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This paper aims to present how iterative round‐trip modelling between two different business process modelling tools can be enabled on a conceptual level. Iterative round‐trip modelling addresses model transformations between high‐level business and executable process models, and how to maintain these transformations in change time. Currently, the development of these process models is supported by different tools. To the authors' best knowledge, no coherent collaborative tool environment exists that supports iterative round‐trip modelling.

This paper is primarily based on a literature review of state‐of‐the‐art business to IT transformations regarding business process modelling. The architecture of integrated information systems (ARIS) and Cordys tools are used as an example case in this research. ARIS is a business process analysis (BPA) tool suited for analyzing and designing business processes, while the execution and monitoring of these processes is allowed by Cordys, a business process management suite (BPMS). The theory is used for transforming between ARIS event‐driven process chains from the business perspective and business process modelling notation in Cordys from the IT perspective.

A conceptual framework is proposed to couple a BPA and BPMS tool for round‐trip business process modelling. The framework utilizes concepts from the model‐driven architecture for structurally addressing interoperability and model transformations. Ensuring iterative development with two tools requires traceability of model transformations.

In many organizations, BPA and BPMS tools are used for business process modelling. These are in practice often two different worlds, while they concern around the same business processes. Maintaining multiple versions of the same process models across two tools is a considerable task, as they often are subject to design changes. Interoperability between a BPA and BPMS tool will minimize redundant activities, and reduce business to IT deployment time.

This research provides a theoretical base for coupling a BPA and BPMS tool regarding iterative round‐trip modelling. It provides an overview of the current state‐of‐the‐art literature of business process modelling transformations, and what is necessary for maintaining interoperability between tools. The findings indicate what is expected in tool support for iterative development in business process modelling from analysis and design to execution.

Domain-specific process modeling has been proposed in the literature as a solution to several problems in business process management. The problems arise when using only the generic Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard for modeling. This language includes domain ambiguity and difficult long-term model evolution. Domain-specific modeling involves developing concept definitions, domain-specific processes and eventually industry-standard BPMN models. This entails a multi-layered modeling approach, where any of these artifacts 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 keep track of changes done and their potential impacts. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors use a multi-context systems-based approach to infer the impacts that changes may cause in the models; and alsothe authors incrementally map components of business process models to ontologies.

Advantages of the framework include: identifying conflicts/inconsistencies across different business modeling layers; expressing rich information on the relations between two layers; calculating the impact of changes taking place in one layer to the rest of the layers; and selecting incrementally the most appropriate semantic models on which the transformations can be based.

The authors consider this work as one of the foundational bricks that will enable further advances toward the governance of multi-layer business process modeling systems. Extensive usability tests would enable to further confirm the findings of the paper.

The approach described here should improve the maintainability, reuse and clarity of business process models and in extension improve data governance in large organizations. The approaches described here should improve the maintainability, reuse and clarity of business process models. This can improve data governance in large organizations and for large collections of processes by aiding various stakeholders to understand problems with process evolutions, changes and inconsistencies with business goals.

This paper fulfills an identified gap to enabling semantically aided domain–specific process modeling.

This paper aims to offer an innovative and original solution methodology proposal to the problem of arbitrary complex multiscale (ACM) ontological uncertainty management (OUM). The solution is based on the postulate that society is an ACM system of purposive actors within continuous change. Present social problems are multiscale-order deficiencies, which cannot be fixed by the traditional hierarchical approach alone, by doing what one does better or more intensely, but rather by changing the way one does it.

This paper treasures several past guidelines, from McCulloch, Wiener, Conant, Ashby and von Foerster to Bateson, Beer and Rosen’s concept of a non-trivial system to arrive to an indispensable and key anticipatory learning system (ALS) component for managing unexpected perturbations by an antifragility approach as defined by Taleb. This ALS component is the key part of our new methodology called “computational information conservation theory (CICT) OUM” approach, based on brand new numeric system behavior awareness from CICT.

To achieve an antifragility behavior, next generation system must use new CICT OUM-like approach to face the problem of multiscale OUM effectively and successfully. In this manner, homeodynamic operating equilibria can emerge out of a self-organizing landscape of self-structuring attractor points in a natural way.

This paper presents a relevant contribution toward a new post-Bertalanffy Extended Theory of Systems. Due to its intrinsic self-scaling properties, this system approach can be applied at any system scale: from single quantum system application development to full system governance strategic assessment policies and beyond.

The new post-Bertalanffy Extended Theory of Systems Framework allows, for the first time, social, biological and biomedical engineering ideal system categorization levels, from an operational perspective, to be matched exactly to practical system modeling interaction styles, with no paradigmatic operational ambiguity and information loss.

Even new social and advanced health and wellbeing information application can successfully and reliably manage higher system complexity than contemporary ones, with a minimum of design specification and less system final operative environment knowledge at design level. The present paper offers for discussion an innovative solution proposal for the complex society and big government modeling and management approach.

Specifically, advanced wellbeing applications, high reliability organization, mission critical project system, very low technological risk and crisis management system can benefit highly from our new methodology called CICT OUM approach and related techniques. This paper presents a relevant contribution toward a new post-Bertalanffy Extended Theory of Systems. Due to its intrinsic self-scaling properties, this system approach can be applied at any system scale: from a single quantum system application development to full system governance strategic assessment policies and beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual model for coding and dissemination of data associated with historical photographic archives. The model is based on Linked Open Data technology and seeks to exhaustively represent the most relevant characteristics for the tasks of contextualization of the documentary groupings and units, management, document retrieval, dissemination and sharing of data about the historical photographs.

An OWL ontology, called Ontophoto, was constructed following an adaptation of the methodology proposed by Uschold and Gruninger and Gruninger and Fox. The ontology was implemented using Protégé 5.5 software. Next a Graph DB® graph database application (Ontotext) was created to generate a query system based on the SPARQL language. To validate the consistency and effectiveness of the model and ontology, a competency questions methodology has been applied using a sample from the Skogler photographic archive.

The model facilitates the generation of systems for dissemination and retrieval of iconographic data for historical research, overcoming some of the limitations with respect to the design of methods of content and contextual information representation for heritage photographic archives.

This study is based on a sample. Future work should consider the implementation of the model on the totality of a photographic collection.

This paper presents a comprehensive ontological model that allows the creation of distributed systems of knowledge representation, which can be queried through SPARQL language.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast a customer‐focused service process diagram tool (blueprinting) with an organizational‐focused process diagram tool (business process modeling notation, or BPMN).

Using a hotel stay as an example, the paper presents both a service blueprint and a BPMN diagram. The authors then explicitly discuss the similarities, differences resulting from an ontological comparison of service blueprints and BPMN, and show where the two tools can be complementary.

The authors have found that one similarity is that service blueprinting segments processes into parts that are similar to BPMN's idea of swimlanes. However, the swimlanes in service blueprinting separate customer actions, customer‐facing employees’ actions and functions, and back‐stage functions, actors, and information systems, thereby effectively mandating certain swimlanes for the purpose of analyzing points of contact between the firm and a customer. Another similarity is that service blueprinting deliberately differentiates between different functional areas and roles within each area to highlight, and IT systems. But it does this to make clear where actions move across organizational boundaries to avoid damaging service support, and also to explain to back‐office staff their role in supporting on‐stage customer interactions. Unlike BPMN, service blueprinting has physical evidence as front‐stage indicators to customers of service quality and to constrain customer actions by carefully designing the servicescape.

A limitation is that the paper only uses one example (a hotel stay).

The comparison provides service managers with guidance as to how to use the two tools interactively.

Firms, to represent business processes, are using BPMN in increasing numbers. Knowing how BPMN supports and undermines service blueprinting is important, because service to customers is the ultimate goal for all firms. Therefore, representing service processes requires the parts of service blueprints to be supported in BPMN. Business process outsourcing adds further urgency for the need to adequately represent the parts of service processes in BPMN.

The purpose of this study is to propose a framework for extracting medical information from the Web using domain ontologies. Patient–Doctor conversations have become prevalent on the Web. For instance, solutions like HealthTap or AskTheDoctors allow patients to ask doctors health-related questions. However, most online health-care consumers still struggle to express their questions efficiently due mainly to the expert/layman language and knowledge discrepancy. Extracting information from these layman descriptions, which typically lack expert terminology, is challenging. This hinders the efficiency of the underlying applications such as information retrieval. Herein, an ontology-driven approach is proposed, which aims at extracting information from such sparse descriptions using a meta-model.

A meta-model is designed to bridge the gap between the vocabulary of the medical experts and the consumers of the health services. The meta-model is mapped with SNOMED-CT to access the comprehensive medical vocabulary, as well as with WordNet to improve the coverage of layman terms during information extraction. To assess the potential of the approach, an information extraction prototype based on syntactical patterns is implemented.

The evaluation of the approach on the gold standard corpus defined in Task1 of ShARe CLEF 2013 showed promising results, an F-score of 0.79 for recognizing medical concepts in real-life medical documents.

The originality of the proposed approach lies in the way information is extracted. The context defined through a meta-model proved to be efficient for the task of information extraction, especially from layman descriptions.

While personalisation and service choice remains a central plank of the Labour Government's policies in health and social care, there is a growing evidence base confirming that ethnic minority groups, are disadvantaged as service users in the UK. Building on some baseline data collected in 2000 and 2003/04, our recent research (Jutlla & Moreland, 2007) has reaffirmed the difficulties that Asian carers have in accessing services when caring for a relative with dementia.While such access data is important, we wish to move beyond the demographic aspects to consider the existential realities (the ontology) of the lives and cultures of those in minority ethnic groups. This paper consequently discusses the diversity and complexity of migration patterns among the Sikh community living in Wolverhampton. The paper conceptualises some of the ways in which different migration experiences and the realities of daily life influence the perceptions, experiences and patterns of care among migrant Sikh carers in Wolverhampton caring for an older person with dementia. The paper thus explores the thesis that the Sikh community is not a homogeneous group; and that the diversity and differences within the Sikh community can have important implications for care. Taking a biographical narrative approach to fieldwork, the relevant factors to be considered include: the carer's country of origin; their migration route and reasons for migration; their age at migration and the cultural experiences of the carers and their communities both in the UK and India.

This paper aims to propose a set of quantitative statistical indicators for measuring the scientific relevance of research groups and researchers, based on high-impact open-access digital production repositories.

An action research (AR) methodology is proposed in which research is associated with the practice; research informs practice and practice is responsible for informing research in a cooperative way. AR is divided into five phases, beginning with the definition of the problematic scenario and an analysis of the state of the art and ending with conducting tests and publishing the results.

The proposed indicators were used to characterise group and individual output in a major public university in south-eastern Mexico. University campuses hosting a large number of high-impact research groups. These indicators were very useful in generating information that confirmed specific assumptions about the scientific production of the university.

The data used here were retrieved from Scopus and open access national repository of Mexico. It would be possible to use other data sources to calculate these indicators.

The system used to implement the proposed indicators is independent of any particular technological tool and is based on standards for metadata description and exchange, thus facilitating the easy integration of new elements for evaluation.

Many organisations evaluate researchers according to specific criteria, one of which is the prestige of journals. Although the guidelines differ between evaluation bodies, relevance is measured based on elements that can be adapted and where some have greater weight than others, including the prestige of the journal, the degree of collaboration with other researchers and individual production, etc. The proposed indicators can be used by various entities to evaluate researchers and research groups. Each country has its own organisations that are responsible for evaluation, using various criteria based on the impact of the publications.

The proposed indicators assess based on the importance of the types of publications and the degree of collaborations. However, they can be adapted to other similar scenarios.

The business process modeling notation (BPMN) is an increasingly important standard for process modeling and has enjoyed high levels of attention in business practice. In this paper, experiences are shared from several research projects investigating the uptake and user acceptance of BPMN by analysts world‐wide. This personal viewpoint aims to offer a number of implications for business process management (BPM) practice and seeks to stimulate and guide further research and other developments in this area.

This paper offers a personal viewpoint based on the experiences and findings gathered from survey research and interviews on the use of BPMN. While details on research execution are mostly omitted, references are provided to guide the interested reader to the methodology used in the original studies.

First, statistics are provided on the usage of BPMN by process modelers world‐wide. Amongst others, it is shown that the high interest in BPMN has created a massive demand for BPM education and training. Second, a number of usage problems related to the practice of process modeling with BPMN are described and suggestions are provided as to how organizations have developed workarounds for these problems. Third, it is suggested that BPMN is over‐engineered and more insights into practical usage are needed for future development.

While being based on empirical research, a limitation of this paper is the lack of detail about research execution; however, references are provided. The paper offers a personal viewpoint on the state of current and future practice of process modeling and discusses a range of implications for future research.

The paper describes a number of commonly encountered pitfalls when modeling processes with BPMN. It also provides directions for the organizational implementation and future development of process modeling as well as implications for various BPMN stakeholders.

This viewpoint is derived from some of very few empirical studies on the usage of BPMN specifically and BPM standards generally.

This study aims to explore the relation between barriers and project sustainability by adding competencies in the mediating role.

The study uses a mediation model including project sustainability as the dependent variable, sustainability barriers as the independent variable and project managers' sustainability competencies as the mediator variable. Data were gathered from project managers, executive teams, and experts/advisors, working in Egyptian higher education enhancement projects (HEEPs) using self-administered questionnaires; the total number collected was 159, representing a response rate of 93.5 percent. Correlations and multiple regression analysis were employed to analyze the mediation impact of project manager's sustainability competencies.

The results indicate that sustainability competencies mediate the relation between barriers to sustainability and project sustainability. Sustainability competencies facilitate project achievements, and the sustainability and future expansion of these achievements. The analysis suggests that “continuous competencies” are extremely important, more so than “self-competencies”.

This study was undertaken at the level of the projects management unit in the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education, which manages the HEEPs.

The analysis helps to understand the complex and nuanced nature of the projects; these are distinguished when the author considers the different practices.

This study offers two principal contributions: first, a guideline for the development, measurement, and application of an uncommon concept of project sustainability; second, a concept of project managers' sustainability competencies and barriers to sustainability.