Web services run in complex contexts where arising events may compromise the quality of the whole system. Thus, it is desirable to count on autonomic mechanisms to guide the self-adaptation of service compositions according to changes in the computing infrastructure. One way to achieve this goal is by implementing variability constructs at the language level. However, this approach may become tedious, difficult to manage, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a solution based on a semantically rich variability model to support the dynamic adaptation of service compositions. When a problematic event arises in the context, this model is leveraged for decision-making. The activation and deactivation of features in the variability model result in changes in a composition model that abstracts the underlying service composition. These changes are reflected into the service composition by adding or removing fragments of Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) code, which can be deployed at runtime. In order to reach optimum adaptations, the variability model and its possible configurations are verified at design time using Constraint Programming. An evaluation demonstrates several benefits of our approach, both at design time and at runtime.

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Abstract. Despite existing methodologies in the field, most requirements engineers are poorly trained to define security requirements. This is due to a considerable lack of security knowledge. Some security ontologies have been proposed, but a gap still exists between the two fields of security requirement engineering and ontologies. This paper is a survey, it proposes an analysis and a typology of existing security ontologies and their use for requirements definition.

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International audienceSecurity is an important issue that needs to be taken into account at all stages of information system development, including early requirements elicitation. Early analysis of security makes it possible to predict threats and their impacts and define adequate security requirements before the system is in place. Security requirements are difficult to elicit, analyze, and manage. The fact that analysts' knowledge about security is often tacit makes the task of security requirements elicitation even harder. Ontologies are known for being a good way to formalize knowledge. Ontologies, in particular, have been proved useful to support reusability. Requirements engineering based on predefined ontologies can make the job of requirement engineering much easier and faster. However, this very much depends on the quality of the ontology that is used. Some security ontologies for security requirements have been proposed in the literature. None of them stands out as complete. This paper presents a core and generic security ontology for security requirements engineering. Its core and generic status is attained thanks to its coverage of wide and high-level security concepts and relationships. We implemented the ontology and developed an interactive environment to facilitate the use of the ontology during the security requirements engineering process. The proposed security ontology was evaluated by checking its validity and completeness compared to other ontologies. Moreover, a controlled experiment with end-users was performed to evaluate its usability

Process mining has been successfully used in automatic knowledge discovery and in providing guidance or support. The known process mining approaches rely on processes being executed with the help of information systems thus enabling the automatic capture of process traces as event logs. However, there are many other fields such as Humanities, Social Sciences and Medicine where workers follow processes and log their execution manually in textual forms instead. The problem we tackle in this paper is mining process instance models from unstructured, text-based process traces. Using natural language processing with a focus on the verb semantics, we created a novel unsupervised technique TextProcessMiner that discovers process instance models in two steps: 1.ActivityMiner mines the process activities; 2.ActivityRelationshipMiner mines the sequence, parallelism and mutual exclusion relationships between activities. We employed technical action research through which we validated and preliminarily evaluated our proposed technique in an Archaeology case. The results are very satisfactory with 88% correctly discovered activities in the log and a process instance model that adequately reflected the original process. Moreover, the technique we created emerged as domain independent.

Aligning Information Systems (IS) to organization's strategic business objectives is one of organizations' top preoccupations. Misalignment is considered as a reason of IT's failure to improve organizational performance. If strategic alignment is relatively simple to understand, it is not so easy to implement. Our experience showed us that organizations are not really able to systematically evaluate whether there is alignment, mainly because of the lack of documentation on strategic alignment. This paper intends to deal with this issue by proposing an approach to describe organizations' strategic objectives and its IS, in order to document and analyze strategic alignment, i.e. how the IS contributes to strategic objectives satisfaction. The proposed method, called INSTAL (Intentional Strategic Alignment), reuses organization documents as a basis to formalize strategic alignment. INSTAL was created following the principles of an action research approach, which consists in developing the approach while exploring issues raised by the case study.