Having a PhD Strategy (Part Two)

This is the second part of my reaction to this post by Kai, a fellow PhD Student at Blekinge TH and Ericsson AB. I had already introduced his blog and you can find the previous part in the previous post on this blog. In this post he reports among others about two other courses he has to take besides from software productivity. I will try to shortly analyze what he wrote about scientific publications and statistical methods.

About scientific publications, what interested me is that they get to study scientometrics. Scientometrics, according to Kai, are the methods used to assess the relevance and importance of journals and scientific conferences. If you have worked as a researcher you must know that not all scientific conferences, workshops, symposia, journals and all sorts of scholarly transactions are equal. They surpass each other in terms of popularity, reach, perceived quality and influence on the scientific community. Using Scientometrics, the impact factors of journals are established, which helps the researcher to select where he wants his papers to be published. as Kai simply expresses it: if you get a paper accepted on one of the journals with the highest impact factors for your community and area of research, then " this increases your reputation as a scientist in the area". But logically, the difficulty to get a paper accepted at one of these conferences grows with their impact factor.

What they learn in this course is to asses the impact factors of target journals and conferences, the major scientists (what my supervisor calls immediate research community), to come up with a strategy of publication and to make a review of papers. I guess the latter concerns papers that have been accepted at famous scholarly transactions or that have been written by members of the major scientists in the community.

Knowing the major scientists in the community is very important. First of all you get to know the most important directions of research, and you get to know the most important results already achieved. So you get a lot quicker to know the state of the art of the area you are working on. Also studying the references used by these scientists can help you know the foundations of your research area that you may want to read for a solid and fundamental understanding of current state of the art results. these scientists are the ones that publish the most articles and the ones at the most important transactions. These scientists normally also show you at which journals and conferences papers tackling related topics can be published and which ones are the most relevant.

The second course are statistical methods. Now, like every computer scientist I have had my share of statistical mathematics. Actually more, due to the emphasis put onto mathematics and the additional statistics options I took at my engineering school, the ENSIMAG, Grenoble. But this is not what Kai is talking about. He specifically says that they take a course dedicated to learn how to use statistics to evaluate and analyze data gathered during research (especially in software engineering, the use of case studies as qualitative analysis tools is widely done, as I can see it from the work of Sebastian). Such use cases and the accompanying statistical analysis can be of great use when tackling one of the last steps of a PhD, which is evaluating your results. The course is based on concrete problems, in 5 seminars.

The goal of these two posts was to give an idea about how a structured PhD at a university (at least partly) takes on the harsh project of a dissertation, and the tools PhD students get to learn and to use. In a totally industrial PhD, you have to try to go as structured as possible with the tools that you have. That means you shouldn't expect to have time, resources to learn or mentors who will teach you how to optimally get on with your PhD. You are in quite some extent an auto-didact, a multi-disciplinary researcher and necessarily one with extended curiosity. The desire to work in a highly structured way and the ability to combine several sources of information, from areas that do not necessarily have much to do with your direct area of research, is a must. being open to learn from the techniques of others and to get the best out of all who you meet or you read about can only make your PhD better.

I hope that my two small analyses have helped better explain what an industrial PhD is about. I will write some other posts about this, since I have quite some opinions to share concerning the topic.

Marwane El Kharbili

Having a PhD Strategy (Part One)

This is my reaction to this post by Kai, a fellow PhD Student at Blekinge TH and Ericsson AB. I had already introduced his blog.
In this post he reports about his (at the time he wrote the post) next steps for the PhD, He lists three courses he has to take at the university and explains ho he wants to approach the PhD Thesis.

Kai explains that he is going to do what is called a "Systematic Literature Review" (SLR. A systematic literature review is different from a normal Literature Review (LR) in the following points:

1. Allows to analyze the current state of knowledge about a whole scientific Area, such as Software productivity (Kai's example) or Compliance Management (my example).
2. It is easier to see what has been done in an area and what hasn't been done yet.
3. It is easier to argue why a PhD Student took a certain direction, and why this direction of research will bring outcomes which are useful to the scientific community.
4. It also easier to motivate the use of certain methods, tools or approaches.
5. it typically covers a way wider scientific scope than a normal SOTA (State Of The Art) review since it doesn't seek to focus on a certain problematic as an efficiency criteria.

But the main difference resides in the following quote from Kai's blog:

• "Systematic means that one has to document search strategy (keywords, search strings, scientific databases), paper selection criteria, paper evaluation criteria, how to synthesize the findings of the identified studies and so forth."

So the main and real difference to a normal SOTA is the strategy. Strategy in the sense that you'll have to select what you are looking for, in terms of setting keywords and search strings, and where to look for references. Moreover, the selection of papers returned has also got to be documented in the strategy. the final part of the strategy being the specification of the LR's results analysis and synthesis. I imagine the last point means that you would have to define a set of dimensions/axes on which you would want to project the results of your research, in order to get what is relevant for you from the LR. One of the main deliverables after this Systematic LR is a taxonomy of the domain of research and solid material for one (or maybe even) several papers. These papers are an important way of synthesizing results of an SLR because they are a way of consolidating the SLR results along one or several axes of research and because they are of high utility to other researchers. Thus, quality SLR papers have their place in highly regarded research Journals. They are also an archived and extensible knowledge basis of the domain. An SLR also makes it easier for the PhD student to later write related sections in research papers, so the big overhead of conducting an SLR can become a good investment.

I was surprised. I had never heard of the clear specification of a Literature Review (LR) strategy. of course you have always your own strategy when conducting one, but it is only "in your head" and your are the only one who knows what you are really looking for. In addition, no one would bother to describe an LR´s strategy because it would not be of a direct use for the expected outcome of the LR. So I was very intrigued. I think that in the scope of a PhD Thesis, dressing strong, clear and most importantly far-reaching fundamentals for the dissertation is a requirement for the thesis. That's why I am really convinced of the utility of a Systematic Literature review (SLR).

The most interesting in this is that I have noticed my non-intended attempt at the beginning of my PhD to do the same for my Thesis. For example, my attempts to have a taxonomy of the domain were in the form of complex mind-maps. Unfortunately , Minds Maps do not scale wekll with complex research domains, you will need a structured approach using several mind maps on several layers of the same domain and use hyperlinks between the mind maps. But I thought (mostly due to comments from colleagues and my entourage) that I shouldn't go for it because it is just a waste of time and that I should focus a lot more on certain topics. Knowing my tendency to tackle a lot wider range of reources to solve one problem (which I call the Sponge Effect (SE) which I will come to later in this Blog), in an attempt to let no information escape my research I thought I had to stop it. But this is not the main reason.

The real reason is that doing a PhD in 3 years necessitates extremely focused work on getting results for a well defined problem. The main fear of a PhD student is not to be able to fully understand the problems he has to deal with and to need a lot more years to conduct his research than intended. This is the real reason why my working method has been to cluster the domain I am working on in sub-domains, and studying one of these sub-domains fully in order to achieve some results for this sub-domain. My strategy is to examine the results I get from my research on this first target sub-domain in comparison to the other sub-domains afterwards. And thus to be able to get a more global overview on my first intended target PhD Domain by criticizing, completing, correcting and extending initial results. Whether 3 years are enough for this, I really doubt. But hope keeps alive :D

Marwane El Kharbili

Learn Project Management in 15 Minutes

This is the title of the free offer by Bar de Baas, the owner of my preferred project management website, SoftwareProjects.Org, actually the only one I have selected the RSS feed of and bookmarked because of the quality of the content. The title sounds like one of those hit and flashy larketing slogans for cheap books. But this shouldn't drive you in an error, underestimating the author and hos website might be a big one. The page to learn project management in 15 minutes contains three videos that'll introduce you to the conceptions of the author about project management. Bas de Baar also has several books to the topics and many many posts on the topic on his dedicated website. I am sure you'll enjoy some pretty entertaining and informative views on project management.

Marwane El Kharbili

Another argument for internal controls

I stumbled on this post on the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) life blog about implementing controls and Segregation of Duty (SoD). Although the post is quite old (19.05.2007), I felt it contained important points that I wanted to report on.

First of all the post gives another argumentation for the need for controls (for me, the need for policies can be justified in a similar way). The authors reports on experience with controls and SoD. He observes two problems in companies:

• An employee having too much responsibilities can be tempted to diminish the quality of his work, either by frauding the realization of his tasks because of improper supervision or by simply not being ready to deliver the performance that is expected from him. Not being able to discover and control these discrepancies is certainly a big leak in a company's internal procedures. This point related to SoD controls.
• The second problem according to [1] is that there is a inherent risk in companies, and that is of continuously forgetting about the most important things to do and concentrating on the most urgent things to do. He makes a parallel between our own lives and companies. We tend to give a higher priority to urging tasks that have to be done and neglect what is really important, although we know that it is. Example: I know that it is important to control the quality of the development of an application that is being developed in India by providing and testing adequate test data. the problem is that at the same time, I have to deliver reports to the management about project planning and expenses for development projects for the region. I will eventually forget about the first task and accept the delivered product because of no time to test it. The same thing happens to companies when it is about designing internal controls.

The author in [1] gives a simple tip to follow when proceeding to the design of SoD controls. For each risk-related task or activity, ask the question: "If I make an error in my work, will someone downstream of me detect it before it becomes a major issue for management and shareholders to read about?" ([1]). I like this formulation because it uncovers the underlying view on tasks as processes. Business processes are actually the place where you should start looking for your controls to be defined. They give you the necessary overview, perspective and documentation o your real activities.

so these are two points coming from the reality of the business. Although most companies starting to struggle with compliance management do so because of the legal pressure applied on them, taking such concerns int o account will eventually make its place, when companies understand the value they get out of internal controls because they allow them to actively manage risks and avoid unexpected failures of business processes.

Marwane El Kharbili.

[1] Explaining Segregation of Duties. SOX Life Blog Post. http://www.insidesarbanesoxley.com/soxlife/2007/05/explaining-segregation-of-duties.asp.

An online community for BPEL

You can find it here. A community around BPEL hosted by the OASIS, sponsored by BEA and IBM.

On the site you will find a knowledge WIKI, Forums, News, Events, Products, Job Offers and Blogs.Documentation and white papers are there to be found too. I discovered the site accidentally because they put my Blog on their blogroll. I applied for an account and got the RSS feed on my feed burner (integrated in my Flock browser). For the moment I haven't found much on the website in terms of blogs but it is clearly a recent site and it needs time to mature and grow. I will make some advertisement for the site in my network and try to get some poeple working with BPEL to post on the site.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Kai's PhD Blog from Sweden

Another link to a PhD blog here, after the one about Sebastian's. This one is by Kai, a friend of Sebastian. I don't know him personnally, but I have found his blog interesting. He does hos promotion at both the Blekinge Institute of Technology and Ericsson AB, so he's in an industrial PhD program too. He tackles questions of software engineering. so drop by and leave a nice comment :D

Marwane El Kharbili.

Have you got a PhD Blog too?

I had previously registered my blog on PhDWeblogs.net. The idea behind this is to make the blog accessible to people also doing a PhD or just simply having interest in research, who do not necessarily share the same interests I have in computer science and economics. Last week I stumbled upon this other website, which looks like way more accessible and better done: http://www.wissenschafts-cafe.net/. Apart from having an very appealing name, the site covers several disciplines and offers a number of services to bloggers. You can enter a description and a link to your blog, and make it accessible from the website to other people interested in what you are doing. I even got the hard bloggin' scientist sticker of the website's creator on my blog.

Have fun!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Is my Blog about BPEL?

Well, I might suprise you by saying among other things of course, but BPEL is certainly a topic of interest to me. yes! This question is motivated by the fact that I discovered that my blog was listed on BPEL.XML as a blog dealing with BPEL. I was surprised and pleased at the same time. You can see the whole list of blogs here, if you are interested.

It is not because BPEL like BPM, web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, SOA and other acronyms And this for many reasons has become a piece of jewelry that every blog can afford and has to wear in order to attract some readers. BPEL is a de facto standard for business process execution languages. This itself is a reason enough. All technical BPM vendors I know of support BPEL. In ARIS too BPEL is supported (Modeling and transformations from business process modeling notations like EPC and BPMN for example) in ARIS (e.g. SOA Architect). Designing Business Process Models with the background idea that these are destined to be transformed into BPEL is fundamentally different from utterly designing BP models on the business level. A whole set of additional constraints become necessary, on what the modeler is allowed to model.

Additionally, the ultimate goal of process transformations, is to achieve the ability of propagating all the models information and data you define for business processes to the execution level, where processes really take place. This would show the strength and power of such transformations. Simply because they form a transport channel of the business requirements and logic from the business level to the execution level, where the modeled and incepted added value is really realized. Every bit of information (your business system's entropy, if you will) you lose on the way to the execution system is a loss for the business.

These are the reasons why I think that although separation between BP modeling and BP execution is necessary for the sake of business, being really careful about what happens with BPEL and paying attention at how it could influence BPM is crucial.

Marwane El Kharbili.

ARIS Blog is Launched!

On the 18th of April 2008, our own blog on ARIS and related technologies has been launched. You can find it here: http://www.aris.com/blog. The blog is maintained by experts in the many areas the IDS Scheer is active in. You will find articles about governance, risk and compliance, business rules, BPM, SOA, Process Intelligence and controlling, and of course general topics around ARIS. This is not another marketing initiative, you will really find useful information on this one. Posts do not only relate to IDS's products, more to the technologies around it, our experience in BPM, to ARIS and to the topics that are relevant to the market. So make sure you don't miss on this one, get yourself subscribed to the Rss feed and come discuss with us your point of view on the topics we are writing about.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Sebastian's PhD Blog

A quick link to Sebastian's PhD blog here. Sebastian is also a researcher and an engineer here at the IDS Scheer working on his PhD too. Sebastian started his PhD a little more than a year and a half earlier than me, and thus tutored me during the first couple of months of my Phd by providing me with tips and introducing me to the research projects we are working on. Sebastian is now in the last sprint phase of his PhD. He is working on nicely finishing and packaging his dissertation and writing the final document. I wish him lots of luck and lots of energy in this last phase, which is the most intensive and tiring phase of a PhD, both mentally and physically.

In his blog, Sebastian discusses a number of subjects, quite various I have to say, which gives a little insight into his interests. You'll find PhD and research related posts, posts about topics of interest such as SOA, and technical posts. You'll also find some posts about quite different things such as medicine, tech or trip reports such as the one about the Kilimanjaro ascension.

It is also accessible through the permalink in my blogroll list. So make sure you have checked this out.

Marwane El Kharbili

PhD Thesis

I am an international cotutelle PhD student enrolled at both the University of Luxemburg and the University of Osnabrück (Germany), as part of a collaboration program between both universities. My area of research is software engineering and I am particularly interested in developing a method and language for regulatory compliance modeling and verification. For more details about my research interests and contributions have a look at my research page.

I am writing my thesis under the supervision of:

• Professor Pierre Kelsen: Model Driven Engineering (MDE) Group, Laboratory for Advanced Software Systems (LASSY), Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC), University of Luxemburg.
• Professor Elke Pulvermüller: Software Engineering Group, Faculty for mathematics and computer Science, University of Osnabrück.

Previously to this, I was working for the IDS Scheer AG in the ARIS Research department. I was involved in international research projects on semantic BPM also tackling compliance management issues. During this period I authored and co-authored several scientific publications (see my publications page). I was also involved in the design of the business rule management solution of the ARIS platform for business process management.

I submitted my research proposal to Professors Pierre Kelsen and Elke Pulvermüller on October 2008. The proposal got accepted during the year 2009 and I officially started working on my thesis on August 2009. My research on compliance in business process management had already begun druing my duty at the ARIS Research in June 2007.

Research

Research Interests

Summary of PhD research

Business process management (BPM) is a core research area in information systems. In particular, the problem of adequate and precise modeling of semantically rich enterprise structure and behavior, as well as the problem of compliance management with regulations are challenges on which I focus in my research. My dissertation provides a formal and model driven framework for covering the regulatory compliance lifecycle in BPM. Policies are used for modeling compliance and model-checking techniques are used for verifying compliance.

Research Vision
The vision of an intelligent, real-time and adaptive enterprise is what drives my research. Therefore the study of enterprise modeling and in particular of business processes is central. However, the big scale and the speed at which data is produced and needs to be processed by information systems strongly challenges current practices and will push the limits of How we make our Information Systems (IS) and What we make them do it. I do believe that the adequate use of carefully engineered business policies and rules, complex event processing (CEP), and model-driven engineering (MDE) may very well form a unique blend of tools worth researching and applying to the governance of information systems, hence leveraging the practice into a more automated and intelligent form.

Research Mission
Business process management (BPM) is a core research area in information systems. My main objective is the use of formal methods to model semantically rich enterprise business processes, which can be verified for compliance with regulations. Enterprise business processes encompass several aspects such as control flow, data flow, resource flow and also provide a link to the motivation level through risks and goals. In particular, the study of the use of policies and rules, model driven technologies and design patterns to represent regulations and verify them on business processes is tackled in my PhD research.

Current Research Focus

The issue of Regulatory Compliance Management (RCM) in information systems is core to my research. It has been tackled in the context of enterprise models and in particular business processes in my initial research, and also in the context of processes defined over the semantic web using semantic web services and ontologies.

RCM has potentially implications for and applications to a variety of domains including enterprise architectures/models, service-oriented-architectures (SOA), requirements engineering and the semantic web. 

I rely on using and adapting techniques from the software engineering sub-areas of model-driven-engineering (formal metamodeling, model transformations) and verification (model checking) to support the full lifecycle of RCM.

Key Areas of Interest

The main areas of interest listed here cover a wide range of topics, due on the one part to the multidisciplinary nature of the research I was involved in, and on the other hand to the potential applications of research results achieved up until now:

1. Business Process Management, in particular the modeling, simulation/monitoring and analysis parts of the lifecycle.

2. Policy and Rule Management, and more generally Decision Management as a means for enabling the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise.

3. Conceptual modeling and application to enterprise models/architectures.

4. Service Oriented Computing.

5. Meta-modeling, model transformation and model composition.

7. Requirements engineering of security and policy requirements.

8.I also made contributions to the semantic web as well as complex event processing.

Reviewer

• For the Electronic Markets - International Journal on Networked Business. http://www.electronicmarkets.org/.
• For the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2011/. Software Engineering Track: http://paris.utdallas.edu/sacse11/.
• For the book: Electronic Business Interoperability - Concepts, Opportunities and Challenges. A book edited by: Ejub Kajan (State University of Novi Pazar, Serbia). IGI Global. To appear in 2011. http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=45956.
• For the book: Modern Software Engineering Concepts and Practices: Advanced Approaches. A book edited by (Dr. Ali H. Dogru, Middle East Technical University, Turkey and Mr. Veli Bicer, FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Germany). http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=687.
• Reviewer at the ECIS 2008: European Conference on Information Systems - Track 6: Strategic Management of IS and IT. http://www.ecis2008.ie/

Research Schools

• 2nd International Summer school on domain specific modeling - theory and practice, 2011, 12-16.09.2011. http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DSM-TP/
• 1st International summer school on domain specific modeling - theory and practice, 2010, 06-09.09.2010. DSM-TP 2010, Casa da Cerca, Lisbon Portugal. http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DSM-TP/.
• European Summer School of Logic, Language and Information. ESSLLI 2010. UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN / DENMARK / AUGUST 9-20, 2010. http://esslli2010cph.info/.

Teaching

• Winter Semester 2009-2010. Practical sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.
• Summer Semester 2010. Practical sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.
• Winter Semester 2010-2011. Practical Sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.

Presentations

• A number of talks at international events among which EDOC, APCCM, BPSC, ECOWS, CEC, GRCIS, SBPM.
• Number of guest talks at universities: University of Ghent, Universita degli studi di Torino, University of Osnabrueck, Queensland University of Technology (jointly organized by NICTA & University of Queensland).

Scientific Stays and Summer Schools

• Scientific stays at the universities of Osnabrueck, Gent, Torino and at NICTA (Australia).
• Summer schools 1st and 2nd Domain specific modeling summer school in 2010 and 2011, ESSLLI (Logic, Language, Information) in 2010.

Projects

I am currently involved in the following projects:

• MARCO (Managing Regulatory Compliance: a Business Centered Approach): http://marco.gforge.uni.lu/. This projects is funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche du Luxembourg (FNR).
  

I was previously involved in the following projects:

• ADIWA (Allianz Digitaler Warenfkuss): http://www.adiwa.net/
• IP-SUPER (Integrated Project - semantics utilized for process management within and between enterprises): http://www.ip-super.org/

Manifesto

My name is Marwane El Kharbili. I am currently a junior researcher at the university of Luxemburg, where I am enrolled as a PhD Candidate. I am a member of the Model Driven Engineering Group of Prof. Pierre Kelsen.

This is my personal blog and it covers various topics related or not to my research interests (Business Process Management, Compliance Management, Model Driven Engineering, Business Rules Management, and the semantic web).

The opinions on this blog are not all necessarily mine and definitely not those of my employer.

Contact

Address
Marwane El Kharbili
Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication
6, Rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359, Luxembourg City
Luxemburg

Office: Campus Kirchberg, L-109
Tel: (+352) 46 66 44 5601
E-mail: marwane (DOT) elkharbili (AT) gmail (DOT) com
Skype ID: Ask me per email and I'll send it to you
LinkedIn: My profile on LinkedIn
Xing: My profile on Xing
Viadeo My profile on Viadeo

BPM Survey

Through Prof. Allweyer's Blog I discovered this website containing the results of a survey about BPM in Germany with 500 participants. There are four PDF files to be downloaded containing statistical figures and analysis. If you are interested in knowing about recent field study results, enjoy the read!

SOA Skills shortage, ok, but what is the solution?

This post by Loraine Lawson on ITBusinessedge makes quite a good discussion out of the recent agitation that resulted of a recent IBM survey saying that the main obstacle to starting SOA projects at Fortune 1000 companies is the string lack in SOA skills. I liked the sythesis she makes and she also tries to formulate answers to the problem. no more comments here, a read is worth it!

Marwane El Kharbili.

BPEL4PEOPLE and people

In his post, Fred Cummins criticizes the fact that BPEL4PEOPLE doesn't fulfill expectations of business users. Fred says that BPEL (see here for version 2.0 from OASIS) is not a language for business people but for programmers. Well, I personally don't know of any programmer who writes BPEL code himself. BPEL is a language for machines, for executions engines. BPEL is destined to be generated not written. On the other hand, BPEL4PEOPLE should allow including and defining human interaction. I don't personally know if that means that the BPEL4PEOPLE execution engine allows defining tasks that are realized by humans (Humanoid services so to say, if considering the general notion of a service) or if it means that it allows BPEL to be defined by people. I do however think the first explanation is the right one.

Nevertheless, in the second part of the post, Fred Cummins talks about possible repercussions of BPDM. The use of BPMN 1.1 (see here) and BPDM together would allow definition of choreography and orchestration for services, both of which are critical concepts in SOA.

I would conclude that there is a wave of opinions directly linking BPM to SOA, so Joe McKendrick, in "BPM and SOA Need Each Other." I must say that I do not think that SOA should be directly linked to BPM. This would simply restrict any flexibility BPM implementation has and its independence from technology, which provides the stability business people like and need so much. The whole story is all about ROI. If you don't want to take a bet on SOA, then why should you? In the end, it is your processes that create value, not your soa architecture. This however, does not exclude that we work on technologies allowing us using the current standards to build a bridge between business process management and an SOA implementation, just because both worlds go so well along with another.

Marwane El Kharbili.

SOA and semantic data integration

I found an interesting post about the role of semantic data integration in SOA by Ken Rugg. The author's main argument is that an efficient system governance implies an efficient SOA governance. And that this SOA governance can only be achieved if the data that is processed by an SOA architecture has the same meaning everywhere and for everybody. The way the author sees semantics is in the form of a Common Informational Model, not in the sense of reasoning-enabling ontologies. This reminded me of the CIM models by the DMTF, for IT system management, as part of their Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) activities. The efforts driven by the DMTF also seek to enable efficient distributed systems governance. Nothing exceptional up until now, apart from the fact that semantic data integration is not easy at all in highly dynamic systems, such as it would be the case once web service compositions will become a reality. No, the most interesting is Progress Data Xtend. Their approach to the question of enabling semantic data integration is using rules. However these rules must have access to all the data exchanges which from my point of view is not possible unless you use a service bus for managing and executing services, because it is a closed system, and controls all data exchanges running upon it. While many people think that SOA can only be implemented through a service bus, this is not true. SOA says nothing about its implementation, and SOA doesn't even tell you that you need web services. One can imagine open systems able to dynamically generate composition of their services, and a new choreography for all their services, once they have discovered a new service. Nevertheless, the idea would make sense if you use one single platform like JBPM from JBOSS to execute your services and are ready to integrate the Data Xtend platform to the rest of the SOA architecture. An interesting approach in all cases.

Marwane El Kharbili.

State of the BPM Market white paper

...from BEA. Well, this was a post on Column2, by Sandy Kemsley. She has worked on this white paper with BEA and it can be downloaded here. Of course you need to go through the whole BEA process, and even if you have an account (I used to download white papers from them that I never had enough time to read...) it should go smooth and easy. The content: strategic positioning of BPM, the situation of the vendor market and trends in the domain. I have not had time to read it but I certainly will, sometime soon. Oh and this other post again by Sandy Kemsley makes a summary of the talk held by BEA (Jay Simons) about the results from their BPM Market state survey.

Marwane El Kharbili.