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In the last few years, service-oriented computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for describing Web services. There has not been as much work in defining languages or ontologies for describing services from business perspectives. In this paper, we analyze the landscape of service representation and discuss the needs of having a description language for business services. By leveraging existing work on describing service capabilities and properties, we define a specific description language that explicitly addresses the decomposition of business services and their non-functional properties. The language is defined both informally (as a list of descriptive concepts) and formally (by means of meta-modeling and declarative modeling).

BackgroundStandardizing the background diet of participants during a dietary randomized controlled trial is vital to trial outcomes. For this process, dietary modeling based on food groups and their target servings is employed via a dietary prescription before an intervention, often using a manual process. Partial automation has employed the use of linear programming. Validity of the modeling approach is critical to allow trial outcomes to be translated to practice.ObjectiveThis paper describes the first-stage development of a tool to automatically perform dietary modeling using food group and macronutrient requirements as a test case. The Dietary Modeling Tool (DMT) was then compared with existing approaches to dietary modeling (manual and partially automated), which were previously available to dietitians working within a dietary intervention trial.MethodsConstraint optimization techniques were implemented to determine whether nonlinear constraints are best suited to the development of the automated dietary modeling tool using food composition and food consumption data. Dietary models were produced and compared with a manual Microsoft Excel calculator, a partially automated Excel Solver approach, and the automated DMT that was developed.ResultsThe web-based DMT was produced using nonlinear constraint optimization, incorporating estimated energy requirement calculations, nutrition guidance systems, and the flexibility to amend food group targets for individuals. Percentage differences between modeling tools revealed similar results for the macronutrients. Polyunsaturated fatty acids and monounsaturated fatty acids showed greater variation between tools (practically equating to a 2-teaspoon difference), although it was not considered clinically significant when the whole diet, as opposed to targeted nutrients or energy requirements, were being addressed.ConclusionsAutomated modeling tools can streamline the modeling process for dietary intervention trials ensuring consistency of the background diets, although appropriate constraints must be used in their development to achieve desired results. The DMT was found to be a valid automated tool producing similar results to tools with less automation. The results of this study suggest interchangeability of the modeling approaches used, although implementation should reflect the requirements of the dietary intervention trial in which it is used.

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Business process compliance management is a field of study involving the co-ordination of business process management and compliance systems. A compliance system is an organisation wide tool that links legislative and business rules to organization policies and processes. The objective of such a system is to promote a self sustaining level of operations that minimizes the losses caused to the business through breaches of laws or internal misappropriations. We view a compliance system in a similar fashion to that of an accounting system where each process is treated as a transaction. Each process may be monitored and valuations of costing and benefits associated to each task. Both high order policy creation as well as low order transactional histories of single processes must be considered to obtain a complete picture of current operations. In this paper we discuss benefits and shortcomings in some of the currently implemented compliance schemes and present a method for measuring the degree of compliance that each business process may achieve. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication DetailsThis conference paper was originally published as E. Abstract-Business process compliance management is a field of study involving the co-ordination of business process management and compliance systems. A compliance system is an organisation wide tool that links legislative and business rules to organization policies and processes. The objective of such a system is to promote a self sustaining level of operations that minimizes the losses caused to the business through breaches of laws or internal misappropriations. We view a compliance system in a similar fashion to that of an accounting system where each process is treated as a transaction. Each process may be monitored and valuations of costing and benefits associated to each task. Both high order policy creation as well as low order transactional histories of single processes must be considered to obtain a complete picture of current operations. In this paper we discuss benefits and shortcomings in some of the currently implemented compliance schemes and present a method for measuring the degree of compliance that each business process may achieve.

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Agent applications are often viewed as unduly expensive to develop and maintain in commercial contexts. Organizations often settle for less sophisticated and more traditional software in place of agent technology because of (often misplaced) fears about the development and maintenance costs of agent technology, and the often mistaken perception that traditional software offers better returns on investment. This paper aims to redress this by developing a plan recognition framework for agent program learning, where behavior logs of legacy applications (or even manually executed processes) are mined to extract a 'draft' version of agent code that could eventually replace these applications or processes. We develop, implement and evaluate techniques for inferring agent plans from behavior logs, with both positive and negative examples. After obtaining the plans, we resort to an effect log to identify the context (i.e. precondition) for each plan. The experimental results show that our framework generates a first draft of an agent program (i.e. the code) which can then be modified as required by a developer. Abstract. Agent applications are often viewed as unduly expensive to develop and maintain in commercial contexts. Organizations often settle for less sophisticated and more traditional software in place of agent technology because of (often misplaced) fears about the development and maintenance costs of agent technology, and the often mistaken perception that traditional software offers better returns on investment. This paper aims to redress this by developing a plan recognition framework for agent program learning, where behavior logs of legacy applications (or even manually executed processes) are mined to extract a 'draft' version of agent code that could eventually replace these applications or processes. We develop, implement and evaluate techniques for inferring agent plans from behavior logs, with both positive and negative examples. After obtaining the plans, we resort to an effect log to identify the context (i.e. precondition) for each plan. The experimental results show that our framework generates a first draft of an agent program (i.e. the code) which can then be modified as required by a developer.