MD*: The Model-Driven Star blog

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.

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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

View more presentations from Marco Brambilla

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

View more presentations from Marco Brambilla.

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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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My take on today's Social BPM tweet jam

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:29:00 +0000

Today I participated, together with an impressive number of world-renowned experts in BPM, to a hectic tweet jam on Social BPM.
I curated a (slightly remixed) recording of the session, which is available here (http://storify.com/marcobrambi/socialbpm) and embedded below.
The participation was so intense that it was really hard to keep the pace of the discussion (especially because I was having a conf call in parallel), so the recording has been definitely useful.
To get an idea, here are the final statistics on the discussion: 521 tweets generated 375,886 impressions, reaching an audience of 24,348 followers.

When I went through the contribution, I found a lot of hidden pearls that I missed.
Overall, my impression is the following: despite some criticism on the term "Social BPM", I would say there is wide consensus on the need of integrating rigid BPM approaches with others that consider user interactions as crucial value for the enterprise. To my surprise, several experts (including Nathaniel Palmer and Clay Richardson) agree that there is a substantial request for these technologies by customers, especially in "non-traditional" scenarios. On the other side, the state of the art of the tools and systems is still perceived as weak or only partially addressing the actual needs.
This is definitely encouraging because it leaves a lot of space for research, improvement, and exciting evolutions in the field.

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Social BPM: motivation and impact on the BPM lifecycle

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:26:00 +0000

A lot of discussions are ongoing on the motivations and role of social BPM, in particular on how and when it should impact on the classical BPM lifecycle.

In terms of motivations, I think the social extension of a business process can be regarded as a specific optimization phase, where the organization seeks efficiency by extending the reach of a business process to a broader class of stakeholders. This general objective articulates into different optimization goals, which constitute the motivation of the process socialization effort:

Exploitation of weak ties and implicit knowledge: the goal is discovering and exploiting informal knowledge and relationships to improve activity execution.
Transparency: the goal is making the decision procedures internal to the process more visible to the affected stakeholders.
Participation: the goal is engaging a broader community to raise the awareness about, or the acceptance of, the process outcome.
Activity distribution: the goal is assigning an activity to a broader set of performers or to find appropriate contributors for its execution.
Decision distribution: the goal is eliciting opinions that contribute to the making of a decision.
Social feedback: the goal is acquiring feedback from a broader set of stakeholders, for process improvement.
Knowledge sharing: the goal is disseminating knowledge in order to improve task execution; at an extreme, this could entail fostering mutual support among users to avoid performing costly activities (e.g., technical support).

To attain these objectives, the social BPM features (or levels of adoption) must be incorporated into the business process lifecycle.
I tried to understand on which phases of the classical BPM cycle the Social BPM levels of adoption impact more and I ended up with this simple mapping:

Social BPM levels mapped to the classical BPM cycle

While participatory design obviously impacts more in the design and modeling phases, the social enactment and participatory enactment apply on the execution phase. Finally, process mining involves some technical aspects at execution time (e.g., logging of events) but then plays its role mainly in the monitoring and optimization phases.

I wish also to highlight that, when the model of the social process is consolidated, the deployment phase might also play an important role: it consists of a the technical phase that produces the actual executable version of the social process enactment application. This task might be complicated by the need of interacting at runtime with social software to support the social interactions required by the process model (in case of social or participatory enactment). These platforms are available online and can be used as a service in the enactment of the process (e.g., LinkedIn for skill and people search, Doodle for decision distribution, etc.). However, the integration of the BPM runtime to the social services is a nontrivial task, complicated by the absence of an interoperability standard masking the technical details of the APIs of each different platform.

To face this problem means to support easy and quick deployment, which is a critical enabler for convincing the management to embrace some social approach with limited cost. For that one can rely on technical architectures and development tools that automate the generation of process enactment applications from Social BPMN process models.
In the paper we recently wrote for the BPMS2 workshop we describe how to exploit the WebRatio architecture and tool for this purpose. WebRatio applies some model transformations to:

first map Social BPMN models into the WebML Domain Specific Language (DSL) application models
and then the WebML models into Java components connected to social software APIs

We will delve further into these issues thanks to a research project called BPM4People that has been recently funded by the European Commission within the 7FP Capacities program for SMEs.

Do you see any other possible motivations or impacts of social BPM?

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The rising sun of Social BPM - upcoming TweetJam

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:49:00 +0000

Despite (or maybe because of) the vast discussion on whether this is just a buzzword, a lipstick on a pig, or even a bad practice for BPM, I have to say that I see a continuously rising attention on Social BPM.

This is demonstrated by a huge amount of posts by prominent BPM practitioners (see also the most recent one by Jim Sinur of Gartner), presentations at events (see for instance Alec Sharp's speech at BPM Europe, Keith Swenston's and Bill Johnston's at the Social BPM Forum, and many others), specific scientific events on the topic (e.g., the BPMS2 workshop at the BPM conference), and even research project focusing on it (such as the yet-to-start BPM4People project funded by the EU Commission).

Several vendors integrate some kind of social BPM practices in their tools now (Appian, IBM BlueWorks Live, and so on).
However, I was quite surprised when I got an invitation to join the Tweet Jam on Social BPM promoted by WfMC and Future Strategies publisher.
If you want to join, the discussion is scheduled for June 21, 2011 @ 11.45-12.45 EDT and will be moderated by Clay Richardson from Forrester Research.
The discussion will be on the challenges facing business and IT practitioners in understanding work, planning and collaboration under the impact of Social Technology.
We still have to see whether this rising sun will bring light to the BPM field, or if it will fail in its objectives. My 2 cents: people still need to understand which are those objectives.
But my bet is that Social BPM has some power and can avoid BPM "To wear that ball and chain" forever.

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Canonical XMI, MEF, IMM, SIMF, FACESEM. Highlights from the Salt Lake City OMG ADTF meeting, June 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:16:00 +0000

I attended the OMG meeting in Salt Lake City from June 22 to June 24. Here are a few highlights from the Analysis and Design Task Force (ADTF) meeting I attended on Wednesday 22.

An RFC for a canonical XMI format
Pete Rivett is issuing today a RFC for a canonical XMI format at OMG.
I think this is an extremely valuable proposal, because you all know that the complete XMI syntax is so complex and open that basically allow to define so many "XMI dialects" that it's actually impossible to talk about interoperability of XMI documents among different tools.
Among the various aspects addressed by the proposal, the most crucial are:

a set of constraints reducing the number of options in the headline formats: a root XMI element is required, all properties must be specified as XML elements except for the ones in XMI namespace (e.g., xmi:id), uuids are mandatory, and so on
the compliance levels that are allowed are: Canonical XMI Schema, Canonical XMI Export, and Canonical XMI Import

IMM - Information Management MetamodelPete Rivett also discussed IMM, a (revised) proposal to an RFP for bridging and mapping different specification languages covering the information management at large.
In particular, the scope of IMM covers: the business world (ER), the data base world (Relational), the application world (XML Schema, UML, LDAP), traceability, and other models (ontologies, Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules).
The work on this is huge and ongoing (e.g., the LDAP coverage is completely missing)

SIMF - Semantic Information Modeling for Federation RFP
Cory Casanave proposed an RFP called SIMF that addresses "the data problem", i.e., the issue of federating different systems and architectures that should share the same information. This includes all the issues of information sharing, interoperability, shared services, and so on. It might be considered the problem of the decade in terms of impact, cost, and volume both in private enterprises and public administrations.
In terms of CIM/PIM/PSM layers, SIMF focuses on CIM/PIM, by defining models and mappings between levels and within each level. SIMF comprises a kernel model, a kernel of Common Logic.
SIMF includes a language for specifying Conceptual Domain Models (CDM) and a language to express Logical Information Model (LIM) for describing data context, data structures and viewpoints. There might be overlap between CDM and LIM. Model Bridging Relations (MBR) aims at semantically relate similar information concepts.
Expected submissions shall provide both visual and textual concrete sintaxes for CDM, LIM and MBR.
SIMF itself should be federated.
The feedback on this proposal highlighted that more than a standard on this (which is partly covered by other standards already) a set of other artefacts are needed: a methodology, possibly a book, and some tools. We will see..

WebML and a RFP for User Interaction Modeling
Stefano Butti and I presented our experience with WebML and WebRatio and we opened a discussion on the need and the scope required for a user interaction modeling language. More details on this initiative can be found in my previous post here and Stefano Butti's post here.
The slides we presented this time are publicly available and can be browsed below. Other information on the outcome of the discussion in Salt Lake City is available in another Stefano's post here.WebML for OMG

Once again, we got good feedback from the audience. Based on this, we decided to:

opt for an RFP process
work on and circulate a first version of the RFP in the upcoming summer and discuss/issue the RFP in the next meeting
focus the RFP on general Web, Mobile and interactive "business" GUIs

Metamodel Extension Facility RFP

Steve Cook (Microsoft) presented the MEF proposal. The motivation of this stands Profiles have a lot of drawbacks: ambiguous purpose wrt metamodels, poor integration with OCL, weak expressive power (e.g., stereotypes do not support all features of MOF classes), applicability only to UML (e.g., BPMN is out), filtering not used, and so on.
The RFP is quite challenging because the proposals should not overlap with MOF, support fixed-model tools, and also MOF-based tools.
A quick summary by Steve himself is available on his blog.

Foundation for the Agile Creation and Enactment of Software Engineering Methods RFP
Ed Seidewitz presented a revised version of the RFP proposed at last meeting as ESSENCE. The RFP is co-authored by Ivar Jacobson and Arne Berre too.

Ed Seidewitz presenting at OMG ADTF in Salt Lake City.

The bottom line here is to foster specification of software engineering processes by providing a simple, easy to use specification language that is more agile than the existing proposals (like the SPEM and ISO ones). This would help practitioners design their own SE processes, without the need of involving expert methodologists (and consequent long and expensive design cycles).
Personally, I think this is definitely needed in the software engineering community and also for teaching purposes.

Other topics that have been addressed include: Web Architectures for ODM (by Elisa Kendall), creating an OMG standard UML profile for NIEM RFP (by Vijay Mehra and David Bray), Common Terminology Services Release 2 (Harold Solbrig), and Foundation for the Agile Creation and Enactment of Software Engineering Methods RFP (Ed Seidewitz, Arne J. Berre, and Ivar Jacobson).

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Image of Salt Lake City: CC by Kwong Yee Cheng

ExploreWeb workshop on exploration of (Semantic) Web data at ICWE 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:30:00 +0000

Together with Piero Fraternali and Daniel Schwabe I organized a workshop at ICWE 2011 on on Search, Exploration and Navigation of Web Data Sources, named ExploreWeb 2011.
It was a new challenge for us, because it was at its first edition, but I can say it has been a quite successful event.
We got 12 submissions and we accepted 7 of them, and furthermore we invited Soren Auer as a keynote speaker to start the day. The attendance was also very good, as we got 25+ people in the room for the whole day.
Here is a quick summary of the day.

Soren Auer: Exploration and other stages of the Linked Data Life Cycle

Soren Auer at exploreWeb 2011.

Soren Auer from University of Leipzig gave a very nice keynote talk at the beginning of the exploreWeb workshop on the entire lifecycle of Linked Data.
The talk was centered on the requirements imposed by the continuous growth of the Linked Open Data cloud (LOD) and on the life cycle associated to the LD contents. Such life cycle comprises the following phases:

Extraction of LOD: extracting linked data is a challenge per se. Indeed, for instance in the case of DBpedia extraction from Wikipedia, the issues to be considered include: keeping aligned the semantic version with the user generated one; and at the same time coping with the messy and incoherent "schemas" offered by Wikipedia infoboxes. For covering this aspect, a "Mapping Wiki" based on a higher level ontology has been created for defining the mapping between labels in Wikipedia.
Storage and Querying of LOD: the critical issue here is that it's still 5 to 50 time slower than RDBMS. On the other side, it obviously grants increased flexibility (especially at the schema manipulation level). A new benchmark recently performed by Soren's group provides new performance results for Virtuoso, Sesame, Jena, and BigOWLIM. The benchmark was performed on 25 frequent DBpedia queries and shows that Virtuoso consistently grants speed two times higher than the competitors, while Jena confirms as the most poorly performing platform.
Authoring of LOD: different approaches can be adopted, including: Semantic Wikis (e.g., OntoWiki), in which users do not edit text but semantic descriptions built with forms. We can identify two main classes of semantic wikis: semantic text wikis and semantic data wiki. A new approach is now adopted by the new RDFa Content Editor, which uses OpenCalais and other APIs for helping annotating the text within a WYSIWYG environment.
Linking LOD: approaches to linking can be automatic, semi-automatic (e.g., see the tools SILK and LIMES), or manual (e.g., see Sindice in UIs and Semantic Pingback).
Evolution of LOD: the evolution of linked data is a critical problem, not yet fully addressed. The EvoPat project is a first attempt to formalize the problem and the solution, by defining a set of evolution patterns and anti-patterns. Some features are already integrated into Ontowiki.
Exploration of LOD: Challenging because of: size, heterogeneity, distributedness. Spacial and faceted exploration of LinkedGeoData #ld #semweb. #freebase is the best search assistant for #ld . Also: Parallax and neofonie faceted browser . domain-specific exploration tools (relationship finder on RDF), visual query builders, ...
Visualization of LOD: on this, Soren highlighted that with the continuously growing size of LOD, the (semantic) data visualization will become more and more important. He presented some preliminary approaches but a lot of work still needs to be done in this field.

In the discussion and Q&A that followed the keynote, the hot topics have beenthe performance benchmark and the authoring of LOD related to the end users v expert/ technical user

Alessandro Bozzon: A Conceptual Framework for Linked Data Exploration

Alessandro Bozzon

Alessandro discussed some motivation to the problem of exploration and integration of linked data sources and then described the Search Computing approach to linked data exploration, which applies the general purpose SeCo framework to the specific needs of the LOD.
More on this can be found on the Search Computing web site, including also a demo and a video.

Daniel Schwabe: Support for reusable explorations of Linked Data in the Semantic Web
Daniel Schwabe started his talk with some strong motivation statements.
One of the main benefits of linked data should be that data bring their own self-description.
However, if you work on it you may end up doing really dirt works on the data, to make them linked.

Daniel Schwabe

When you go to exploration interfaces, expectations of the end users might be very different with respect to what the exploration tools for tech-savvy user. That gap needs to be filled, and Rexplorator moves in that direction. Explorator was presented in the Linked Data workshop(LDOW) in Madrid in 2009. Now its extension Rexplorator has been demonstrated at ISWC 2010 and now presented extensively at the ExploreWeb workshop.
With it, you can do composition of functions, parametrization of operators, storage and reuse of "use cases", with a query by example approach. The UI lets you think that you are dealing with resources and sets of resources, but actually the system is dealing only with triples and SPARQL queries.
A pretty interesting approach, which has something in common with the Search Computing one, and also features great UI and expressive power. It also covers faceted search.
Rexplorator is a MVC based application implemented with Ruby using ActiveRDF DSL.

In-Young Ko

Han-Gyu Ko and In-Young Ko. Generation of Semantic Clouds based on Linked Data for Efficient Multimedia Semantic Annotations
The presentation started from the definition of the requirements of semantic cloud generation: the idea is to produce tag clouds and help people annotating multimedia contents (e.g., for IP-TV contents).
The requirements include being able to:

identify the optimal number of tag clouds
balance the size of the different clouds shown to the users
check the coherency between the clouds and avoid ambiguity of each cloud.

The proposed lifecycle includes three phases:

locating the spotting points: with a context-aware searching of linked data, starting from more important and densely connected nodes. More general nodes are more likely to be selected
selecting the relations to traverse: the aim here is to reduce the RDF graph to the set of relevant relations only
identify term similarity and clustering of tags.

If compared with simpler approaches for constructing clouds (e.g., based on rdf:type and SKOS parsing), this approach leads to better and more meaningful clouds of keywords.
The implemented system overlays the generated clouds upon the IPTV screen and let people select the tags.

Mamoun Abu Helou. Segmentation of Geo-Referenced Queries

Mamoun Abu Helou

This work aimed at manipulating natural language, multi-objective queries so as to split them into several simple single-aim queries.
The focus of the work was limited to geographical queries. It exploited Geowordnet, Yago, GeoNames, and Google GeoCoder API for identifying the important geographical concepts in the query. Both instances (e.g., Louvre) and classes (e.g., museum) can be identified.
A benchmark over 250 queries show promising results for the approach.

Peter Dolog.SimSpectrum: A Similarity Based Spectral Clustering Approach to Generate a Tag Cloud
Peter's work addressed the specific problem of clustering within tag clouds.There are some problems in clouds: recent tags are overlooked because they have lower frequency; frequent ones are often useless; ... .
The presentation delved into the discussion on the selection of the best algorithms for clustering of tags.
The aim was to reduce the number of tags, pick the most relevant ones, and put at nearby locations in the cloud the semantically close terms. The evaluation of the approach has been calculated in terms of coverage, overlap and relevance between the queries and the generated clouds, in the medical field.

Matthias Keller. A Unified Approach for Modeling Navigation over Hierarchical, Linear and Networked Structures

Matthias Keller

This is a visionary presentation on the needs and possible directions for a navigational model for data structures.
Data structures are very diverse (trees, graphs, ...), and extracting hyperlink/access structure from the content structure is very difficult (basically there is no automatic transformation between the two). CMS enable something of this, but with limited expressive power and difficult configurability.
The idea is then to model:

the content organization supporting different graph-based content structures
the description of the access structures
the relation between the content and the access structure

The authors propose a graphical notation for covering these requirements and define some navigation patterns using this language.

Rober Morales-Chaparro. Data-driven and User-driven Multidimensional Data Visualization
This work aims at extracting automatically a set of optimal visualization of complex data, covering the entire lifecycle:

the data model
the data mining
the information model
the visualization proposal engine
the visualization model
the code generation
and the final generated application for the end user

To conclude, here is a simple tag cloud generated for the content discussed during the workshop:

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Alec Sharp at IRM BPM Europe - Soft stuff is the hard stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:56:00 +0000

Alec Sharp giving his speech
at IRM BPM Europe

One of the highlight of the BPM Europe event (especially for the BPM hardcore people, at least :) has been the speech given by Alec Sharp on June 9th.

The main point of the discussion is again that the human issues are the key for effective business process re-organization.And Organization Development (OD) is a perfect discipline that can complement the BPM initiatives.

First message: obviously, BPR might be designed as a process itself. And as such, it crosses several enterprise divisions. To grant success, BPM projects must get alliances among different actors, including BPM analysts, and even more Organization Development consultants.

Second message: what is OD really? Possible definitions span 40 years of practices, but the common bottomline is: reshaping behaviour and structure for improving enterprise process effectiveness.
There are a lot of commonalities with BPM practices. However, people in the two fields seldom collaborate.
This is quite unfortunate, considering the explicit dependency we have:
Enterprise culture, behaviours, core competencies and management style put strong constraints to business process, and also not accidentally the enacted business processes can impact the enterprise culture in a deep way.

Third message: this is not just an abstract statement. Concretely this applies to every tools used for enacting the processes.
For instance, measures and incentives that locally aim at optimizing the performances of single actors may lead to huge inefficiencies at the overall process level. Just imagine the typical sales incentives: this tends to lead to orders very unevenly spread along the year, which in turn make it difficult (and less efficient) for other functions (production, shipping) to reach their goals.

Fourth message: the differentiators.
The core question is: what differentiates you from the other providers of the same products/services? One should be careful when deciding. For instance, if you aim at operational excellence: this actually means you are more efficient but less flexible.
In general, it's difficult (impossible?) to excel in more than one vertexes of the triangle: operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy. You need to set your trade off point among the three.

All this may end up in huge conflicts and distress of people, if OD perspective is not considered.
Once one direction is chosen, people need to be involved and motivated. Otherwise, they might work on another direction and finally get frustrated / betrayed once they get to know the actual direction the company is moving towards.

Fifth message: hitting the belief wall.
It's always the case that a set of beliefs / value statements within the enterprise can stop the growth of the company. To go beyond this, you need to change people's beliefs!

So here it comes my question. Can Social BPM help in these issues? Your opinion is greatly appreciated.
(and if you are not sure what I mean with Social BPM, you may have a look at this)

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Social Business Forum 2011: Keith Swenson keynote speech on the Quantum Enterprise

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:28:00 +0000

Keith Swenson keynote speech at the Social Business Forum2011 on the Quantum Enterprise

Today I attended the Social Business Forum 2011 in Milan. It was a great event, with a huge line of speakers and events. The audience was huge (1200+ people I think), so big praise to Open Knowledge for the organization.

If you want to grasp the level of social interaction, just look on twitter to the #sbf11 tweetflow. You could barely follow it in realtime.

I have no time to go through the entire stack of sessions, but I wish at least to report here on the keynote speeches at the Social Business Forum. Great speeches from Dell, Oracle, and Fujitsu VPs actually.

Among the many things going on, the Social BPM book was launched at the event, sponsored by WebRatio and the event itself (during Keith Swenson speech at the end of the day). That's why I'm focusing especially on Keith's speech. Some hints on the other speeches are reported too.

Keith Swenson speech (Fujitsu): the Quantum Enterprise

The discussion basically start from this simple question: Why do we think that we should have simple processes?

Chaos and turbulence are there, both at the macroscopic physical level (thus challenging the Newtonian thinking) and at the atomic level (Quantum thinking). Why shouldn’t they be there within an organization made up of complex human beings interacting?

Repeatability and mass production at the office place work well until you stay at the level of routine work. However, this level is being more and more automated and thus eliminated. We have now a much larger percentage of work which can be defined “knowledge work”.

What distinguishes a knowledge worker is the way to apply their knowledge by figuring out what they need to do based on the intelligence and knowledge. This spans from university professors, to paramedics, rescue and firefighting crews, police detectives, judges, and so on. They follow up clues and they have no way of predicting and modeling in advance what to do.

The thing is: 40% of workers today are knowledge workers and this percentage is going to increase.

While a good model for the enterprise for routine workers is a machine, a good model for knowledge workers is an ecosystem, ie. a place with several parts that are self-organizing and self-regenerating.

Thus, the paradigm is moving from a Newtonian model (external observability, smoothness, simple rules, predictability) towards a Quantum model (limited precision, turbulence, relationship-based, unpredictability).

This also implies a move from push to pull models in the organization. The push model assumes centralized choices, passive consumers. The pull model instead bases on loosely coupled and modular systems.

So, enterprises should be careful of not to oversimplify. The value today must be on promoting the culture of sharing knowledge and decentralizing.

We are on the verge of this change, and enterprises must be able to master this transition. Here is the link to Keith's presentation:

Original presentation: Enabling Quantum Organizations as a new level of effectiveness - Keith D. Swenson

View more presentations from the Social Business Forum 2011

Bill Johnston speech (Dell): Paving the Way to Social Business

On this, you can directly look at the slides that the author put on SlideShare:

Keynote from Social Business Forum 2011

View more presentations from Bill Johnston

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DSL classification: a quick Domain Specific Language dictionary

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:43:00 +0000

I wrote a post some time ago on the classification of DSLs, that presented some dimensions of DSLs:

Focus of a DSL (vertical vs. horizontal)
Style of a DSL (declarative vs. imperative)
Notation of a DSL (graphical or textual)

But today (triggered by the discussions at Code Generation) I realized I overlooked a few obvious classification dimensions that are worth mentioning:

Internal DSL vs. External DSL
As defined by Marting Fowler in his blog, External DSLs have their own custom syntax, you can write a full parser to process them, and you write self-standing, independent models/programs using them
Internal DSLs instead consist in using a host language to give the host language the feel of a particular domain or objective, either by embedding pieces of a DSL in the host language or by providing abstractions, structures or functions upon it.

Interpreted DSL vs. compiled DSL
(aka., model interpretation vs. code generation)
This dimension has triggered a long debate in the MDD community. Model interpretation consists in reading and executing the DSL script at run-time one statement at a time, exactly as programming languages interpreters do.
Code generation instead consists into applying a complete model-to-text (M2T) transformation at deployment time, thus producing an executable application, as compilers do for programming languages.

If you want, you can suggest further classification dimensions you deem relevant for DSLs, your contributions is really appreciated.

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Highlights from LWC 2011: Language Workbench Competition 2011 (co-located with Code Generation 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:11:00 +0000

Language Workbenches, as defined originally by Martin Fowler, are tools aiming to cope with DSL creation and code generation to increase the level of abstraction of software development [credit to Pedro J. Molina for the reference].The Language Workbench Competition at Code Generation 2011 aimed at gathering and comparing the features of different workbenches available today, through a small challenge based on a set of requirements.
Then, the challenge was summarized in the Code Generation main event. Here is a quick writeup of the presentations of two good representatives of the presented tools, not focusing on the performance within the challenge but more oriented to giving an overview to the field (especially for novices).
The complete list of submitters includes:

Xtext, resources here
MPS, resources here
MetaEdit+, resources here.
EMFText/JaMoPP, resources here
OOMEGA, resources here
Whole Platform, resources here
Essential, resources here
Spoofax, resources here
Intentional, resources here
Rascal, resources here
Atom3, resources here
Obeo Designer, resources here
Cedalion, resources here and here

Among the above, I could only attend the summary of the two contributions from OOMEGA and Intentional:

OOMEGA (www.xenium.de, www.oomega.net), presented by Christian Merenda

Oomega is based on Eclipse, supports ATL for M2M transformations and Xpand for M2T transformations.

It’s based on the theoretical graph-based Edge Algebra

Upon it, there is M2L as a metamodeling language.

Oomega is the tool that implements it.

It works with continuous and incremental changes between the graphical and textual representation of the models.

The tool is showcasing 5 interrelated DSLs.

Intentional Domain Workbench (http://intentsoft.com/), presented by Mats Helander
It's a projectional editor, not a text-based tool (i.e., based on a parser). It's instead based on a tree representation of the languages, which is then reshaped based on projections.
References are not name-based but node-based instead. Every node has an ID and you reference them. So, if you change a name of a class, you get automatic updates in the referenced objects.
The specification is based on an extension of C#, extended with some DSLs.
You can get textual or graphical projections, and also document-like projections; you can mix different notations.
This allows involvement of non-technical, business users too
You also get for free code-completion-like features.
The technical paper presenting the solution to the challenge is available here.

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Social BPM: links, references and resources

noreply@blogger.com (Marco Brambilla) — Wed, 18 May 2011 17:20:00 +0000

In this post I wish to summarize the opinions and the discussions on the hot topic Social BPM. I think this provides a good understanding of the topic and a feeling on the debate that is still ongoing. If you know about other useful references, feel free to add them (self-citations are also welcome). Also, if you are cited and you think your position is not well represented by the quote, feel free to detail it.
One further valuable resource is the Social BPM handbook that will be available starting June 2011,on which I also wrote a chapter on A Model-driven Approach to Social BPM Applications.

Uhoh. Social BPM in the real world? [Thanks to Jim Sinur for pointing this out. Credits for Dilbert: Scott Adams]

Who is socializing in Social BPM, Keith Swenson
http://social-biz.org/2010/05/12/who-is-socializing-in-social-bpm-2/

"Proper use of social software will be about individuals producing, publishing and running their own processes. Not collaboration on the design phase, but designing individually, and collaborating with a completed process. This won’t just be the BPM lifecycle using social software, it will be the elimination of the BPM lifecycle, the elimination of a design phase, the elimination of the separation between designers and workers."

Will Social Revive Interest In BPM? Will BPM Make Social Relevant?, Sandy Kemsley

http://www.column2.com/2010/05/will-social-revive-interest-in-bpm-will-bpm-make-social-relevant/

"Everyone could be a writer in the blogosphere, but in reality, only a tiny fraction of those who read blogs actually write blogs, or even comment on blogs. The same will likely occur in runtime collaboration in BPM: only a fraction of users will design processes, even though all have the capability to do so, but all will benefit from it."

Knowledge Management, Social Media, Social BPM and Control, Sandy Kemsley
http://www.column2.com/2011/03/knowledge-management-social-media-social-bpm-and-control/

"There is a paradigm shift happening in the way that organizations understand control. Control no longer means that management dictates every action that every employee takes, but rather that appropriate levels of control are given to everyone so that they can control their environment and make it most effective for their tasks at hand."

The Continuum of Social BPM, Marco Brambilla
http://www.modeldrivenstar.org/2011/05/continuum-of-social-bpm.html

"The introduction of social features in business processes can be achieved at different levels, according to a spectrum of possibilities: from closed BPM to Participatory Design, Participatory enactment, Social enactment, and Process Mining."

Want Value From Social? Add Structure, Tom Davenport
http://blogs.hbr.org/davenport/2010/11/want_value_from_social_add_str.html

"I'm becoming convinced that the way to gain value is to combine computer-based sociality with computer-based structure. [...] The combination of the social and structuring aspects of technology ensures that online social activities are oriented to getting work done. The addition of structure makes everyone more conscious of the work tasks at hand, which limits the desire for purely social interaction. "

The BPM Game Changer, Adam Deane
http://adamdeane.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/the-bpm-game-changer/

"It’s just a matter of time before organisations will be purchasing Twitter-like software for their internal use, and BPM will need to adapt to this new environment. Yes, Google Wave failed. But that doesn’t mean that the trend is dead.. Other companies are building Twitter for Business applications"

Is Social BPM A Methodology, A Technology, Or Just A Lot Of Hype?, Clay Richardson
http://blogs.forrester.com/clay_richardson/10-05-20-social_bpm_methodology_technology_or_just_lot_hype

"On the one hand, some feel that social BPM is all about tools and technology (i.e., process wikis, process mashups, etc.). And on the other hand, I see another camp emerging that believes social BPM should focus on transforming the organization and the organization's processes. I say, they're both right. We see customers adopting social BPM along a continuum."

Is There Social BPM?, Boris Lublinsky
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/05/SocialBPM

"Social networks have already profoundly changed our lives. Usage of social media will create a similar impact on BPM design and implementation. Will it create a new type of BPM or just a new way of BPM implementation remains to be seen."

Social BPM: Is It Social, or is It BPM?
Open question by Peter Schooff (with some responses below)
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2010/03/social-bpm-is-it-social-or-is-it-bpm.php

Michael zur Muehlen:

"If you only focus on streamlining process execution and making it as efficient as possible the social aspect diminishes. But if you consider process discovery, the development of a shared understanding of what your operations look like, and monitoring your process environment, then social plays a big role. Social is all about providing context, a rich environment of data points that a streamlined workflow would be lacking otherwise. The challenge is to make this context useful, both from a social networking perspective and from an unstructured data perspective."

Tom Allanson:

"Social BPM is basically just collaborative business process management utilizing a collective network environment - it's about extending BPM access and decision-making to partners and select external parties without compromising the exclusivity of the core group."

Clay Richardson:

"Basically social capabilities are now assumed to be baked into BPM offerings. I think the real question now is how do you move your organization to harness social BPM capabilities."

The future of social BPM

http://www.becauseprocessmatters.com/the-future-of-social-bpm/

"The future of social BPM lies in developing the best way to leverage social media tools to promote collaboration and coordination in the workplace – on an enterprise basis with a meaningful contribution to the business."

Social has no future (Yet), Keith Swenson
http://social-biz.org/2010/12/11/social-has-no-future-yet/

"In general, social software systems record what is happening now and in the past, but for the most part completely lack any representation of the future. Enterprise Social Software, or Social Business Software, will succeed only if it has some representation of goals or other future activities."

Will social BPM supercharge BPM?, Thomas J. Olbrich.

http://taraneon.de/blog/2011/03/25/will-social-bpm-supercharge-bpm/

"My view would be that we need to become more social where it helps. But let’s not overreach and hold company-wide opinion polls during process design and implementation. Social in the sense of making room for qualified input is fine, process anarchy is not."

Social BPM is a Methodology FIRST, Just like BPMhttp://www.ultimus.com/Blog/bid/37265/Social-BPM-is-a-Methodology-FIRST-Just-like-BPM

"I will argue that more than 50% of the information and data used to complete business processes is communicated outside of the formality of business process technologies today. Chat programs, emails, standing in front of the coffee machine in the AM, and passing people in the hall are easy and convenient channels of vital information exchange. [...] There is no reason to start employing any existing Social BPM or Social Technology application today without first understanding the state of "chaos" you have today."

Realizing the Promise of BPM Software: Forrester Says Social BPM Extends Process Participation, Ben Farrell http://www.appian.com/blog/2011/05/04/realizing-the-promise-of-bpm-software-forrester-says-social-bpm-extends-process-participation

"BPM software will only reach its true potential when more people inside (and outside) the organization get involved. Social BPM is a great way to extend the reach and impact of the technology across an organization – to get more people to “Be Part of the Process". [...] Run-time social BPM means you get real-time feedback on how well a process is working. It means process bottlenecks can be identified and resolved, and processes improved, faster."

Social Breaks The Logjam On Business Process Improvement Initiatives, Clay Richardson
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/social_breaks_logjam_on_business_process_improvement/q/id/55887/t/2

During process design, teams leverage social tools to more easily engage stakeholders in process discovery and definition, including frontline workers, customers, and partners. For process development, some process pros turn to social and Web 2.0 tools by using BPM software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. And during process execution, teams leverage social to support dynamic business processes.

What are the boundaries of social BPM?, Chris Taylor
http://bpmforreal.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/what-are-the-boundaries-of-social-bpm/

"I’ll admit, ‘social’ can strike fear into the hearts of the traditionalist (and/or control freak), and social BPM is no different. Will making my processes open to all lead to chaos and anarchy? I would argue the opposite is true."

Tapping into Collective Knowledge Will Drive Unstructured Process Activity, Jim Sinur
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/09/16/tapping-into-collective-knowledge-will-drive-unstructured-process-activity/

"When organizations aggressively tap into collective knowledge inside and out side their organizations, BPM will have to behave differently. BPM will have to support morphing work driven by emerging goals and dynamic decisions and be able to identify potential best practices."

Social BPM - Responding to Business Uncertainties, Arun Ravindran
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/social-bpm-responding-to-business-uncertainties-008645.php

"If refining in Business Processes Management (BPM) was all the rage in the eighties, then leveraging the power of emergent processes seems to be the focus and challenge of today’s businesses. "

Making BPM “Social”: Flexibility First, Sociability Follows, Andy Wang
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/making-bpm-social-flexibility-first-sociability-follows-008538.php

"To enable organizational agility, decision makers need to be able to adapt quickly in the face of change. An ECM system with flexible BPM tools is a necessary foundation to have in place before putting a Social BPM methodology into practice."

Social BPM and the new IT stack, Keith Harrison-Broninski
http://harrison-broninski.com/keith/blog/?p=181

"If you need to fuse the structural benefits of BPM with the collaborative potential of social technology, you won’t find it in the products currently being marketed as “social BPM”. Rather, you need to look elsewhere, for [...] “collaborative planning”"

Social BPM and the HIMS, Keith Harrison-Broninski
http://harrison-broninski.com/keith/blog/?p=185

"My purpose is to point out that the current hype for social BPM is unjustified, which cannot be a good thing either for consumers or vendors. If you try Blueworks Live expecting a solution for high-level knowledge work, you will only come away disappointed."

What constitutes a social BPMS, by Sameer Jejurkar
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/techreflections/what-constitutes-a-social-bpms-46937

"So what is social BPM(S)? At its core "social" means collaboration and communication. It can mean collaboration and communication that occurs during normal course of business i.e. when a business process is in flight. This is interaction (such as email, phone conversations etc.) between users that usually happens outside the context of a typical (non-social?) BPMS. The ability to collaborate with others in the organization is a definite plus for all internal users."