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Doctor's Theses (authored and supervised):

D. Novakovic:
"Business Context Aware Core Components Modeling";
Supervisor, Reviewer: C. Huemer, S. Rinderle-Ma, E. Proper; Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, 2014; oral examination: 2014-11-07.



English abstract:
Business document standards usually cover a hierarchical structure of thousands of elements that may be relevant in any business context (any geopolitical region, any industry, etc.). In order to use a business document standard in a specific context, user groups define so-called business document implementation guidelines based on a smaller subset consisting usually of 3-5% of the overall elements. When one defines a new implementation guideline for a specific business context, one has always to start from scratch, which is time-consuming and also leads to heterogeneous interpretations of the standard. It is our goal to speed up the development process and to create more homogeneous implementation guidelines by learning from existing models. If we could assign a formal context to existing implementation guidelines, we may predict the subset of a new implementation guideline for a given context.

We especially consider implementation guidelines built on the top of the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS). These guidelines consist of business context specific data building blocks which are restricted from more general, semantically interoperable Core Components. In order to share, search, and (partially) re-use context specific restrictions of Core Components it is essential not only to store the restrictions, but also a business context model where these restrictions are valid. Therefore, we develop the Enhanced UN/CEFACT Business Context Model (E-UCM) and the Business Context Ontology Model (BCOnt) for representing business context in the domain of Core Components.

This thesis proposes an approach to contextualize already existing Core Components by means of our business context models. This contextual information is also used to predict a subset for to-be developed electronic business document implementation guidelines based on existing ones. The underlying algorithms calculate degrees of business context match, detect different types of mappings between existing Core Components and generate Core Component based contents of new implementation guidelines.

Our research has been conducted following the design science research process. The corresponding evaluation is interpreted as a build and evaluate loop iterated a number of times before the final approach was developed. We evaluate the business context models on the basis of 16 evaluation criteria. The feasibility of the business context aware Core Components modeling approach is demonstrated by a prototype implementation. The analysis of the calculated precision and recall rates proves that our approach holds not only in theory, but also in practice.

Keywords:
Business Context, Electronic Business Documents, Standardization, Inter-organizational Business Processes


Electronic version of the publication:
http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_234005.pdf


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.