Luis Ferreira Pires

• University of Twente

Numerous implementations of FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) are actively emerging and are being evaluated against FDO specifications. Here, we focus on the Nanopublication Framework as a possible implementation of FDOs. Nanopublications are unitary, standardised, and self-contained RDF-based knowledge graphs consisting of three subgraphs: an assertion...

Machine Learning (ML) models often operate as black-boxes, lacking transparency in their decision-making processes. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to address the rationale behind these decisions, thereby enhancing the trustworthiness of ML models. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Explainable ML Workflows ontology, which...

This paper explores the design and creation of metadata schemas based on the FAIR Data Principles. We provide a clear interpretation of these principles, focusing on how they apply to metadata schemas. Leveraging the OntoUML language, we developed a conceptual model that explains the key components of a FAIR-compliant metadata schema. Through detai...

Introduction Video service providers are moving from focusing on Quality of Service (QoS) to Quality of Experience (QoE) in their video networks since the users’ demand for high-quality video content is continually growing. By focusing on QoE, video service providers can provide their subscribers with a more personalized and engaging experience, wh...

Urbanization brings forth social challenges in emerging countries such as Brazil, encompassing food scarcity, health deterioration, air pollution, and biodiversity loss. Despite this, urban areas like the city of São Paulo still boast ample green spaces, offering opportunities for nature appreciation and conservation, enhancing city resilience and...

The popularity of microservices has increased over the past decade due to their potential benefits for distributed enterprise applications. Developing and maintaining a microservices architecture (MSA) is challenging, amongst others because the size (granularity) of the microservices has an impact on most system properties, such as, e.g., maintaina...

This paper presents two key data sets derived from the Pomar Urbano project. The first data set is a comprehensive catalog of edible fruit-bearing plant species, native or introduced to Brazil. The second data set, sourced from the iNaturalist platform, tracks the distribution and monitoring of these plants within urban landscapes across Brazil. Th...

This paper presents two key data sets derived from the Pomar Urbano project. The first data set is a comprehensive catalog of edible fruit-bearing plant species, native or introduced in Brazil. The second data set, sourced from the iNaturalist platform, tracks the distribution and monitoring of these plants within urban landscapes across Brazil. Th...

This paper presents two key data sets derived from the Pomar Urbano project. The first data set is a comprehensive catalog of edible fruit-bearing plant species, native or introduced in Brazil. The second data set, sourced from the iNaturalist platform, tracks the distribution and monitoring of these plants within urban landscapes across Brazil. Th...

The "Pomar Urbano" (Urban Orchard) project focuses on the collaborative monitoring of fruit-bearing plant species in urban areas throughout Brazil. The project collected a list of 411 fruit-bearing plant species (Soares et al. 2023), both native and exotic varieties found in Brazil. This list was selected from two main sources: the book Brazilian...

In some industries, small improvements to processes and profit margins may lead to a significant change in profit, and this holds especially in the automotive industry. A popular approach to achieving process improvement is benchmarking, in which the execution of a process is measured and compared between different work units so that improvement op...

In this paper, we discuss how we are using metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies to improve interoperability between Brazilian agriculture and livestock trading data providers. A new metadata schema is being created based on a community-based approach. This method relies on knowledge from specialists to define a list of relevant metadata pro...

Scientific advances, especially in the healthcare domain, can be accelerated by making data available for analysis. However, in traditional data analysis systems, data need to be moved to a central processing unit that performs analyses, which may be undesirable, e.g. due to privacy regulations in case these data contain personal information. This...

Smart environments can be built by connecting smart devices and control systems, which coexist as an integrated system that supports everyday activities. A digital thread gives the necessary support to introduce smartness in socio-technological systems. Digital threads are not only useful in the development of these systems, but also to facilitate...

When developing a Learning Management System (LMS) using Scrum, we noticed that it was quite often necessary to redefine some system behaviour scenarios, due to ambiguities in the requirement specifications, or due to misinterpretations of stories reported by the Product Owners (POs). The definition of test suites was also cumbersome, resulting in...

Explainable Machine Learning comprises methods and techniques that enable users to better understand the machine learning functioning and results. This work proposes an ontology that represents explainable machine learning experiments, allowing data scientists and developers to have a holistic view, a better understanding of the explainable machine...

The FAIR principles have become a data management instrument for the academic and scientific community, since they provide a set of guiding principles to bring findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability to data and metadata stewardship. Since their official publication in 2016 by Scientific Data – Nature, these principles have rec...

ABSTRACT Significant effort is required to find, make sense and reuse research data. To tackle this problem, the Findable, Accessible, Reusable and Interoperable (FAIR) data principles describe a minimal set of requirements for data management and stewardship, considered as the technological basis for the European Open Science Cloud. The FAIR data...

ABSTRACT This article proposes to discuss the role of data management plans as a tool to facilitate data management during researches life cycle. Today, research data opening is a primary agenda at scientific agencies as it may boost investigations’ visibility and transparency as well as the ability to reproduce and reuse its data on new researches...

An early warning system (EWS) is a distributed system that monitors the physical world and issues warnings if it detects abnormal situations. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunities to improve monitoring capabilities of EWS and to realize (near) real-time warning and response. This paper presents the development of an interoperable IoT-ba...

Recently, a number of ontology-driven healthcare systems have been leveraged by the Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, which offer opportunities to improve patient monitoring and abnormal situation detection with support of medical wearables and cloud infrastructure. Usually, these systems rely on IoT ontologies to represent sensor data observa...

Design problem:improve interoperability of IoT Early Warning Systems (EWSs) to detect emergency risks. Collaboration (open call): scenario of detecting accidents at the port of Valencia, interoperating wearable medical devices with IoT platforms to react quickly, reducing time responses during accidents.

Several IoT ontologies have been developed lately to improve the semantic interoperability of IoT solutions. The most popular of these ontologies, the W3C Semantic Sensor Network (SSN), is considered an ontological foundation for diverse IoT initiatives, particularly OpenIoT. With characteristics similar to SSN, the ETSI Smart Appliances REFerence...

An early warning system (EWS) is an integrated system that supports the detection, monitoring and alerting of emergency situations. A possible application of an EWS is in epidemiological surveillance, to detect infectious disease outbreaks in geographical areas. In this scenario, a challenge in the development and integration of applications on top...

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has been used in business environments in order to integrate heterogeneous systems. The dynamic nature of these environments causes changes in the application requirements. As a result, service composition must be flexible, dynamic and adaptive, which motivate the need to ensure the service composition behavior at r...

Gene expression studies often require the combined use of a number of analysis tools. However, manual integration of analysis tools can be cumbersome and error prone. To support a higher level of automation in the integration process, efforts have been made in the biomedical domain towards the development of semantic web services and supporting com...

This chapter introduces the first set of basic design concepts along with specification language elements to formally represent them. When considering an object of design, we make a sharp distinction between the object as a carrier of a behaviour, i.e., its possible existence as a real world object, and the behaviour itself. We use this distinction...

In this chapter we present the first phase of our design methodology for Interaction Systems: a method for designing a Service by developing a general purpose structure for Services. The method is based on the top down strategy introduced in Chap. 1 and the constraint-oriented specification method introduced in Chap. 4. The constraints are formed b...

In this chapter we discuss systems as we intuitively know and understand them. The objective is to identify common characteristics that can be used in a methodology for designing distributed systems. To achieve this, such characteristics must be essential, structural and precisely definable. This allows us to formalise them into what we call basic...

This chapter discusses the refinement of a more abstract (inter)action into a correctness preserving structure of more concrete (inter)actions, called interaction behaviour. When this is the case, we say that the interaction behaviour conforms to the abstract interaction (Dirgahayu et al. in Interaction refinement in the design of business collabor...

This chapter introduces the modelling of a behaviour by relating its (inter)actions by means of causality relations. A causality relation consists of a causality condition, attribute constraints and a probability constraint. The causality condition defines how the occurrence of a result (inter)action depends on the occurrence and non-occurrence of...

This chapter introduces the basic design concept of interaction system. An interaction system can be seen as a definition of the way systems interact to achieve some common functional goal. By considering this functional goal as a system in its own right, the interaction system concept represents a dual view on the notion of system. A typical examp...

This chapter presents two methods for the structuring of a behaviour as a means to master the complexity of designing a realistic system by representing it as a composition of smaller sub-behaviours, namely causality-oriented structuring and constraint-oriented structuring. Causality-oriented structuring decomposes the causality relation by separat...

In this chapter we discuss our interpretation of the basic design notions, terminology and meta-concepts that are frequently used in design and design specification approaches. We present precise definitions for those notions that underlie our design methodology, namely modelling, abstraction and refinement, design concepts and design language.

This chapter presents the second phase of our design methodology for Interaction Systems: a method for designing a possibly layered Protocol, by developing a general purpose structure for Protocol Entities. It builds further on and complements the general purpose service structuring as presented in Chaps. 7 and 9. We discuss the main lines of our m...

This chapter discusses the concept of reference model as a structure of related Services and Protocols that together form a complex possibly standard Interaction System. These Services and Protocols are only globally defined in terms of their main characteristic or key functions. A reference model then acts as an intermediate specification to overv...

This chapter further refines the possible structuring of a protocol by discussing a number of general purpose functional building blocks, called Protocol Elements. We mention a number of frequently used Service Elements, like association control, addressing, data transfer and quality of service (QoS), and a number of frequently used protocol elemen...

This chapter refines the possible structuring of a service by discussing a number of general purpose and frequently used functional service elements. A service element is characterised by the temporal pattern in the exchange of service primitives. These elements can be fit in a general purpose service and then lead to parameters of service primitiv...

ArchiMate is a widely adopted enterprise architecture modeling language that includes the “service” construct as a key structuring element across its enterprise layers. A previous analysis of the use of this construct within ArchiMate’s business layer concluded that it fails to represent some important social aspects associated with the dynamics of...

How to improve the semantic interoperability among early warning systems (EWS) for epidemiological surveillance: How to design and implement the detection of pre-epidemic situations and the adequate response actions? How to exchange the detected situation messages among EWS and their components? How to identify pre-epidemic situations not specif...

Nowadays, several organisations provide services on the Internet with similar functionality but different price and pricing schemes. Since these services are used in service compositions, the providers of composed services have to face the challenge of managing the services they use, in order to decrease the cost of the service compositions without...

Future disease outbreaks may spread faster and stronger than recent epidemics (Gates, 2015), such as Zika, Ebola and Influenza. The integration of multiple existing Early Warning Systems (EWS) is a requirement to support disease surveillance in combating infectious disease outbreaks. In this direction, numerous applications have been developed cons...

The notion of situation enables designers, maintainers, and users to abstract from lower-level entities and properties and to focus on the higher-level patterns that emerge in time. Situation management concerns a number of tasks including situation specification, situation detection (which may involve composite situation pattern recognition), and...

This book presents a design methodology that is practically applicable to the architectural design of a broad range of systems. It is based on fundamental design concepts to conceive and specify the required functional properties of a system, while abstracting from the specific implementation functions and technologies that can be chosen to build t...

Over the last years, numerous ICT applications with mechanisms to detect situations have been developed to support disaster management (DM), which is a field of a great societal and economic importance. Those applications are termed situation-aware (SA) because they try, in near real-time, to perceive and comprehend a situation of some type (e.g. d...

The concept of “service” has been characterized in different disciplines and by different authors from various points of view. This variety of characterizations has emerged because although this notion seems intuitive, it is far from trivial, with many interrelated perspectives. Given their importance in enterprise computing and Service Science in...

Abstract. In order to enhance interoperability and productivity in the development of situation-aware applications for disaster management, proper mechanisms and guidelines are required. They must address the lack of semantics in modelling emergency situations. In addition, the ever-changing and unpredictable nature of disaster scenarios present ch...

Gene expression studies are generally performed through multi-step analysis processes, which require the integrated use of a number of analysis tools. In order to facilitate tool/data integration, an increasing number of analysis tools have been developed as or adapted to semantic web services. In recent years, some approaches have been defined for...

Nowadays, many companies expose their competencies as services on the Internet to facilitate the cooperation with their customers. This situation has created a new marketplace where services have been provided with similar functionality but different qualities such as cost, performance, and reliability. In this scenario, service composition provide...

Strategic planning improves both the financial and behavioral performance of an enterprise. It helps the enterprise set priorities, focus capabilities and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that stakeholders are working toward common goals and assess and adjust the enterprise's direction. Strategic planning is currently not explicitly represe...

Despite the availability of services with similar functionality but from different providers in the cloud, using them in a workflow might subject to constraints such as service QoS and service bundling. Service bundling refers to the situation where the subscription of two services have to be done together, such requirement might be imposed by serv...

The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recognized in the management literature. Despite that, little attention has been given to integrate the notions of capabilities and resources in enterprise architecture descriptions. One notable exception is a recent proposal to extend the ArchiMate...

During the service composition lifecycle, service costs should be predicted, controlled and reported in order to optimize resource utilization and increase profit. Several approaches have been proposed to address cost issues in some phases of the service composition lifecycle. However, each approach expresses costs in its own way, which makes it ha...

Although Business Process Management has emerged as a means to manage and improve business processes, it may require high costs due to the need for software, hardware and technical support. Cloud Computing can help achieve efficient business processes with lower costs, since it provides a fast and cheap way to acquire computing resources in a pay-p...

Nowadays, companies are increasingly offering their business services through computational services on the Internet in order to attract more customers and increase their revenues. However, these services have financial costs that need to be managed in order to maximize profit. Several models and techniques have been recently reported that aim at m...

This paper presents an architecture for health information exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. Our architecture has been designed for message exchange by integrating ubiquitous computing technologies, intelligent agents and healthcare standards, in order...

Business Process Management (BPM) has gained a lot of popularity in the last two decades, since it allows organizations to manage and optimize their business processes. However, purchasing a BPM system can be an expensive investment for a company, since not only the software itself needs to be purchased, but also hardware is required on which the p...

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) was introduced some years ago as a paradigm that allows companies to expose their core competencies as services. Yet, we can only benefit from the full potential of SOC if we explore the possibility of composing services. In practice, service composition enables the development of complex systems by combining existi...

In today’s global market, the competitiveness of enterprises is strongly dictated by their ability to collaborate with other enterprises. Ontologies enable common understanding of concepts and have been acknowledged as a powerful means to foster collaboration, both within the boundaries of an individual enterprise (intra-enterprise) as outside thes...

This paper presents a report on the workshop on selected applications and methods for Enterprise Interoperability, which has been organized in conjunction with the IWEI Conference 2013 (Enschede, the Netherlands). The workshop has taken place on 26 March 2013 and was attended by around 15 people. Five papers were presented during the workshop: (1)...

Processes can synchronize their states by exchanging messages. System crashes and network failures may cause message loss, so that state changes of a process may remain unnoticed by its partner processes, resulting in state inconsistency or deadlocks. In this paper we define a method to transform a business process into its recovery-enabled counter...

Introducao e Objetivo : Este trabalho propoe uma arquitetura para a troca de mensagens ciente de contexto em ambientes de Cuidado de Saude Pervasivo. Material e Metodo : No Cuidado de Saude Pervasivo, novas tecnologias de informacao e comunicacao sao aplicadas para apoiar a prestacao de servicos de saude em qualquer lugar, a qualquer momento e a qu...

Introducao e Objetivo : Este trabalho propoe uma abordagem para o desenvolvimento de aplicacoes no ambiente de Cuidado de Saude Pervasivo, atraves do uso de arquetipos. Material e Metodo : O Cuidado de Saude Pervasivo foca o uso de novas tecnologias, ferramentas e servicos, para ajudar os pacientes a ter um papel mais ativo no tratamento de suas co...

A aplicacao das TICs na area de cuidado de saude, conhecida como e-Health , pode facilitar o acesso aos servicos de cuidado de saude e so sera aceitavel se permitir a troca de informacao eficiente e segura entre os cuidadores de saude e pacientes. O objetivo deste trabalho e apresentar uma abordagem para troca de mensagens em cenarios realisticos.

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of enterprises to interoperate in order to achieve their business goals. Although the purpose of enterprise interoperability is determined at the business level, the use of technical (IT) services to support business services implies that interoperability solutions at both the business and technical level...

Due to safety requirements, certain data or activities of a business process should be kept within the user premises, while others can be allocated to a cloud environment. This paper presents a generic approach to business processes decomposition taking into account the allocation of activities and data. We designed transformations to decompose bus...

The concept of "service" has been characterized by different disciplines and authors from various points of view. The variety of characterizations reveals that this notion, although an intuitive one, is far from trivial. Given the importance of services in enterprise computing and Service Science in general, we believe that a clear account of servi...

The Fourth International Workshop on Models and Model-driven Methods for Service Engineering -3M4SE 2013- aims at helping the convergence of research on model-driven development and practical application of the model-driven approach in the area of enterprise computing and service engineering. The workshop addresses questions with respect to the req...

The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recognized in the management literature and on a recent proposal to extend ArchiMate, which includes these concepts in order to improve ArchiMate's coverage of portfolio management. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the concepts introdu...

The application of ICT on the whole range of health sector activities, known as e-health, can simplify the access to health care services and will only be acceptable for realistic scenarios if it supports efficient information exchange amongst the caregivers and their patients. The aim of this paper is present an approach for message exchange to re...

Pervasive Healthcare focuses on the use of new technologies, tools, and services, to help patients to play a more active role in the treatment of their conditions. Pervasive Healthcare environments demand a huge amount of information exchange, and specific technologies has been proposed to provide interoperability between the systems that comprise...

Recent research results have shown that Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a beneficial approach to develop software systems. The reduction of development time enabled by code generation mechanisms is often acknowledged as an important benefit to be further explored. This paper reports on an experiment in which an MDD-based approach using code gener...

With the possibility of system crashes and network failures, the design of robust client/server interactions for collaborative process execution is a challenge. If a business process changes state, it sends messages to relevant processes to inform about this change. However, server crashes and network failures may result in loss of messages. In thi...

In Pervasive Healthcare, novel information and communication technologies are applied to support the provision of health services anywhere, at anytime, and to anyone. Ubiquitous Computing technologies allow efficient and safe information exchange amongst caregivers and their patients in communities, homes and hospitals. Since health systems may off...

Much effort has been spent on the optimization of sensor networks, mainly concerning their performance and power efficiency. Furthermore, open communication protocols for the exchange of sensor data have been developed and widely adopted, making sensor data widely available for software applications. However, less attention has been given to the in...

With the possibility of system crashes and network failures, the design of robust client/server interactions for collaborative process execution is a challenge. If a business process changes its state, it sends messages to the relevant processes to inform about this change. However, server crashes and network failures may result in loss of messages...

The main objective of this paper is to present a reusable architecture for message exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. This architecture has been designed by integrating different concepts and technologies of ubiquitous computing, software agents, and ope...

A service registry is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) component that keeps a ‘catalogue’ of available services. It stores service specifications so that these specifications can be found by potential users. Discussions on the design of service registries currently focus on technical issues, while service registries should take into considerat...

Two orchestrated processes interacting with each other have to maintain their own states. Messages are used to synchronize states between orchestrated processes. Server crash and network failure may result in loss of messages and therefore result in a state change performed by only one party. Thus, the states of the parties are no longer synchroniz...

During a stateful interaction, a partner service may become unavailable because of a server crash or a temporary network failure. Once the failed service becomes available again, the interaction partners do not have any knowledge about each other's state, possibly resulting in errors or deadlocks. This paper proposes an approach to the recovery of...

Service composition has been acknowledged as a promising approach to create new (composite) services that are capable of supporting multiple needs of service users. Service composition has been used quite extensively to support complex but relatively stable enterprise processes. More recently, service composition is also being applied to support th...

Nowadays, many organizations use BPM for capturing and monitoring their business processes. The introduction of BPM in an organization may become expensive, because of the upfront investments on software and hardware. Therefore, organizations can choose for a cloud-based BPM system, in which a BPM system can be used in a pay-per-use manner. Opting...

Held in conjunction with the 15th IEEE International Enterprise Computing Conference - EDOC 2011

Model transformations are increasingly being incorporated in software development processes. However, as systems being developed with transformations grow in size and complexity, the performance of the transformations tends to degrade. In this paper we investigate the factors that have an impact on the execution performance of model transformations...

Recently, paradigms such as Service-Oriented and Pervasive Computing are being combined and applied in scenarios where users are surrounded by a plethora of computing devices and available services. Dealing with a potentially large number of devices and services can become overwhelming to users without appropriate software support. Moreover, in the...