Tomorrow I will present the paper Mot en processorienterad förvaltning (En. Towards a process oriented government*), by Gustaf and me, at Sundsvall 42 conference.

The paper summarizes our work at the OST (Open Social Services) project finances by Vinnova. It discusses the prototype we developed for the emergency phone application process and the full scale solution developed during the project.

The prototype can be downloaded from http://people.dsv.su.se/~petia/phone_demo_v_2.zip
A description of how to install and run the prototype is available here.
A movie from the prototype is available here.

The full scale solution is available at Järfälla’s web-site.(electronic identification is requested.)

Finally, the presentation for tomorrow is available here.

* The paper is written in Swedish. A related paper, presenting some of the results in English, is Business Process Management for Open E-Services in Local Government.

After the Best paper award at the ER 2009 conference, we got invitation to write a journal article on Anchor Modeling. The title of the new article is “Anchor Modeling – Agile Information Modeling in Evolving Data Enviornmnets”. The authors are Lars Rönnbäck (Resight), Olle Regardt (Teracom), Maria Bergholtz (DSV), Paul Johannesson (DSV) and I. The article has now been accepted for publication in the journal Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE, Elsevier). A preprint of it can be found here.

Abstract: Maintaining and evolving data warehouses is a complex, error prone, and time consuming activity. The main reason for this state of aairs is that the environment of a data warehouse is in constant change, while the
warehouse itself needs to provide a stable and consistent interface to information spanning extended periods
of time. In this article, we propose an agile information modeling technique, called Anchor Modeling, that
oers non-destructive extensibility mechanisms, thereby enabling robust and exible management of changes.
A key benet of Anchor Modeling is that changes in a data warehouse environment only require extensions,
not modications, to the data warehouse. Such changes, therefore, do not require immediate modications of
existing applications, since all previous versions of the database schema are available as subsets of the current
schema. Anchor Modeling decouples the evolution and application of a database, which when building a
data warehouse enables shrinking of the initial project scope. While data models were previously made
to capture every facet of a domain in a single phase of development, in Anchor Modeling fragments can
be iteratively modeled and applied. We provide a formal and technology independent denition of anchor
models and show how anchor models can be realized as relational databases together with examples of
schema evolution. We also investigate performance through a number of lab experiments, which indicate that
under certain conditions anchor databases perform substantially better than databases constructed using
traditional modeling techniques.

Keywords: Anchor Modeling, database modeling, normalization, 6NF, data warehousing, agile development,
temporal databases, table elimination

This week we submitted a paper titled “Business Process Management for Open E-services in Local Government” to the BPM track in the Australian Conference on Information Systems. The paper describes the prototype which we developed for the Open Social Services (ÖST) project. More generally it discusses the use of business process technology for the development of e-services. A preprint of the paper can be found here.

The work was carried out in cooperation with Dr. David Truffet from Australia and Gustaf Juell-Skielse (DSV). I met David during my visit at QUT last summer, which coincided with his own visit there. Similarly to me, David believes in the YAWL open-source initiative carried out by the BPM group at QUT and invests (among other through the establishment of a consulting company for YAWL) on spreading out the research results and YAWL to industry and official sector.

The project proposal which Paul, Martin, Birger and myself submitted to the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) this year can be found here (VR10-main.pdf). It is an improvement from our proposal from last year. The objective is to research on the integration of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) with social software (SoS).

Last Friday (16th of April 2010) A/Prof Karim Baina, visiting Syslab, gave a presentation on Enterprise Architecture as well as the work of his reserch team at Ensias.

The slides of the presentation can be found Karim.Baïna.EA.Talk@SYSLAB.16April2010.slides.long.version.pdf.
CV of A/Prof. Karim Baina can be found Karim.Baïna.EA.Talk@SYSLAB.16April2010.agenda.pdf.