shown that implementation of properly trained foreign language speech recognizer may achieve recognition accuracy of Lithuanian voice commands which is necessary for applications in public sector.

The article presents conceptual model and empirical research for evaluation of customer capital of the enterprise. The method is aimed not only for forecasting of turnover and return, but also for evaluating potential response to the enterprise efforts targeted for scoring customers and evaluation of stability of the customer capital. The compound index of customer capital is designed and tested by experimental research.

The article analyses the use of data mining technology for small businesses, which are not able to invest in information technologies but seeking to optimize business processes and use accumulated data effectively, is presented. A comparison of data mining tools is very important for choice an appropriate tool.

A contemporary challenge for enterprises is to keep up with the pace of changing business demands imposed on them in different ways. There is today an obvious demand for continuous improvement and alignment in enterprises but unfortunately many organisations don’t have proper instruments (methods, patterns, best practices etc.) to achieve this. Enterprise modelling and business process management are two areas belonging to a tradition where the mission is to improve business practice and business and IT alignment. In this tradition the alignment process usually is manifested in taking a business from one state into another improved state, i.e. a transformation of the business and its supporting IT into something that is regarded as better. A challenge in business and IT alignment is to move beyond this narrow focus on one tradition or technology. We need to be aware of and able to deal with a number of dimensions of the enterprise architecture and their relations in order to create alignment. Examples of such dimensions are: organisational structures, strategies, business models, work practices, processes, and IS/IT structures. Among the concepts that deserve special attention in this context is IT governance. An effective IT governance aligns IT investments with overall business priorities, determines who makes the IT decisions and assigns accountability for the outcomes. There are ordinarily three governance mechanisms that an enterprise needs to have in place, 1) decision-making structures, 2) alignment process, and 3) formal communications.

When is it appropriate to discuss the divergence of organizational and technological realms and based on which assumptions? Could the social and technical disconnection be merely a constructed phenomenon, and if so, what does design thinking has to offer towards the creation of aligned organizational and technological views? Drawing from these questions this paper argues that the two notions of organization and technology are both human artifacts with an intertwined and unfolding ontology. We base our argument inspired by i) structuration theory according to which organizational structures and technologies are mutually constituted and co-evolving elements, and, ii) a conceptualization of organizations and technologies as ‘epistemic objects’ with a lack in completeness of being. We finally discuss design thinking principles as a basis for an integrated reflection of the two notions hopping to invoke creative and constructive dialogue among communities of technologists, managers and academics alike.

Today, many enterprises use information systems to support their activities but as a rule these systems are heterogeneous and incompatible. When enterprises need to cooperate with each other, they have to overcome this heterogeneity and establish interaction between their information systems. Based on a case study from international business development, this paper analyzes principles and conditions for creating interaction between autonomous systems. Furthermore, an approach to interaction between heterogeneous information systems in the case study is presented, which is based on a service-oriented architecture and Web services. In this context, a business process model describes how the distributed autonomous systems should be used by companies in different countries to support establishment of business relationships. These systems have different data models, and use different industrial classifications. Our main contribution to research in the field of interaction between autonomous systems are (1) a proposal for principles to be taken into account when federating autonomous systems and (2) an experience report when putting these principles into practice in the case study presented.

How are companies managed today and what part does state-of-the-art business/IT alignment play? Executive information systems (EIS) should support top management in “managing a company.” But many executives complain that EIS bear little relevance to their management task. This article examines the role of business/IT alignment within a new-generation EIS architecture and contributes a business-driven model. A prototype demonstrates an instantiation of this approach. The findings are synthesized to seven recommendations on business/IT alignment that should lead to better EIS architecture.

The strategic role of IT and its significance throughout the organization increases in environments characterized by complexity, variety and change. Hence IT management must deal with uncertainties and with different, conflicting and ever changing demands. In this sense Enterprise Architecture is playing an increasingly important role in improving IT management practice. This paper presents architectural design principles that strive to create and maintain alignment in a dynamic and uncertain business environment. Two crucial architectural aspects will be highlighted: (1) the delineation of the information systems, (2) the choice of interoperability principle. A case from Swedish Industry is used to demonstrate the application of the principles. In the paper we argue that the choice of principles has an significant impact on operational as well as strategic alignment. The larger, heterogeneous, and dynamic the business are, the more crucial are the issues of information systems delineation and interoperability.

For many enterprises, it is of decisive strategic importance to optimize the internal information flow and to implement an efficient reuse of existing knowledge. Especially in knowledge-intensive industry and service sectors, information is a major factor in production processes, and knowledge reflects an important asset of the enterprise. Similarly, public organizations and governmental bodies are dependent on accurate and timely information supply for efficient and high quality processes and services. Intelligent information supply has become an important issue that is characterized by just-in-time, demand-oriented and context-sensitive information.

The success of information supply strongly depends on successful user adoption. This especially is the case for the integration of non-human information sources deriving from ubiquitous computing. To allow ordinary users to participate, there is a clear need for simple but yet powerful front-end technology. Therefore, we suggest leveraging existing and proven application patterns rather than building new concepts out of scratch. Especially Web 2.0 applications are designed for the management of millions of (human) networked information nodes and could be very useful in the context of Information Logistics. Beyond the Web 2.0 tool family, in particular microblogging could show a perfect match with Information Logistics scenarios due to its ad-hoc character and its simplicity. This paper discusses these possibilities and presents the vision of Ubiquitous Microblogging, which means a Twitter-like front-end for information from human and non-human information sources.

Semantic web technologies show great promise in usage scenarios that involve information logistics. This paper is an experience report on improving the semantic web ontology underlying an application used in expert finding. We use ontology design patterns to find and correct poor design choices, and align the application ontology to commonly used semantic web ontologies in order to increase the interoperability of the ontology and application. Lessons learned and problems faced are discussed, and possible future developments of the project mapped out.

The paper presents a collaboration platform with model-based configurable services. It is a part of a more general approach developed by the EU project MAPPER that enables distributed collaboration over adaptive knowledge-intensive engineering processes. In a model-configured infrastructure, active knowledge models (AKMs) of products and processes become the basis for user-composed services, tools and methodologies available to users in customisable workplaces. A multi-layered architecture that offers a powerful means for configuration of services for particular application areas has been described. The presented approach and the collaboration platform have been experimented with in a collaborative engineering use case in electronic industry that integrated two dispersed SMEs. Experiences learned are summarized.

The consideration of context information in physicians search for medical knowledge and information offers good prospects to improve the quality of the delivered search results from heterogeneous eResources. Within the scope of this contribution the authors introduce their information logistic approach towards a context-based information supply for physicians. Basically, this approach encloses a comprehensive context model, which is divided into the four sub models “process”, “clinical case”, “physician” and “environment”. The prototypical implementation of a context application uses an excerpt from the model. The application is based on a context middleware and was used as a basis for an empiric validation of the approach during practical tests and two laboratory experiments. The contribution concludes with an outlook on future needs for research regarding context-based information supply and information logistics in general.

The context for work presented in this paper is the field of information logistics and addressing the reduction of information overload. Among the approaches for reducing information overload, the concept of information demand patterns has been developed for capturing organizational knowledge on how to improve information supply. This paper investigates the use of information demand patterns (IDP) in higher education by performing an exercise with 22 students divided into 12 groups in a master course on information logistics. The intention is to explore whether the IDP structure reached a level of maturity to transfer it to actors outside the development team and whether it also can be applied for capturing information demand in general. The main result of the work is that the respondents participating in the exercise managed to produce information demand descriptions using the pattern structure, which indicates that they understood the structure as such and were able to apply it.

The paper offers an approach to self-organisation of resources of a smart environment for the purpose of taking joint resource actions to assist the people involved in a situation. The approach incorporates concepts of information and knowledge logistics and conforms to the idea of reducing information overflow by utilizing the paradigm of a demand-oriented information supply. For representation of the needs or demands of the people involved in the situation context model is used. The resources of the smart environment are represented by Web-services. Due to this representation self-organisation of the resources is replaced with that of the Web-services. The proposed approach, service-oriented architecture of the smart environment, and a protocol for Web-serves self-organisation are discussed in the paper.

Business metadata plays a crucial role in increasing the data quality of information systems. Despite its importance, business metadata is primarily discussed from a technical perspective, while its business value is scarcely addressed. Therefore, this article aims at contributing to the further development of existing design approaches by explicitly accounting for the use cases of business metadata. In the course of this article a classification of use cases will be developed, which can be utilized when identifying the respective informational requirements a business metadata system needs to satisfy. A banking case is presented that demonstrates how this conceptual model has successfully been applied in practice.

The 3

rd

Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology Workshop will be remembered as a successful event – both to the organizers as well as the workshop community. This time the workshop was held in Berlin on 3rd May 2010. The workshop was organized in conjunction with the 13

th

International Conference on Business Information Systems. We are now pleased to provide to readers the post-proceeding containing the accepted papers.

The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) is an XML Schema for representing theories and arguments (proofs) constructed from theories ESTRELLA Project (2008). A theory in LKIF consists of a set of axioms and defeasible inference rules. The language of individuals, predicate and function symbols used by the theory can be imported from an ontology represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Importing an ontology also imports the axioms of the ontology. All symbols are represented using Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs). Other LKIF files may also be imported, enabling complex theories to modularized.

In Australia, before a divorcing couple can have their case heard by the Family Court, they must undertake mediation. Thus it is useful to develop information technology tools to support negotiation and mediation in family law. Most negotiation support systems focus upon integrative bargaining. In doing so, they tend to ignore issues of fairness. In Australian Family Law, the interests of the children, as opposed to those of their parents/guardians, are paramount. We investigate the use of providing BATNAs and integrative bargaining in providing family mediation decision support. The discussion is highlighted with examples taken from the domain of Australian Family Law.

While

isomorphism

of knowledge representation has been recognized as important, particularly to maintenance in legal knowledge representation, the requirements of the maintenance process in general get less attention. Traceability from knowledge resources used in the organization to the sources of law used in their production is a central maintenance issue in administrative organizations. This paper explores a mediating knowledge representation for reconstruction of traces to sources of law and to implementation knowledge resources, that should be helpful for analysis of the impact of changing sources of law.

Ontology is a knowledge representation technique that can be applied in many areas such as information retrieval. Ontology construction is a tedious job and time consuming task for law experts. This paper proposes a system framework called ATOB that can automatically generate a seed ontology and extend the ontology using ant colony algorithm. Two ontologies are created by ATOB system which are succession law ontology and family law ontology. We compare the performance of these ontologies with the ontologies manually created by law experts in our previous system (TLOE) and found that ATOB provides satisfactory result.

In the last few years crucial issues like cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal knowledge discovery and extraction have been considered in theory and in practice. The availability of services allowing cross-language and cross-collection retrieval is a growing necessity. This paper focuses on the need to develop solutions for automatic, language-independent procedures to provide interoperability between mono/poly-lingual thesauri at national and European levels. This will guarantee sustainable and scalable services enabling to manage the multilingual complexity of the European Union legal context to be used for cross-language and cross-collection legal information retrieval. Wider use of the service can also be envisaged as support to legal translation services, as well as in general to promote integration and sharing of widespread and heterogeneous legal resources, providing new market opportunities for stakeholders to exploit the economic potential of public sector information in a multilanguage environment.

We present a work in progress report of our research on automatically analyzing German court decisions. For accessibility to information retrieval and text summarization processing, we show concepts of a parsing framework dealing with linguistic features of this genre. To cover these features, we first developed a description language inferred from content structure analysis presented before. The main aspect of this paper is the presentation of a graph-based parsing framework concept. The parser will be able to label the content structure of German court decisions.

We present an approach different from the classical framework of qualified electronic signatures that seem to offer much better properties regarding usability, costs, risk level as well as security in technical sense. Our approach is based on mediated signatures and chaining mechanisms that replace time stamping services.

The Ontojuris project consists of a multilingual system for legal information retrieval (IR) associated with an ontology editor. The system accepts queries in one language, and allows IR based on similarity of documents, written in one of several languages. The multilingual ontology editor works with the concept of Universal Words (UW´s). The UW´s are universal representations of things and objects, and it is developed inside the Universal Networking Language Project (UNL), allowing query expansion in a multilingual way. Query expansion can improve the searching process required by user, including additional terms which have similar meaning to the original query. In this study, we proposed a new expansion method which is based on domain ontology and UW´s, to achieve better performance for a multilingual IR. So, the Ontojuris project aims to facilitate access to information on legislation in the area of Intellectual Property Law, Consumer Rights and Electronic Law in the consortium formed by researches in Brazil, Chile, Spain and Argentina.