176 research outputs found
Proceedings of the Workshop on Formal Ontology, Knowledge Representation and Intelligent Systems for the World Wide Web at KR 2002
No full textImpact Measures for Business Process Compliance:Analyzing Impact Compliance and Declarative Specifications
No full textA business is an organization that engages in commercial, industrial, or professional
activity on a systematic and predefined manner. Key aspects of the business include
profit motive, exchange of goods and services, organization and management, and risk.
A business’s objective is typically to supply goods or services to consumers or to other
businesses in order to make a profit or to achieve a given non-profit purpose. Businesses
can range from small-scale enterprises like neighborhood shops to massive multinational
corporations but they are distinguished from occasional or unorganized endeavors for
their scope, that is to organize their own activities on a specified way, in many cases
formally defined, a priori with respect to the activities. In other terms, businesses have
their own predefined processes, or workflows.
A process is a set of events, procedures, or operations that are performed in admissible
systematic orders to reach a specified conclusion or purpose. In industrial and agrictu-
lural production, for instance, a process is the activity of converting inputs (such as raw
materials, data, or resources) into outputs (finished goods, results, or solutions) using
a set of structured procedures. Key elements of a process include sequence, inputs and
outputs, transformation, repetition, and control.
A business process is a comprehensive formal model that represents the behavior of
complex systems, both existing and newly designed ones. These models capture the
interactions and synchronizations between humans and machines, making them crucial
for understanding and optimizing the dynamic interplay within business operations.
Compliance refers to adherence to laws, regulations, guidelines, and specifications
relevant to organization operations. It ensures that businesses operate within a given
normative background and meet the standards set by regulatory bodies, industry best
practices, and internal policies. Ensuring compliance means that business processes are
aligned with regulatory requirements, organizational goals, and both soft and hard rules
imposed on the processes themselves. Compliance is essential for maintaining legal and
ethical integrity, minimizing risks, and enhancing the reputation of the organization.
Without compliance warranties, a business may incur penalties from regulatory bodies
or have adverse effects in the future, whether economically, socially, or environmentally.
Business processes must adhere to various forms of compliance, in the realm of practical
business life including:
a General Regulatory Compliance: This ensures business processes conform to
external authorities’ laws, regulations, and standards. It involves adhering to legal
requirements that govern the industry or sector in which the organization operates.
b Goal Compliance: This aligns business processes with predefined organizational
goals and objectives. It ensures that the processes support the strategic aims and
targets of the organization.
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c Impact Compliance: This ensures that the impacts of business processes remain
within acceptable thresholds, thereby minimizing negative effects of the execution
of the process. It involves assessing and managing the potential effects of processes
on various aspects of the business.
d Environmental Compliance: This ensures that the impacts of business pro-
cesses do not exceed constraints set from an environmental perspective. It involves
adherence to environmental regulations and practices that mitigate adverse en-
vironmental effects. Adhering to these compliance requirements helps ensure that
business processes operate effectively within legal and ethical boundaries while sup-
porting organizational objectives and minimizing negative impacts on society and
the environment.
This dissertation primarily focuses on impact compliance and environmental
compliance, that I shall show are analogous in technical terms. The purpose, on a
generic viewpoint, is to minimize the emission of Carbon dioxide (CO2) but can also
be used to regulate other pollutant substances. It delves into the definition of impact
compliance, its integration with existing compliance concepts, and its evaluation from
multiple perspectives.
When we discuss Compliance, there are three perspectives of compliance i.e. cor-
rective, detective, and preventive. All these three perspective base themselves on the
detective dimension, for no correction or prevention can be performed without leaning
out the detection of (potential) uncompliances.
Corrective measures are intended to limit the extent of any consequences caused
by non-compliant situations. They are reactive and aim to address and mitigate is-
sues after they have occurred. Examples include manual audits, which are periodic
reviews conducted by individuals to identify and rectify compliance issues, and auto-
mated detections, which are systems and tools that automatically detect deviations
from compliance standards.
Detective measures aim to identify non-compliant situations “after-the-fact”. They
are essential for recognizing and addressing issues that have already impacted the business
process. These measures also include manual audits and automated detections, similar
to corrective measures.
Preventive measures embed compliance into the business processes from the out-
set, a concept known as “Compliance by Design”. The objective is to proactively
prevent non-compliance by designing processes that inherently adhere to compliance re-
quirements.
The dissertation explores the synthesis of business processes through declarative
specifications, which provide a structured framework for defining and enforcing com-
pliance. It investigates how impact compliance can be effectively integrated with
regulatory and goal compliance, ensuring a holistic approach to business process man-
agement.
Business Process Compliance (BPC) is a collection of methodologies used to
evaluate business processes to ensure they adhere to specified constraints. These con-
straints, which may be imposed due to regulatory requirements or organizational goals,
are essential for maintaining the integrity and reliability of business operations. Business
Process Compliance (BPC) methods assess whether an execution trace exists—a sequence
of actions within the process—that violates any of the imposed constraints. Conversely,
this evaluation can also involve superimposing a set of constraints on the process and
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then assessing all possible executions for compliance. This dual approach to Business
Process Compliance (BPC) is highly relevant in real-world applications, particularly in
the realm of regulatory compliance. Businesses must verify their processes against a nor-
mative framework, which includes not only stringent regulations but also softer guidelines,
product specifications, and standards. This verification ensures that processes meet the
expectations set by regulatory bodies and the business owners themselves.
In this dissertation, I introduce a novel type of compliance, termed impact compli-
ance. This concept is designed to evaluate whether a business process adheres to a set
of constraints by ensuring that the undesirable effects of executing tasks within the pro-
cess are maintained below specified limits. Impact compliance is showed to be usable for
minimizing negative outcomes associated with business operations such as for regulating
the emission of pollutant substances including carbon dioxide(CO2), thereby optimizing
overall process performance. I demonstrate that under certain structural conditions, the
problems associated with checking for compliance are polynomially solvable on determin-
istic machines. Specifically, the task of determining whether any execution trace violates
the constraints is generally NP-complete. However, verifying that all possible executions
adhere to the constraints is polynomially solvable, provided the structural conditions are
met.
This dissertation delves also into the synthesis of business processes through declar-
ative specifications and examines the significant role of compliance, discussing impact
compliance by design. I also design a method to compare business processes as a whole in
terms of impact, and therefore obtain a notion of impact similarity that is in turn shown
to be useful for process mining.
By introducing and detailing the concept of impact compliance, I provide a framework
for ensuring that business processes not only comply with regulatory and organizational
standards but also minimize undesired effects, thereby enhancing operational efficiency
and time Complexity. This research contributes to the field by offering a detailed ex-
ploration of impact compliance, proposing innovative methods for integrating impact
compliance into business process models, and demonstrating the application of these
methods through various case studies and theoretical analyses
Non-monotonic Reasoning on the Web
No full textIn this tutorial we describe the approaches to non monotonic reasoning as a means for inference on the web. In particular we are focusing on the ways in which reasoning technologies have adapted to five different issues of the modern era world wide web: (a) epistemic aspects, bound by the new models of the social web, (b) changes over time, (c) language variants, including different languages of deployment of a web site, (d) agent-based knowledge deployment, due to social networks and blogs, (e) dialogue aspects, introduced again in blogs and social networks. The presentation covers these aspects by a technical viewpoint, including the introduction of specific knowledge-driven methods. The technical issues will be provided within a general logical framework known as defeasible logi
The Complexity of Reasoning about Spatial Congruence
No full textIn the recent literature of Arti cial Intelligence, an intensive research e ort has been spent, for various algebras of qualitative relations used in the representation of temporal and spatial knowledge, on the problem of classifying the computational complexity of reasoning problems for subsets of algebras. The main purpose of these researches is to describe a restricted set of maximal tractable subalgebras, ideally in an exhaustive fashion with respect to the hosting algebras. In this paper we introduce a novel algebra for reasoning about Spatial Congruence, show that the satis ability problem in the spatial algebra MC-4 is NP-complete, and present a complete classi cation of tractability in the algebra, based on the individuation of three maximal tractable subclasses, one containing the basic relations. The three algebras are formed by 14, 10 and 9 relations out of 16 which form the full algebra. 1
The Process of Reaching Agreement in Meaning Negotiation.
No full textThis new journal focuses on research in applications of the computer-based methods of Computational Collective Intelligence (CCI) and their applications in a wide range of fields such as semantic web, social networks and multi-agent systems. It aims to provide a forum for the presentation of scientific research and technological achievements accomplished by the international community.The topics addressed by this journal include all solutions of real-life problems, for which it is necessary to use computational collective intelligence technologies to achieve effective results. The emphasis of the papers published is on novel and original research and technological advancements. Special features on specific topics are welcome
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