Thoughts about systematic literature reviews

Some time ago, I had posted a two-piece item about systematic literature reviews.
Then came the following comment by sebastian:

... I think you are discussing here planning vs. intuition. Your way of approaching the literature review is intuition. Kai is planning. Personally, I think both ways will lead to success as long as you have some checks to make sure you are on the right way.

Yeah, I will have to agree on this one, since I have been doing literatire reviews for 18 months now. The only problem is that I still think that at least one single strong systematic literature review, which is carefully planned (i.e. choices of selected literature can be justified by more than intuition, relationship to other works, relevance for the tackled topic, celebrity of the working group, recency, impact factor, kind of publication, signification of results, et...) is necessary, at one stage or the other in a PhD. The reason for this is simple, it is easier from the researcher's perspective to make a clear map of the literature when usiny a systematic approach, the complexity can then be gradually increased. It can also help spare some analysis time, since comparison dimensions are known and well-understood. The intuition-based version, requires the ability of dealing with a huge amount of information, and still keeping a clear view on the massed of information, without loosing track of the real aim of the literature review. It is the hardest variant and I would say the most dangerous. In short, intuition is extremely important in research, and most often works best, every researcher will tell you this. Systematic literature review is a top down approach where the "publication population" for a certain topic is analyzed before publications are selected, and the more intuition based one is rather bottom-up, since the classification and analysis of the literature is done based on the already selected literature. The question is whether these two approaches always bring the same results? No way to tell this for sure. But we shouldn't forget that the real goal is to make good research, to reach new goals, not to make a perfectly written literature review.

Marwane El Kharbili

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

10 research Positions open

At the HPI in Potsdam in Germany, there are 8 positions for PhD students and 2 Postdocs that are open now. You'll find the detailed announcement here:

http://kolleg.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/

mention is given of the approached topics and the salary.

Good luck to whom it may be of interest.

Marwane El Kharbili

ESWC - Part II

I know this is a very strange post here, since it had to be written one month ago now, as I was still at the ESWC conference in teneriffe. But the things being what hey already are, I have decided to still publish it.Here is the content:

"Now a week after I left Teneriffe, here is the rest of my report about the conference. Here I will tell a bit about the interesting talks I have heard, the demos I have seen and the poster sessions where I could ask deeper questions about some tools such as Nepomuk, WSMX and the WSMT.

First of all many presentations were about searches in triple stores. If one knows that the semantic language that is most widely used is still RDF, one can understand that. Ususally, the most simple things are the best accepted by people, and scientists are no exception. So RDF triples are stored in repositories and retrieving and querying information is all about searching these triple stores. So no wonder that there were several tracks precisely tackling this and other related issues. Pure semantic web is not really my area of predilection, even if I always keep an eye on the advances reached in this field. I didn't visit those talks.

What I was very much interested into however, was everything that has something to do with sws (semantic web services) in a first place, and with inference engines in a second place. For inference engines...I'll make it short, I only got one 10 minutes long presentation in the demo session of day two of the conference about some probablistic extension to an existing OWL-DL inference engine....the idea seems nice bt you ain't becoming an expert by listening to such shorties..I guess my journey deep into inference engines is going to take me some time and cost me lots of energy, since I will have to learn it alone (as always). But I would really appreciate any help guys, really :D

I attended several talks about semantic web services which essentially explain the advances made in the main tools currently existing with the WSMO framework. Those tools were also presented during the demo session that took place in the first 2 days of the conference from 19:00 till 20:00. I had the opportunity to talk to many developers on those research tools and I particularly liked the new things done in the new WSMX environment, in the WSMT tool (Web Service Modeling Toolkit) concurrent of the WSMO Studio and the service discovery functionalities of the Maestro tool. In the SUPER research project, we use the WSMO studio as a platform for implementation and also for modeling our ontologies in WSML.

I also attended talks which present new ontologies. The two that I liked most were the business process analysis ontology (by colleagues from the SUPER project) and the a software model that takes an MDA approach to the SDLC by the guys over at the SAP CEC in Dresden. I ask some questions to the host of the first talk and decided that I would read both papers. The reason for this is simple, everybody in research is by nature curious about a lot of things, but nobody has the time to cover even an infinite part of the things that sound interesting. So researchers are particularly selective about what they read. It is publish or perish but the reverse side of the medallion is "Read it in the morning if you''ll need it in the evening". I want to first have an idea about how to write a good paper to present a new ontology (and conferences are particularly selective when it comes to ontologies because there is just an explosion of them) and an unpublished ontology is not recognized by anybody in the community. The second reason is that I have very similar ideas to the ones presented in the second ontology but right now, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is not my focus, I am concentrating on BPM. However, the MDA ideas and concepts developed by this community are always similar to those needed in the more software oriented BPM community.

I must also say that I was very much impressed by the demos of the tools coming out of the nepomuk project, which seeks to develop a semantic desktop. the reason for this is that tese guys just decided to illustrate all their concepts by integrating many of them into the newest release of the Gnome system, a desktop layer for Linux distributions. I watched and discussed some of the tools with the guys and I think it is really the bedtest for future development software inresearch on social semantic desktops and interfaces in general. Or you guys will have to do at least as good as the nepomuk guys.

Marwane El Kharbili

ESW2008

Written on the 03.06.2008:

I am in Teneriffe since a couple of days now and taking part in the ESWC (European Semantic Web Conference 2008) where I have presented a paper on policy-based enterprise compliance management on monday at the SBPM08 (Semantic Business Process Management) workshop. It is dead season here so there are really only a few people and the weather is on the opposite to what one may think, mild and nice, not very hot, around 20°C. I didn't have time to see around the island during the conference since there are just too many interesting things here at the conference to see, in fact, there are too much for my passionate mind to even follow. what I like here about the food is that you get fish, a lot of fish everywhere, in fact, in many restaurants you only get fish! I flew in to teneriffe two days before the conference and went as a backpacker to the north of the island where mass tourism is a lot lss present, but where the island is just a lot more beautiful to see. And I can confirm that. In a future post I will tell about my mini-backpacker trip and let you know the best places and tricks.

The conference is really big, and there are quite a lot of people from various backgrounds and organizations, so I took on the task of networking a bit and have had several interesting discussions with mainly scientists, which open my mind to some new things. I also talked to some business people from companies simply attending the workshop because they are interested in following up with what the community is currently doing. I also helped out a little by assisting the brits during one panel session and making sure everybody who had a question could get a microphone on time.

On the first day I have presented my paper at the workshop and got some reactions from the other scientists, but I have noticed that many people are not familiar with the problem of compliance management. Policies and business rules are also a big source of questions, since people with background in formal languages and logics are specialized in quite very different sectors. The same goes for artificial intelligence folks. One of the talks that most interested me was one colleague from the university of Gent in belgium whose work is on supporting business modelers in eliciting and managing requirements in order to exploit them in business process modeling.

On the second day, I have listened to talks about one company called Garlik that was created quite recently by one british professor and profesisonals from the banking sector. Garlik basically made use of and extended semantic web technologies in order to extract data about any person on the web and make sure that your privacy is protected and that nobody steals your identity.

some other talks were even more interesting, particularly the one by ricardo yates from yahoo research about the virtuous circle of the semantic web and how yahoo understood the problems created by the web of data and designed and implemented solutions (which are not yet available as standard yahoo products) for allowing us to get to a personalized and semantically enhanced search on the web. you would basically get personalized search results based on what the web knows about you.

I am going to avoid talking about the concrete knowledge that I got from the conference for now since it helped me to get to know about a lot of work I was not aware of before, and get to know some potentially future close research collaborators from two diffreent institutions. I will get back to these more detailed aspects in future posts on my personal blog.

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/

Business Rules and the semantic Web

So when will the wedding take place? This seems to be the question everybody is asking about Business Rule Management (BRM) and the Semantic Web (SW). At least the buys from the European Business Rules Conference did (http://www.semantic-web-days.net/EBRC_start.htm). Last year they organized the Semantic Web Days at the EBRC 2007. It took the form of a tutorial by Gerd Wagner (University of Cottbus and REWERSE Project) and colleagues and an exhibition by innovative companies and research institutes to present the latest innovations. In the tutorial, Gerd Wagner talked about Rule Modeling and Rule Interchange between different representation formalisms. He also talked about the latter in the context of the approaches of the REWERSE European research project and the W3C RIF (Rule Interchange Format) working group of the W3C. Another project dealing with the question is the MUSING project, under coordination of our neighbors here in Saarbrücken, the DFKI, represented by the person of Thierry Declerck.

This is only one of many events tackling the question of bringing specialists of the two domains together, since they are working mainly on inherently adjacent issues. One of the characteristics of research on business rules is the variety of works from very different people with different backgrounds. Due to lack of communication and exchange, we undergo the risk of having to reinvent the wheel at each time. One will inevitably notice this if one works in the Business Rules domain and tries to get an overview and an incept of what is really going on in research about business rules.

There is no need to be an oracle to see how semantic web technologies can help business rule propagation, interchange and enforcement in systems all over the web (actually there is no reason why the same approaches could be used for most type of distributed environments and systems), but also what level of artificial intelligence awareness the use of business rules in the semantic web architecture and applications would bring. I only hope that after the REWERSE project is over, many researchers will get to know the results, take profit from the dissemination efforts of REWERSE and build on them, and that through the variety of backgrounds, positions and ideas, that we will bring Business Rule Management to the next level, being really productive in a semantic distributed environment.

Marwane El Kharbili

Fulltime POSTDOC in Semantic Technologies, STI International, Vienna

I have to make a quickie here. It is a bout a Postdoc position available at the STI2 International in Vienna, Austria. STI2 is a world leading institution in semantic technology Research (which is obvious if one knows that STI stands for Semantic Technologies Institute). STI2 is a regroupment of stakeholders in semantic technolgies from the academic, industrial and governmental communities.

The Postdoc position will require a person with an excellent PhD degree and some experience in semantic technologies. The exact description of the position is to be found here.

Marwane El Kharbili