MD*: The Model-Driven Star blog

"My" events for 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:28:00 +0000

Well, this year I'm involved in the organization of so many events that it's worth (for myself) to track them down in a single blog post, so as to keep track of all the activities and places I'll be experiencing.
I'm reporting here all the events, just for sake of recording (and for anybody to browse):

SocialBPM summer school in Como, July 2012
CrowdSearch workshop at WWW 2012
International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2012)
Model-driven Web Engineering workshop (MDWE 2012) at ICWE 2012
Very Large Data Search workshop (VLDS 2012) at VLDB 2012
CloudMDE workshop at ECMFA 2012
SOHuman 2012 workshop at SocialCom 2012
VORTE 2012 workshop at EDOC 2012

.. and a few others. This is not the full list of the events I'll be attending though (which includes some more).

I especially recommend to look into the Social BPM summer school:

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

CrowdSearch 2012: my experience at the First International Workshop On Crowdsourcing Web Search at WWW2012

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:35:00 +0000

Last week I have been attending WWW 2012 in Lyon and within it I joined the First International Workshop on Crowdsourcing Web search (CrowdSearch 2012) on April 17 to April 20 in Lyon, France. I enjoyed a lot the technical contributions and the extremely lively discussion and feedback from the audience (50+ people throughout the day).

The program of the workshop can be found here.

#crowdsearch2012 is the official hashtag for the workshop and the proceedings are available at:

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-842/

My talk

I also presented a paper on Model-driven techniques for crowdsourcing search, based on WebML, BPMN, model transformations, and the Search Computing approach.

The presentation is reported here:

Model driven crowdsourcing of search (CrowdSearch2012 workshop at www2012)

View more PowerPoint from Marco Brambilla

The demo video of the application can be found on YouTube:

Twitter summary

I report here some highlights from the twitter discussion (retrieved through Topsy) related to the workshop:

CrowdSearch: Crowdsourcing Web search | CrowdSearch 2011
crowdsearch.como.polimi.it/

humanist0810 Kyumin Lee
RT @MarcoBrambi: #crowdsearch2012 proceedings available online http://t.co/RuHnzoBK.

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 26 more

Podcastle
en.podcastle.jp/

wpmigrations Jordi Cabot
RT @MarcoBrambi: http://t.co/ylg9r64B for searching, reading, annotating podcasts collaboratively. #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 13 more

Songle
songle.jp/

shinnonoir Raynor Vliegendhart
You can see our paper on PodCastle http://t.co/RmaWExUK and Songle http://t.co/9b2dD6lA at http://t.co/YOUOD4N6 #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

6 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 369 more

archives_masala Pauline Moirez
Crowdsourced improvement of music lyrics, parts identification ... Also for Japanese #crowdsearch2012 http://t.co/o501v0mg

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 2 more

CrowdSearcher Demonstration

searchcomputing Search Computing
Crowdsourcing search - demo video http://t.co/jFVmElfw for paper http://t.co/7e5uY902 #crowdsearch2012 #www2012 #mdd

2 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 3 more

Model driven crowdsourcing of search (CrowdSearch2012 workshop at w...
slideshare.net/mbrambil/model-driven-crowdsourcing-of-search-crowdsearch2012-workshop-at-www2012

roiduecommerce roiduecommerce
My presentation on Model-driven Crowdsourcing of Search at #CrowdSearch2012 wshop http://t.co/PWGauymc #www2012 #mdd #webml #socialnetwork

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 4 more

You can see our paper on PodCastle and Songle at #crowdsearch2012 #www2012
staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/PAPER/CROWDSEARCH2012goto.pdf

masatakagoto Masataka Goto / 後藤真孝
You can see our paper on PodCastle http://t.co/RmaWExUK and Songle http://t.co/9b2dD6lA at http://t.co/YOUOD4N6 #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 3 more

crowdsearch2012 workshop proceedings now officially published CEUR-WS #crowdsourcing #search #socialnetwork #www2012
ceur-ws.org/Vol-842/

camilopcalderon Camilo P. Calderón
#crowdsearch2012 workshop proceedings now officially published @ CEUR-WS http://t.co/5tIBX7Yq #crowdsourcing #search #socialnetwork #www2012

6 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 3 more

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla
Triadic elicitation (comparing 3 items instead of 2) is more difficult, but also more solid because reduces noise #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

iricelino Irene Celino
Measuring #humancomputation talk by #google at #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

iricelino Irene Celino

"Today #humancomputation approaches lack ground truth" Paritosh at #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

TREC Crowdsourcing Track

sites.google.com/site/treccrowd/

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

#TREC track on #Crowdsourcing available for 2nd year. Interesting res. for human computation https://t.co/sdrnPSo0 #www2012 #crowdsearch2012

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 3 more

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

Insipiring (and convenient) approach by @sihemameryahia on crowdsourcing related work summarizations in papers at #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

wrap-up of #crowdsearch2012 by Stefano Ceri: potentials on data integration, data quality, loose equality, transparency of crowds. #www2012

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

XRCE_COOP_workshop

coop2012.xrce.xerox.com/

charoy François Charoy

Large Scale Idea Management and Deliberation Systems workshop. Continuation of #crowdsearch2012 #www2012 http://t.co/xtIjNKZb #crowdsourcing

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 9 more

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

Hyp.: SQL + #openworld assumption used for crowd programming. Ext due to broader problems, not broader systems. #www2012 #crowdsearch2012

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

Collaboratively Patching Linked Data. (arXiv:1204.2715v1 [cs.IR])

arxiv.org/abs/1204.2715

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

Collaboratively Patching Linked Data by @mgns_pro at #usewod2012 http://t.co/hBdudwWi #patchr #www2012 < relevant for #crowdsearch2012 too

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 7 more

ianso/scriptus @ GitHub

ianso.github.com/scriptus/

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

#L3S vision on Twitter for crowdsourcing similar to #Scriptus library or higher level? http://t.co/aWE7AH1D #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite 44 more

Heading to Lyon for #www2012 and #crowdsearch2012 wshop ( Aeroporto di Malpensa "Città di Milano" (MXP) w/ 3 others)

foursquare.com/marcobrambi/checkin/4f8cf01fe4b00c10ebcdc8dc?ref=tw&s=R6LpdQ034ucAOV4Rp1Fxodg86hM

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

Heading to Lyon for #www2012 and #crowdsearch2012 wshop (@ Aeroporto di Malpensa "Città di Milano" (MXP) w/ 3 others) http://t.co/UQLRK6PZ

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

http://t.co/wpAfgrWp for searching, reading, annotating podcasts collaboratively. #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

http://t.co/wSUlTtD8 SONGLE.JP online social editor of music tracks for analysis and correction #crowdsearch2012 #www2012

7 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

marcobrambi Marco Brambilla

Large Scale Idea Management and Deliberation Systems workshop. Continuation of #crowdsearch2012 #www2012 http://t.co/xtIjNKZb #crowdsourcing

8 days ago Reply Retweet Favorite

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Code Generation 2012 - from geeky (programming) interfaces to user interfaces

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:49:00 +0000

For the second year, I've been attending the event called Code Generation, held in Cambridge, UK and organized by Software Acumen. For the second year, the event has been a quite good mix of practitioners, vendors and experienced evangelists.

During the event, Emanuele Molteni (product manager of WebRatio) and I have given a talk on User Interaction modeling problems, requirements and initiative, with special attention to the IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language) standardization activity within OMG. I think the problem is perceived as definitely relevant by the community, as demonstrated by the lively discussion that followed the presentation.

I would say that the main characterization of this year is really towards User Interaction modeling. A lot of sessions and speeches (including ours) addressed this problem from different perspectives, spanning from multi-platform mobile apps, to interaction modeling, to interpreted approaches for enterprise UIs, and so on. Even during our presentation, the audience admitted that they have built tens of domain specific languages (DSLs) for modeling some aspects of UIs. If you are interested in the topic, you can have a look at our presentation here:

Experiences and requirements for User Interaction Modeling

View more PowerPoint from Marco Brambilla

WebRatio has been sponsoring the event, and as a sponsor also got a booth at the conference (see picture). We have been interacting with a lot of visitors ad got enthusiastic feedback.

WebRatio booth at Code Generation 2012.

The event also features several interesting sub-events, sessions and keynotes, notably:

A keynote speech by Markus Voelter on DSL design
A Language Workbench Challenge
A lightening and demo session
A nice session by Peter Friese on multi-platform mobile application development

.. and several other interesting talks.

In summary, happy to attend and looking forward to next edition.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

What's the iPad for BPM?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:00:00 +0000

It has been a while since a dangerous albeit crucial question has been posed to the Business Process Management community, starting from a provoking statement by Theo Priestley in one of his posts (BPM must die!). The question that circulated around is simple:

is BPM dead?

The question has collected a lot of attention, especially after it has been selected as daily question in the BPM ebizQ forum.

I think the question should be better phrased as "should BPM die?", or if we want to be even more politically incorrect:

"Should we kill BPM?"

That's because BPM is evidently not dead now (and will still be alive until no vendor and consultant can make any money out of it, which will probably never happen). It's on the community to decide responsibly what's the best for BPM, either to kill or save it.

In the links above you can find a lot of people voting for either party (and I add the notable post by Keith Swenson here). As for myself, I'm keen to vote for killing, in this sense: I think that a field that is not able to renew itself and not able to cope with the evident dissatisfaction, skeptical positions or concerns of its users is in a way or the other doomed to fail. And sometimes I have the perception that BPM is not far from that (as well as other related fields, such as model-driven engineering (MDE) for that matter).

Now the question to be asked first is actually the following: why are users skeptical and who should be blamed for it?

I think the response is straightforward: users are skeptical because nobody tells them not to be. In other words, we are selling BPM only to customers that are already buying it (I'm not talking about specific product, customers can decide to move from one to the other, but about the approach by itself).

We seldom manage to get customers intrigued and involved, we continuously try to sell BPM as a geeky way for making business or as a business way for making software. And the needs (and will) of the users are the most neglected part. Just think about other fields: computer manufacturing has tried for years to change the way of using laptops. Then, suddenly (well, more or less.. it got a lot of steps before that paved its way) the iPad came in and it became a social phenomenon. Why? Well, I bet that the overall image made its part, together with the coverage of new use cases that addressed different user needs, and a perfect marketing and communication strategy.

iPad (and iPhone, and then Android..) became the icon of computer consumerization.

The question I ask now is the following.
What should we do for making of BPM the next phenomenon?
Or, if you want, what will be the iPad for BPM?

Personally, I think we need to consider the trends we are witnessing in general in computer science adoption. We should not forget that even the most enterprise-oriented solutions will be purchased now and in the near future by people that are well inside the consumerization of IT and will expect also BPM to go that way somehow.

Bids are open..

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

IFML.org published for reporting on Interaction Flow Modeling Language

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:53:00 +0000

I wish to announce that we have just open the new ifml.org web site, where you can find information on the Interaction Flow Modeling Language and updates on the status of the standardization process within OMG.

As you may remember IFML is meant to be a domain-specific modeling language for describing model-driven specification of user interactions.

The URL of the new site is: http://www.ifml.org/ .

You can find more on this in my posts on IFML, on the WebRatio blog, and obviously on the new IFML Web site.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Social Informatics workshop: Social networking at work with human factors and technical platforms in mind

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:53:00 +0000

Today I'm attending an extremely interesting workshop on Social Informatics at University of Trento. The workshop gathers a diverse audience spanning from computer science to cognitive science and health.
The program of the day included the following presentations:

Supporting Social Interactions for Older Adults. Cristhian Parra, University of Trento, Italy
This talk focused on ways for encouraging social sharing and interactions between elders, and on which could be the fields where elders could provide and get higher benefits in online socialization.

Active Lifestyle applications and motivation instruments. Patricia Silveira, University of Trento, Italy
This talk discussed the role of serious games in preserving elders physical and mental functions and health.

Towards a crowdsourcing platform for elders. Pavel Kucherbaev, University of Trento, Italy. Neocogita S.r.l. - UNITN Spin-off in Cognitive Training. Nicola De Pisapia, University of Trento, Italy
This talk focused on understanding which are the cognitive capabilities that need to be continuously trained and maintained, also through games.
Experience sharing: LiquidGalleries and ComeAlong. Beatrice Valeri, University of Trento, Italy
This talk presented two interesting experiences of sharing: LiquidGalleries is a flexible and social mobile app that allows a personalized and delocalized experience when visiting art exhibitions and museums. People can tag preferred art pieces in advance, get content on the fly, or tag pieces while visiting and sharing them or reading about them later at home.

Knowledge Spaces: Supporting Knowledge and Experience Sharing. Marcos Baez, University of Trento, Italy
This talk presented a set of methodological guidelines for defining experience sharing applications and showed them at work within the scenario of scientific publication sharing.

Sensing social interactions through smart phones. Aleksandar Matic, University of Trento and Create-net, Italy
This talk presented some techniques for detecting social activities in real world considering physical proximity, based on smart phone technologies (as opposed to dedicated hw used in other projects).

Civic Media Platforms. Maurizio Teli and Stefano De Paoli, ahref Foundation (Trento), Italy
The talk focused on platforms that aim at increasing the citizen participation to a common good target in local or government communities or activities, including also citizen journalism. The addressed problem is how to build a social community in this scenario, considering also possible biases (political or social) added. An example is the Timu platfom, focusing on storytelling.

BPM4Crowd. Stefano Tranquilini, University of Trento, ItalyThis presentation suggests some basic technical support to the development of social applications. The idea is to provide a high-level abstraction access to the developer, so as to ease the development of applications. This is demonstrated with an online dating application implemented within a social network.

Convergence of social networking, search and business processes. Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
This was my talk and included an overview on Social BPM and CrowdSearch. I will post some slides very soon.

Recommending content for basic and high education. Rosa Alarcon, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile
This talk was about understanding the information overload in the educational market.
Existing content repositories for elearning are not sufficient. The standard ways for describing them (e.g., SCORM) are quite poor too.
They try to apply recommendation techniques for teachers and they end up with some initial results, including the fact that surprisingly teachers should not be clustered based on their specialization.

Interactive Experiences for supporting elderly or impaired young people. Paolo Massa, FBK, I3, Italy
This talk was about a few experiences on applying technological tools for facilitating tasks and socialization of autistic boys and people with mental disorders.
Other activities are about biases in translation and editing on the web, especially on public sites like wikipedia (e.g., see http://manypedia.com or the wikitrip project), considering gender and political problems.

Credibility evaluation of Web content. Adam Wierzbicki, Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Poland
This speech presented an interesting corpus of Web credibility assessment. The assessment is done by asking people to assess credibility and cleanness of pages.
Game theory has been used also for classifying credibility. This research is a joint work with some Swiss institutes, including EPFL.
The talk also addressed the roles of wikipedia. It's not just an encyclopedia, its a knowledge community, a collaborative innovation network, a community of prosumers, a model for the knowledge economy. But information about it is limited and social behaviours are critical (the environment is getting more and more unpleasant and closed). Overall, it cannot be defined a social centric platform.
Finally, the speech focused on serious social games for elders to motivate social interaction. A good paradigm is gaming based on gossiping because it grants trust, social norms, and ties.

Other speeches I could not attend included:

Cheating in online games / trust and reputation. Stefano De Paoli, ahref Foundation (Trento), Italy
Reseval Mash. Muhammad Imran, University of Trento, Italy
Social Processes over Social Networks. Juan Jose Jara, University of Trento, Italy
Discovery of composition knowledge for mashup development, process mining and BPM (BI). Carlos Rodriguez, University of Trento, Italy
Social Search and recommendation engine for scientific publications. Daniil Mirilenka, University of Trento, Italy
Overview of DALi project. Christopher Raphael Wilkinson, University of Trento, Italy

This was a great and multi-disciplinary experience, very well in line with our research project Search Computing, Cubrik, and BPM4People.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Presentation at Code Generation 2012: User Interaction Modeling: current status of the standardization process

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Together with Emanuele Molteni, I will give a speech at Code Generation 2012 on:
User Interaction Modeling: current status of the standardization process, from the requirements to the language.

In this presentation we will go through our 15-years experience of user interaction modeling for the Web, based on WebML and WebRatio, and we will delve into the challenge of making our own domain-specific language (DSL) a standard. We will present the ongoing activities at OMG towards the standardization of a Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML): we will discuss the requirements and the scope of the sought standard, and we will propose a solution based on our 15-year experience in Web interaction design. We will be inspired by our WebML language, but we will also explain how to go beyond that, so as to cover mobile, multi-touch, collaborative applications, independently from the implementation platform.
We will also show how a dedicated interaction modeling tool like WebRatio can ease the development through a plethora of facilities supporting the developer, including: visual debugging, quick prototyping, multi-platform and cloud deployment, and so on.

I look forward to the exciting days in Cambridge and to the feedback we will get from the public.
If you have suggestions or proposals on the topics you wish us to cover during the speech, feel free to let us know!

If you want to know more about the IFML standardization at OMG, you can visit these posts on IFML.

If you want to know more about the agenda of the event Code Generation 2012, you can visit the official program page.

WebRatio is a proud sponsor of the event. See you in Cambridge then!

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

RDF Data Management. Talk by Tamer Ozsu at Politecnico di Milano

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Tamer Ozsu gave a 1 hour seminar on RDF Data Management today at Politecnico di Milano.

Tamer Ozsu,
University of Waterloo

What I found intriguing is the database and modeling perspective he has on RDF.

We all know that RDF is a machine readable format for describing resources on the web based on triples. A triple is a simple concept composed of three terms: .

Every resource is identified by a URI. The terms can either be URIs or literals.
Terms can have types (rdf:type), which is basically corresponding to a class in modeling sense.
Triples define a graph of vertexes, including URI vertexes and literal vertexes.

RDF can be queried through SPARQL.
In database sense, one could think to a naive solution by saying we have a global schema with only one table with the three columns (Subject, Predicate, Object), upon which one could perform SQL queries.
However, this solution is critical because it's introducing a huge number of joins.

The real relational solutions that one can apply are:

Property table: each class of objects go to a different table (like in normalized relations)
Vertically partitioned table: build a two column table, containing subject and object, ordered by subjects
Exhaustive indexing: consider the whole table and build all the possible indexes upon it

However, typical solutions do not go towards relational schemas. They directly work on the RDF graphs, by applying subgraph matching, by applying isomorphisms. However, off-the-shelf algorithms do not scale well to the size of RDF graphs.

Typically, RDF graphs are not generic graphs. They often implement "star-shape patterns", where one core object is connected to several properties.
Ozsu proposes an encoding technique for optimizing querying.
It defines an adjacency table where for every vertex, you select all its adjacent nodes, and you encode them by applying n-gram technique with n=3, encoding the result in binary format and then putting them all in OR. If you encode the question in the same way, this lets you find a set of nodes that possibly match the question. You need to run a two-step process though: the first step runs an inclusion query, which extracts all the nodes that include a given query node. To make it efficient, you run an S-tree solution: you define a tree and apply the inclusion query. You get a set of potential nodes, and then you perform a join between them based on the predicate label that connect the query nodes. To reduce the space of the join, one can apply pruning and thus apply VS-tree techniques.
The result is complete but not sound, in the sense that you can still get a lot of false positives. In a second step, you verify that the extracted nodes actually match.
Aggregation obviously adds up complexity.

RDF graph or neuron connections?

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Sufficiently advanced software development methodology

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:46:00 +0000

I've been intrigued today by a bold tweet by Meinte Boersma (see his blog to know more about him and his activities)

Any sufficiently advanced software development methodology is indistinguishable from model-driven.

Meinte, I personally fully agree with you. Being also an advocate of Model driven development (and model driven in general, as this blog's title demonstrates), this is not surprising at all.

This also opened up a new line of discussion, on whether MD* should be named a methodology at all or not.
Personally, I'm again with Meinte and I would say that MD* is much more than a bunch of tools. I think it is actually a methodology, or even more an overall way of thinking. If we want to delve into it: I think it's a way to make explicit how we should think.

But real question as I see it is :
why can't an advocate of any discipline state the same it for its own approach?
(e.g., development approaches like: Agile, Lean, test-based, search-based, ...)

My response:
MDE is actually in a much better position, because it's a way for formulating, stating and formalizing ways of thinking that are inherent with the human way of seeing the world (i.e., abstraction). That's why MDE / MDD advocates can actually say that advanced software development methodology is indistinguishable from model-driven.

What's your response?

Let's discuss them all here!

[Incidentally, this is my post #100 on this blog! Thanks to all of you readers and contributors]

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Model interoperabilty in MDE: a lost battle?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:25:00 +0000

If you have been extensively using software modeling tools, you have probably experienced the awful situation where you want to move models from one tool to the other, but this ends up not being possible.
Why? Because you are using different languages? Not at all: even just moving a "standard" model from a modeler to another is a pain.
Concretely, each tool stores and manages the models with its own internal format or its own "dialect", even if a standard format is adopted.

This is a major concern for developers, who need to check every time the actual possibility of exchanging the same kinds of models between editors, and often still need to struggle finding the mappings and defining the bridges between the formats by themselves. This hampers the possibility of effectively exploiting different tools in the development process. This is is definitely a minus for the developers, since having several tools at hand to be used upon the same model could allow to use the different features provided by the different vendors, based on availability but also taste of the developer himself. For instance, in an ideal world a developer could design the models with a modeling tool MT1 (e.g., because the editor of MT1 is more usable and allows higher productivity) and then immediately move to another tool MT2 for the verification phase (e.g., because MT2 provides more precise or extensive rules), and to tool MT3 for model execution (code generation or model interpretation, e.g., because it's not provided by other tools).
Even in the case of well established standards like UML or BPMN, their abstract definition is still not enough for leading modeling tools from different vendors to share their models in a seamless way.

Interoperability is addressed also by standardization bodies. They are well aware that the supposed role of facilitating communication and information interchange that (standard) models should cover, is not a reality yet.
To improve interoperability between modeling tools, standardization bodies have defined specific model interchange languages. Examples of these languages can be found both for GPLs and for DSLs.
The most known model interchange language is XMI (XML Metadata Interchange), a standard proposed by OMG for serializing and exchanging UML models. Unfortunately, even if this has been devised as an interchange format, different tools still adopt it with different flavors. Therefore, the need arises of constraining the language even more. That's why OMG is now running an activity for defining a canonical version of XMI (Canonical XMI), which is a strict subset of XMI and forces the adopters to follow stricter constraints.
A similar situation can be found in the most popular DSLs too. For instance, BPMN has an interchange counterpart in the XPDL language (XML Process Definition Language). In turn, this interchange language suffers of the same problems of XMI. Indeed, it is very difficult to actually move BPMN projects from a modeling environment to another.

This leads to my initial question:

Is modeling interoperability a moving target that will never be reached?
Is it doomed to fail anyway and anyhow?

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Interaction Flow Modeling Language RFP issued at OMG

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:15:00 +0000

WebRatio Cubes roaming San Francisco
while I was engaged in the approval of the
IFML RFP in Santa Clara, CA.

After 9 months of participation to the OMG meetings, intensive interactions with stakeholders, and interesting feedback from big vendors and users (including IBM, Microsoft, Thales, NoMagic, SoftTeam, and others), OMG issued the official request for proposal (RFP) for IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language), a domain-specific modeling language for describing model-driven specification of user interaction. The RFP has been proposed for issuance by the ADTF (Analysis and Design Task Force), and then approved by the AB (Architecture Board) during the last technical meeting in Santa Clara, CA.

The IFML RFP will be the framework where we propose our contribution to OMG standardization based on the extensive 10-year experience on WebML and WebRatio.

If you want more details, you can go and find the requirements directly on the official RFP document, which is publicly available on OMG servers at the url:
http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ad/11-12-06

Or, if you want more personal insights, you can read my complete post on the WebRatio blog.

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Most visited posts in the blog: stats and discussion

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:25:00 +0000

As the end of the year is approaching, I think it's time to draw some conclusions from the stats of this blog.
Here is the list of the top 10 posts in terms of visits since they have been posted.

The top-10 most visited posts in my ModelDrivenStar blog during its 2.5 years life
(mainly on MDD, MDA, BPM, Social Business and Social BPM).

Although the publishing date must be taken into account, I think that one trend is quite evident: general posts on world-wide events are much more popular in terms of visits with respect to specialist-oriented posts that discuss domain-specific or controversial / research issues. This is also because these posts are more likely to be shared and linked in popular sites, possibly.
In fact, the three most viewed posts are:

5th MDA and Agile Modeling Forum, Milano (part 1)
Sep 30, 2010

5th MDA and Agile Modeling Forum, Milano (part 2)

Sep 30, 2010

Social Business Forum 2011: Keith Swenson keynote

Jun 8, 2011

The second set of posts is related to social BPM and other specific topics (MDD,...): they have a definitely lower number of accesses, but on the other side they are the ones which get people more involved in the discussion (you see it from the number of posted comments)

The continuum of Social BPM

May 14, 2011, 8 comments

Social BPM: motivation and impact on the BPM lifec...

Jul 14, 2011, 5 comments

Models and reality: upon the verdicts on MDA/MDD

Mar 7, 2011, 9 comments

A Model-driven Approach to Social BPM Application...

May 10, 2011, 4 comments

Prominent bloggers in the BPM community

Nov 10, 2010, 6 comments

Well, we know we work on niche discussion topics wrt the mainstream Web users. I think the main purpose of a blog like this is to raise the discussion between experts, and only later possibly to share the arising knowledge with the general public. That's why I think this mix is definitely interesting and I'm very satisfied with the current fruition of the contents.
The general interest in this blog is steadily increasing, as shown by the following graph of total number of pageviews.

The increasing popularity of my ModelDrivenStar blog during its 2.5 years life.

I hope that next year will bring further interest and many more reader on board.
Happy new year to all of you (and to your blog, if you have one)!

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Mobile and consumerization -- keys for event-based Social BPM?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:43:00 +0000

I really appreciated the provocative post by Chris Taylor on the potential of Social BPM to replace emails in business processes. While I see the final statement there a little bit too optimistic, total replacement is definitely in my dreams and I agree on the general trend.

Actually, I see we are already in a hybrid situation where email or text messaging is still needed for notifying people (especially end users) but with respect to the past they tend to be just reminders or references to the actual info, which is stored on a (web) system. The reason for this is sometimes different than BPM practices.
For instance, you may think about your online bank statement: you get a notification email what it's available, but then you access it through the bank site. To have them on the web and not within an email is more a matter of security and compliance than of BPM implementation, but what's interesting is that these small steps are slowly shaping the attitude and the minds towards expecting all behaviour and content to be on a system.

Example of bank statement notification.

What I think it's still not yet here is the event management part. This still uses traditional means. For this, I foresee two crucial enablers for future adoption:
- mobile apps (which can be a part of a "extended" BPMS): getting notifications and dashboards would be very convenient and acceptable by the users
- "consumerization" of the business interfaces: if people perceive a (business) UI as user-friendly and convenient, he won't object to using it instead of the email
But this has still to come..

However, I'm not really concerned about the notification phase toward the user, since this is anyway something coming from the enterprise systems. The critical point is to capture the behaviour of the user and the action he performs in response to the trigger. This is what would bring the maximum value to the enterprise in understanding the actual "hidden" procedures that go on within the company or at its borders.
This is the part where email falls short, because email activities cannot be traced in the general case. However, for this I see an even longer way to adoption.

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CUbRIK: content-intensive, time-intensive and human-intensive scalable search

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:09:00 +0000

Today I wish to share with you some details about a new project I'll be involved in throughout the next three years. The project is called CUbRIK and addresses advanced search techniques and tools for multimedia and multimodal search, based on content-intensive, time-intensive and human-intensive scalable processes.

The project aims at experimenting the integration of machine tasks and a variety of human and crowd-sourced tasks, orchestrated by programmable pipelines. The obtained processes will allow content processing, query submission and result computation, relevance feedback processing.
CUbRIK will allow complex search on the web and on enterprise content, by encompassing entity-, time-, and space- aware search functions. This means that people will be able to search for multimedia contents that include specific reference to objects, temporal information or locations. This will be possible because CUbRIK will exploit highly accurate repositories of spatio-temporal entities (locations, events, trends, and so on), correlated through rich semantic associations.
I will participate in the joint research unit of Politecnico di Milano and WebRatio on this, lead by Piero Fraternali.
The project is meant to be the continuation of a successful experience with the Pharos research project. The project will have significant synergies with the Search Computing project and with the topics of crowdsourcing and social web addressed within the BPM4People project.

Here is an introduction video on CUbRIK:

You can find more on this in my interview on the WebRatio site and on the official CUbRIK site I'll keep you posted on the outcomes of the project.

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Bruce Silver's keynote speech at BPMN 2011 workshop: interoperability and other issues in BPMN and UML

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Today at the BPMN 2011 workshop in Luzern, Bruce Silver gave an interesting talk on the status of BPMN 2.0, its adoption, and his proposal for improving its general usage.
I really appreciated the talk because:

it focused on the ambiguities of the BPMN notation, even in the so acclaimed 2.0 version
it highlighted how users tend to be confused once the notation is so complex.

Bruce presented his well-known approach, with the caveat that probably method and style is too weak as a position, so he proposes to move to the rules term, so that people feel somehow more obliged to comply :-) .

The first issue I take away is the problem of interoperability.
I would also identify a trend on what I heard here, through a parallel to what is happening in OMG within the Canonical XMI initiative (read something here), performed by the Canonical XMI Finalization Task Force: given a modeling language (or an exchange format like XMI) which is under-specified, too general, or too open for dialects generation, the need arises for putting some stricter limitations to the designers, for making the tools more interoperable and for improving the quality of the models. Interoperability is the explicit aim of XMI, but, since it failed to an extent. Probably the same would apply to XPDL itself: it was designed as an interchange format for business process models, but then ended up being prone to several dialects and interpretations as well. For XMI, the improved interoperability aim is now in charge of Canonical XMI (while no action is being taken on XPDL). The same purpose is addressed by the BPMN-I initiative by Bruce Silver.

A similar problem that has been addressed is executability:
Also on this, I see strong parallelism with the UML world. There is definitely a push towards executability of models: just think about the executable UML fUML and Alf initiatives (you can find a nice overview on both on Jordi's blog here), at OMG or also some new activities like MiUML, an open-source executable UML project.
On the other side, also BPMN 2.0 is addressing executability and within WebRatio we are also providing somehow a pragmatic approach to BPMN executability, by generating running Web applications. The question is: are customers asking for that? The claim by Bruce is that they are not for BPMN. Most people only want to model, not to execute. Probably, if you look at the share of interested people, for UML it's the same. However, I think executability is an interesting property that should be granted to give a general grounding to reality to models (although I acknowledge that some models may not need/allow that).

A final take from the day is related to choreography.
Interestingly enough, again people are not using it: neither in the BPMN world nor in the UML one. I don't have stats on the usage of the different kinds of UML models, but I'm pretty sure people only use class diagrams basically. Some will use activity diagrams, and few sequence diagrams. Anything else?

Bruce Silver, with Bruce Silver Associates,
presenting his keynote at the BPMN 2011 workshop.

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Representing Social BPM and WebML at the BPMN workshop 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:13:00 +0000

Tomorrow (November 21st) I'll present two contributions to the 3rd international BPMN workshop in Luzern, Switzerland.
My first speech will present our proposed notation for representing Social Business Processes within Social BPM scenarios. Social networking is more and more considered as crucial for helping organizations harness the value of informal relationships and weak ties, without compromising the consolidated business practices embedded in conventional BPM solutions. However, no appropriate notation has been devised for specifying social aspects within business process models. We propose a first attempt towards the extension of business process notations with social features. In particular, we devise an extension of the BPMN notation for capturing social requirements. Such extension does not alter the semantics of the language: it includes a set of new event types and task types, together with some annotation for the pool/lane levels. It actually exploits the extensibility features of BPMN 2.0. Our notation enables the description of social behaviours within BPMN diagrams. To demonstrate the applicability of the notation, we implement it within the WebRatio BPM editor and we provide a code generation framework that automatically produces a process enactment Web application connected with mainstream social platforms.The presentation is available on SlideShare:

Bpmn workshop 2011. A BPMN-based notation for SocialBPM

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My second speech is on Execution Semantics of BPMN through MDE Web Application Generation, using BPMN and WebML. I describe our pragmatic approach based on Model Driven Engineering (MDE) principles for implementing the execution semantics of BPMN. The approach is implemented in WebRatio and is based on a two-step model transformation that transforms BPMN models into Web application models specified according to the WebML notation and then into running Web applications. Thanks to the proposed chain of model transformations it is also possible to fine tune the final application in several ways by refining the intermediate WebML application models. The presentation is available on SlideShare:

BPMN workshop 2011. Execution Semantics of BPMN through MDE Web Application Generation, using BPMN and WebML

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More information on the workshop can be found at: http://www.bpmn-workshop.org/.
In particular, the program of the day is available here.

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Andrei Broder, Yahoo! VP on computational advertising: Seminar on Targeted Advertising.

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:12:00 +0000

Andrei Broder,
Yahoo! Research

Andrei Broder from Yahoo! Research gave two seminars at Politecnico di Milano on introduction to internet monetization (in Como) and on targeted advertising (in Milano) as a branch of computational advertising.
Computational advertising is about finding the best match between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement.
The context can be a web search result page, or a content page provided by a portal. The ads should match these contents.
Ads aim at showing the product, provide information, induce direct action (e.g., direct marketing such as expiring coupons, which induce some urgency in the reader) but also build a general and long-lasting image for a brand.
The core motivation of targeting the advertising is that sending the appropriate advertising to more interested users is the best option for everybody: the advertiser (who gets to the users he is really looking for), the advertising company (who gets more clicks on the ads, i.e., a higher click per view rate, and therefore earns more money), and the user himself (who can finally get advertising interesting for him).
Advertisers use targeting in several ways (geotargeting, demographics, adv. channel, and so on).
The problem addressed by this discipline can be summarized in the problem introduced by information overloading. When there is a large availability of information, there is a scarcity of interest of users. In modern time one must put a huge effort for getting users' attention.
Technically speaking, the goal of targeted advertising is to raise the Accuracy-Reach curve (i.e., precision-recall curve).

Targeted advertising can be achieved through two main approaches:

rule based: the advertiser provides a set of rules for targeting the right segments of users (e.g., based on age, geographical info, sex, and so on).
model based: the advertisement platform defines a user model that lets it address better the kind of users that might be interested in an ad.

Modern targeting is model-based and it relies on the concept of persona, which is basically a relevant behaviour and profile of user. A persona is a facet of personalities. A single user may cover different personas.
The other crucial aspect is based on interests or topics that people like. These can change in time. To play good targeting you need to draw temporal pictures and consider combination of topics that are relevant at the same time.
Demographic targeting is the classical approach.
One important technique is re-targeting, which is a particular case of behavioral targeting: you do something on a web site and later on, when doing searches or other online activities, you get advertisements from that web site.
That can be simply achieved through cookies added to your browser when visiting the original site. The question is how much is this acceptable? Do users feel their privacy has been violated?
One basic solution is obviously to delete cookies in the browser. Statistics show that people tend to be more careful in time and delete cookies more often.

Seminar by Andrei Broder at Politecnico di Milano on Targeted Internet Advertising Issues.

Marco Brambilla introducing Andrei Broder at the seminar in Como.

Andrei Broder during the seminar on Internet Monetization in Como.

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Seminar on Social BPM at SMAU 2011 Milano

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:22:00 +0000

Just to keep track of the events I've been involved recently, here is a quick summary of the seminar I gave together with Stefano Butti at SMAU Milano 2011. The topic was Social BPM. You can find here some picture, an interview (in Italian) and the slides I used (in English).

Other pictures of the event are available on the WebRatio site.
The presentation I gave at SMAU is available on SlideShare:

Perspectives and impact of social BPM - SMAU 2011

I also gave a short interview at the exhibition, which has been published on YouTube:

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10 years of WebRatio (and 15 of WebML)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:25:00 +0000

This is a quick visual summary of the event held at Villa Grumello, Como, Italy, on October 14th, 2011 for the celebration of the 10 years of WebRatio:

Further pictures of the event are available on the WebRatio blog. Some of the ideas I presented there are described in my previous post.
The presentation I gave at the 10-year event is available on SlideShare:

The WebML innovation cycle

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The WebML Innovation Cycle: presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:48:00 +0000

This is the presentatio I gave at the 10 Years celebration of WebRatio:

The WebML innovation cycle

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10 years of WebRatio: thinking about our path to industrialization

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:40:00 +0000

Tomorrow we will celebrate 10 years of WebRatio: this is a good occasion for thinking about the path that led from a university research project to a recognized modeling language (WebML) and a solid, industrialized version of a toolsuite (WebRatio).
The main ingredient of our history are basically:
- a substrate for cross-fertilization coming from European Research projects (W3I3, WebSI, Cooper, BPM4People, ...)
- valuable inputs and requirements from customers (both final customers and software integrators)
- a strong research team that continuously worked on innovating the approach
- the teaching activities within the university
- and the professional developers and analysts at Web Models that work hard for making a good product out of the rough ideas and experiments produced in the university.

These ingredients allowed more than 10 years of evolution of the language and the tool. I tried to summarized the virtuous cycle of our experience in the following picture:

While research provides innovation to both teaching and industrialization, and finally produces the upto date version of the language and methodology.
The tool vendor provides the tool itself and also requirements coming from real industrial customers. The tool is extremely useful for teaching and research purposes not only within our group, but throughout the world (thanks to an academic program that allows education institutions to get free licenses of the tool).
The role of customer is crucial in this picture, because it's from their input (business, technical and UI requirements) that we extract the actual needs of the industry. The whole innovation cycle start there.
Furthermore, customers provide feedback and feasibility/acceptability check upon our findings and solutions.

This virtuous cycle has been able to carry the core idea of the WebML language through 10 years of history in the product (and 15 years of history of the language). The lesson learned is that, if you have a core concept which is flexible and innovable, a good strategy can lead to continuous evolution, improvement and expansion of the idea. In these years the language underwent a huge number of incremental additions:

support of web services
support of business processes
support of semantic web features
support of RIA - AJAX features

If you want to get a flavour of the experience, you may check out this paper, published in John Mylopoulos Festschrift by Springer:S. Ceri, M. Brambilla, P. Fraternali: “The History of WebML Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Model-Driven Development of Web Applications“. In book: Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications, Essays in honor of John Mylopoulos, Springer LNCS, Festschrift series, vol. 5600, 2009, pp. 273-292

As I already commented on modeling-languages.com, our experience is quite similar to the one of the ATL research group in Nantes.

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The social enterprise options

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:40:00 +0000

A huge discussion is ongoing on how to implement the social enterprise paradigm and on why it doesn't seem to deliver as expected.
Obviously, social enterprise is a broad term that comprises a large number of very diverse problems addressed and solutions that can be adopted, within a variety of business scenarios (including social CRM, social BPM and many more).
I think there is a common problem that needs to be solved for each of them: how much to empower the users / workers with respect to keeping in control of the business.
I see a continuous set of possibilities here, but I tried to summarize them in a discrete set of 5 options, as reported in the figure below.
Let's assume a simplified model with two user stereotypes:

internal user: representing a human resource formally enrolled in the enterprise activities and in charge of some tasks or responsibility. For instance, in case of BPM, this would be one of the users assigned a role in the BP and in charge of performing one or more process activities.
external user: representing any actor (from within the company, from partners or third party enterprises, or even from the end user base) that is not formally in charge of any task, but that do contribute somehow to the business through his/her social interactions, feedback and so on.

The continuum of the social enterprise options when deciding how to exploit the social assets.

The possible solutions that can be implemented are:

No social enterprise: the company performs its business in a traditional and completely structured way, without exploiting weak ties, informal interactions, user feedbacks. Everything is performed through the some enterprise software platform.
Empowered enterprise: the company applies some user/worker empowerment by allowing external users to contribute through a social networks. In this case, the actual business is run through the enterprise software platform; the users on the social network have limited interaction options, while the ones on the enterprise platform are enabled to perform the entirety of the needed tasks.The internal user still plays a predominant role here and decides if and when to exploit the actions and events coming from the social platform.
Enterprise democracy: the company adopts a completely transparent policy and lets the external users perform the same actions that internal users can do.
Enterprise view: the company role in this case is to get a view on any kind of complex interactions or behaviour on a social network. In this case the role of the internal user is quite diminished, because he is basically just collecting feedbacks or statistics on the action, while the actual activity is performed on the social network.
Only social: this is the most unstructured scenario, where everything is run on the social basis and there is no actual structured activity ongoing on it.

These 5 scenarios are all good in principle, but if you move to the real business some of them are more important than others.
Let's keep out the two extremes: we are not interested in the non-social case here, and on the other side the completely social one doesn't make much sense in a business setting (actually, even in the pure social network platforms there are some analyses and tasks run by internals, which position the case in the scenario number 4).

Empowered enterprise is probably the most sensible scenario, and I can imagine a lot of situations where this can apply (most of the Social BPM cases for instance).
Enterprise democracy, although positioned in the middle, is quite extreme in considering the role of social contributions. At the moment I can't see any real scenario where to apply this. If you have some, feel free to share it.
Enterprise view instead is typical of several situations where the social behaviour needs to be observed for understanding the positioning of the enterprise (think about social CRM, social Marketing, opinion trend analysis and so on).

Please let me know if you are aware of any other sensible scenario you recognized, and please share also real / realistic cases you experienced.

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Keynote by David Campbell (Microsoft) on Big Data Challenges at VLDB 2011, Seattle

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:03:00 +0000

This post is about the insights I got from the interesting keynote speech by David Campbell (Microsoft) on Big Data Challenges that was given on August 31st 2011 at VLDB 2011, Seattle.

The challenge of big data is not interesting just because of the "big" per sè. It's a multi-faceted concept and all the perspectives need to be considered.
The point is that this big data must be available on small devices and in shorter time-to-concept or time-to-insight than in the past.
We cannot afford any more the traditional paradigm in which the lifecycle is:

pose question
conceptual model
collect data
logical model
physical model
respond question

The question lifecycle can be summarized by the graph below:

However, the current lead time of this is too long (weeks or months). The true challenge is that We have much more data than we can model. The bottleneck is becoming the modeling phase, as shown below:

The correct cycle to be adopted is the sensemaking developed by Pirolli and Card in 2005 in the Intelligence Analysis community.
The notion is to have a frame that explains the data and viceversa the data supports the explanatory frame, in a continuous feedback and interdependent relationship. (see the Data-frame theory for sensemaking by Klein et al.)
So far, this is viable in modeled domains, while big data expands this to unmodeled domains.
This needs to enable automatic model generation.
The other challenge is to grant that the new paradigm is able to comprise the traditional data application and that it will be able to get the best of traditional data and big data.
A few patterns have been identified for big data:

Digital shoebox: retain all the ambient data to enable sensemaking. This is motivated by the cost of data acquisition and data storage going toward zero. I simply augment the raw data with sourceID and instanceID and keep it for future usage or sensemaking.
Information production: turn the acquired data from digital shoebox to other events, states, and results, thus transforming raw data into information (still requiring subsequent processing). The results go back in the digital shoebox
Model development: enable sensemaking direclty over the digital shoebox without extensive up front modeling, so as to create knowledge. Simple visualizations often suffice for getting the big picture of a trend or a behaviour (e.g., home automation sensors can provide the habits of a family).
Monitor, mine, manage: develop and use generated models to perfom active management or intervention. Models (or algorithms) are automatically generated so as to be installed as a new system (e.g., think to fraud detection or other fields).

I think that these patterns can actually be defined more as new development phases than patterns. Their application can significantly shorten the time-to-insight and is independent on the size of the datasource.
On the other side, I think this paradigm can apply more to sensor data that generally speaking big data (e.g., datasources on the web), but still has a huge potential both for personal information management, social networking data and also for enterprise management.

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BPMN and Design Patterns for Engineering Social BPM Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:09:00 +0000

Our paper "BPMN and Design Patterns for Engineering Social BPM Solutions" (authored by Marco Brambilla, Piero Fraternali, and Carmen Vaca) has been presented today, August 29th, 2011, at the 4th Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2’11), co-located with BPM 2011, in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
This paper presents a process design methodology, supported by the WebRatio tool suite, for addressing the extension of business processes with social features. The social process design exploits an extension of BPMN for capturing social requirements, a gallery of social BPM design patterns that represent reusable solutions to recurrent process socialization requirements, and a model-to-model and mode-to-code transformation technology that automatically produces a process enactment Web
application connected with mainstream social platforms.
The full paper can be downloaded from here.
The presentation that was given is reported below (together with an embedded demo video of the implemented prototype).

BPMN and Design Patterns for Engineering Social BPM Solutions

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Touch base on Model Driven Software Engineering: MDE, MDD, MDA and (other) stuff. What about a new book?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:21:00 +0000

I think it's time for Model Driven Software Engineering practitioners (and lurkers) to touch base, see where we are and where we are heading to, and finally spread the world.

That's why I felt the need of a comprehensive and agile reference on the topic, and having not found one that fits the needs of both developers and designers, and of both enterprise and academia, I decided, together with Jordi Cabot and Manuel Wimmer, to start working on a new Model Driven Software Engineering book to be published next Spring by Morgan&Claypool.

The choice of the publisher and the series is very much in line with our philosophy of providing an agile, easy to fetch reference book, at a reasonable price, and available all over the world.Several students will actually be able to get it for free, if their institution is affiliated with the M&C subscription program.

Our book will approach the topic of MDE from a high level perspective, and will proceed by describing the various techniques, methods, languages and technologies in this field with a pragmatic and hands-on style. The book will target people with no previous knowledge on MDE with the goal of giving them a clear idea of what MDE is, what it is good for and how to apply it.
We believe the book will be interesting for professionals (software developers, project managers, CTOs,..), university students in academic courses, and consultants on MDE topics.
Some of the topics we will cover in the book are:

an introduction to MDE and the plethora of acronyms that surround it (MDD, MDA, MOF, GML, DSL)
an overview to the General Modeling Languages (GML) approach
the Domain Specific (Modeling) Languages (DSL / DSML) approach, with all its variant and application issues
the model transformations concepts and languages, including model-to-model and model-to-text transformations and code generation techniques
the basics of the supporting infrastructure for MDE

All the topics will be illustrated through a running example in a very pragmatic way, so as to help readers to easily grasp the complexity of MDE. We will describe the full MDE-based development process (from high-level models to the final running applications, but covering also maintenance, reengineering, and so on). Readers will be able to easily test and execute the examples. The reference platform for them will be the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) build on top of the well-known Eclipse open source platform, but references to other tools and platforms will be provided too.

We would be glad to get your opinion on this initiative and to tell us what you would like to see in the book or any other comment that can be useful while we are writing it. The TOC has been already defined (based on the topics above), but we can think of extending/reducing some parts if we see you are interested in specific topics!
Feel free to comment and propose ideas here or on Jordi's blog.

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