In the context of Digital Ecosystems, and particularly in the context of their evolutionary perspective (aspect), enterprises have to leverage state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies in order to achieve high-level business-to-business networking and interoperability. Cutting-edge ways of communication and of inter- and intra-organization process integration are needed between both individual enterprises and clusters of companies.

Besides the research on social and network-topological issues in the field of regional SME's evolution in a Digital Ecosystem, the EC co-funded research project OPAALS[1] focuses on new ways for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) to build business-support software systems.

The project SEPAIX focuses, besides many others, on two parts of the OPAALS project for providing such business-support software systems: (i) generating workflow information out of specifications written in natural language on the one hand, and (ii) using the same natural language to generate user interface components on the other hand. The intrinsic ambiguity of a fully natural language conveyed the adoption of the OMG standard Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Business Rules (SBVR) [8] as operational approximation. SBVR, indeed, is seen as a structured language based on natural language that is a natural language with a number of syntactic, semantic and logical constraints. Such constraints put a limitation to the expressivity of the language, but at the same time (1) still allow any person without deep technical knowledge to read and understand its formalism and notation, (2) eliminate most of the ambiguity of a natural language thus (3) allowing models represented through SBVR to be automatically interpreted and processed.

Stay tuned for more information to be published soon..

 

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SEPIAX

In order to support the technological catalysts, tools that can be used to describe business processes in the SBVR formalism are currently under development. Some of these tools are embedded in the up-coming Semantic Ecosystems for Process Identification, Automation and eXtraction (SEPIAX) project that has been introduced in section IV. The goal of SEPIAX is to provide a combination of tools to create, manage and use business models.

Project at Sourceforge...

OPAALS

OPAALS is a global Network of Excellence formed around multi-disciplinary research into Digital Ecosystems. OPAALS research covers social science, linguistics, computer science, software engineering, and biology.

More about OPAALS...

OPAALS Homepage...

IEEE DEST08

Model-Transformation-Based Software Generation Utilizing Natural Language Notations was the topic of a paper of the SEPIAX group, presented at the IEEE Digital Ecosystems conference in February 2008 in Thailand. Here an abstract: Adaptive software generation based on natural language notations is a key challenge in software industries. In the present work, the ability of stakeholders to formulate requirements that can directly be used in software production and software generation bases on a natural-language-based formal notation called Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Business Rules (SBVR), a recent OMG standard. SBVRbased model-to-model transformations are utilized to generate prototypical user interfacing code to demonstrate that non-IT business stakeholders can create framework-based software out of the box. For more information see the proceedings of the conference www.ieee-dest.curtin.edu.au