Massimo Mecella

• Sapienza University of Rome

A Visual Query System (VQS) can be defined as a system that uses a visual representation for both the domain of interest and requests related to the domain. In particular, as the purpose of any VQS is to provide access to the information contained in a database, the main users' tasks are understanding the database content, focusing on meaningful it...

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging dynamic domains beyond business computing (e.g., healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex knowledge-intensive processes in such domains. A knowled...

In this paper, we introduce an adaptive Process Management System implementation that combines business process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on well-established formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence, including the Situation Calculus, Indi...

Traditional activity-centric process modeling languages treat data as simple black boxes acting as input or output for activities. Many alternate and emerging process modeling paradigms, such as case handling and artifact-centric process modeling, give data a more central role. This is achieved by introducing lifecycles and states for data objects,...

Artful processes are those processes in which the experience, intuition, and knowledge of the actors are the key factors in determining the decision making. They are typically carried out by the "knowledge workers," such as professors, managers, and researchers. They are often scarcely formalized or completely unknown a priori. Throughout this arti...

Energy management, and in particular its optimization, is one of the hot trends in the current days, both at the enterprise level (optimization of whole corporate/government buildings) and single-citizens' homes. The current trend is to provide knowledge about the micro(scopic) energy consumption. In our work we developed a platform, named OPlatfor...

Declarative models are increasingly utilized as representational format in process mining. Models created from automatic process discovery are meant to summarize complex behaviors in a compact way. Therefore, declarative models do not define all permissible behavior directly, but instead define constraints that must be met by each trace of the busi...

Providing operational support to clinicians during their daily activities in hospital wards is a challenge for information technologies. In particular, any possible solution should provide usable user interfaces, possibly deployed on mobile devices, and should be able to enact and monitor the execution of clinical guidelines. To tackle this issue,...

Process mining is a discipline that aims at discovering, monitoring and improving real-life processes by extracting knowledge from event logs. Process discovery and conformance checking are the two main process mining tasks. Process discovery techniques can be used to learn a process model from example traces in an event log, whereas the goal of co...

Collaboration is a key issue in modern virtual enterprises adopting service-oriented business models and functional engineering in the offering of their tangible and intangible assets, as in software oriented IT, CAM/CAD, manufacturing industries. In this paper, we aim at introducing the main components of a Collaboration and Decision Making Suite...

Objective: In this paper we present a Visual Query System, which allows users to graphically build queries over data streams and traditional relational data. The Visual Query System runs on a top of a DSMS (Data Stream Management System). Methods: The system has been designed and implemented following the user-centered design approach. Two differen...

In this paper we present SmartPM, a model and a prototype Process Management System featuring a set of techniques providing support for automated adaptation of knowledge-intensive processes at run-time. Such techniques are able to automatically adapt process instances without explicitly defining policies to recover from exceptions and without the i...

Current smart spaces require more and more sophisticated sensors able to acquire the state of the environment in order to provide advanced and customized services. Among the most important environmental variables, locations of users and their identities represent a primary concern for smart home applications. Despite some years of investigation in...

In order to automatically control the environment, smart systems should have sufficient rules, which describe expected system's behavior. While such rules may be added man-ually, usually this requires considerable efforts, often surpassing those that users are willing to spend to setup the system. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to mine...

IntroductionWe welcome you to this special issue dedicated to extended and revised versions of the papers presented at the 1st International Workshop on Knowledge-intensive Business Processes (KIBP), co-located with the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2012) and held in Rome, Italy on June 15...

To evaluate the feasibility and usability of an assistive technology (AT) prototype designed to be operated with conventional/alternative input channels and a P300-based brain-computer interface (BCI) in order to provide users who have different degrees of muscular impairment resulting from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with communication and...

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems aim to provide people with severe motor impairment with an additional/alternative channel to communicate and interact with the external world. At the state of the art there are several custom computer programs specifically developed to be controlled through a BCI. However from the end users' point of view it i...

Data- and artifact-centric business processes are gaining momentum due to their ability of explicitly capturing the interplay between the process control-flow and the manipulated data. In this paper, we rely on the framework of Data-Centric Dynamic Systems (DCDSs), which has been recently introduced for the formal specification and verification of...

Energy management, and in particular its efficient optimization, is one of the hot trends in the current days, both at the enterprise level (optimization of whole corporate/government buildings) and single-citizens' homes. Energy efficiency is generally function of out-door techniques -- renewable energy, smart energy production and distribution, e...

During the last years, many approaches have been proposed in order to address the issue of automated service composition. In this chapter, we discuss the so-called Roman model, in which services are abstracted as transition systems and the objective is to obtain a composite service that preserves a desired interaction, expressed as a (virtual) targ...

In the recent years there has been a growing interest in the design and implementation of smart homes, and smart buildings in general. The evaluation of approaches in this area typically requires massive datasets of measurements from deployed sensors in real prototypes. While a few datasets obtained by real smart homes are freely available, they ar...

Autonomy of persons with severe motor disabilities can be supported by the use of assistive technologies. In this study we designed an assistive device tailored to the needs of persons with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The aid is meant to mediate communication and control of a domotic environment. Usability of the aid from the onset of the...

MailOfMine aims at automatically building a set of workflow models--which represent the artful processes behind knowledge workers' activities--on top of a collection of email messages. Such models formalize the unspecified agile processes that knowledge workers autonomously perform: because these models aren't defined a priori by experts but are ra...

Data- and artifact-centric business processes are gaining momentum due to their ability of explicitly capturing the interplay between the process control-flow and the manipulated data. In this paper, we rely on the framework of Data-Centric Dynamic Systems (DCDSs), which has been recently introduced for the formal specification and verification of...

Mobile computing, coupled with advanced types of input interfaces, such as Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), and smart spaces can improve the quality of life of persons with disabilities. In this paper, we describe the architecture and the prototype of an assistive system, which allows users to express themselves and partially preserve their indepe...

Sensors have become increasingly deployed in many areas, and especially in industrial engineering settings. Sensor data is however temporal, massive, and multidimensional in nature. Such characteristics make it difficult to render sensor data for visual analysis. Although there exist potential visualizations for sensor data, there is very little sp...

Schools and teaching are quickly changing due to the continuous evolution of the world and society, and thus new forms of education are required: on the one side, the emergence of smart cities and smart communities demands for active citizens interacting with institutions, and on the other side ICT is modifying both the learning environments and th...

Declarative approaches are particularly suitable for modeling highly flexible processes. They especially apply to artful processes, i.e., rapid informal processes that are typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called "knowledge workers". This pape...

In the recent years there has been a growing interest in the design and implementation of smart homes. The evaluation of these approaches requires massive datasets of measurements from deployed sensors in real prototypes. While datasets obtained by real smart homes are freely available, they are not sufficient for comparing different approaches and...

In the healthcare domain, a wide range of processes with different characteristics and requirements are executed, ranging from highly standardised procedures to less structured ones that reflect the knowledge-intensive nature of clinical decision making. Healthcare is thus widely recognised as one of the most promising, yet challenging, domains for...

Managing the complexity of highly specialized products in industrial environments requires today the ability of handling the different data streams produced in all phases of the product lifecycle. Data stream management systems and stream query languages represent a viable solution for processing and accessing large data streams to support analytic...

The DesigNET research and innovation project, commissioned by leading Italian companies in interior design, furniture, architecture and services (Iguzzini, Teuco, Berloni, IndelB, Indesit, Idea and many others) aims at investigating and developing a novel Web-based e-business prototype supporting selling activities, by identifying, on the basis of...

Advances of high throughput technologies have yielded the possibility to investigate human cells of healthy and morbid ones at different levels. Consequently, this has made possible the discovery of new biological and biomedical data and the proliferation of a large number of databases. In this paper, we describe the IS-BioBank (Integrated Semantic...

Nowadays, process-aware information systems (PAISs) are widely used for the management of ‘administrative’ processes characterized by clear and well-defined structures. Besides those scenarios, PAISs can be used also in mobile and pervasive scenarios, where process participants can be only equipped with smart devices, such as personal digital assis...

Publications Internes de l'IRISA ISSN : 2102-6327

The emerging trend in process management and in service oriented applications is to enable the composition of new distributed processes on the basis of user requests, through (parts of) available (and often embedded in the environment) services to be composed and orchestrated in order to satisfy such requests. Here, we consider a user process as sp...

Service ecologies are networks of services pervasively embedded in everyday environments, e.g., smart homes, where they are composed and orchestrated in order to provide advanced functionalities. In this paper, we show how the interplay of off-line and on-line composition of services can improve flexibility and adaptiveness.

Over the last decade, the advances in the high-throughput omic technologies have given the possibility to profile tumor cells at different levels, fostering the discovery of new biological data and the proliferation of a large number of bio-technological databases. In this paper we describe a framework for enabling the interoperability among differ...

Providing operational support to clinicians during their daily activities in hospital wards is a challenge for information technologies. In particular, solutions should provide very usable user interfaces, possibly deployed on mobile devices, and should be able to enact and monitor the execution of clinical guidelines. In this paper, we present the...

Artful processes are informal processes typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called "knowledge workers". MailOfMine is a tool, the aim of which is to automatically build, on top of a collection of email messages, a set of workflow models that rep...

Various visualization techniques for correlated multiple quantitative data sets, which allow a researcher to explore a character of content, are fairly common tools in the visual analysis. The available methods and techniques for a displaying of different diagram types, are suitable for a partial solution to this kind of a practical problem. This p...

Over the last decade, the advances in the high-throughput omic technologies have given the possibility to profile tumor cells at different levels, fostering the discovery of new biological data and the proliferation of a large number of bio-technological databases. In this paper we describe a framework for enabling the interoperability among differ...

Artful processes are informal processes typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called "knowledge workers". MAILOFMINE is a tool, the aim of which is to automatically build, on top of a collection of e-mail messages, a set of workflow models that re...

Artful processes are informal processes typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called “knowledge workers”. In this paper we propose the MailOfMine approach, to automatically build, on top of a collection of email messages, a set of workflow models...

Home automation represents a growing market in the industrialized world. Today’s systems are mainly based on ad hoc and proprietary solutions, with little to no interoperability and smart integration. However, in a not so distant future, our homes will be equipped with many sensors, actuators and devices, which will collectively expose services, ab...

In this paper, the WORKPAD project, concluded in 2009, is presented and the main features of the system are highlighted. They are the interplay of process management (i.e., task-driven coordination of operators during emergency situations) with geo-awareness of the team about the area and the team itself (real-time position of colleagues), also bas...

Artful processes are informal processes typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called “knowledge workers”. mailofmine is a tool, the aim of which is to automatically build, on top of a collection of e-mail messages, a set of workflow models that re...

People Localization and Tracking (PLT) systems are in charge of providing information about mobile agents to components providing higher level services. This low level knowledge usually consists of the dynamic position (or more generally the dynamic pose) of mobile agents and can sometimes include the identity of mobile agents. Currently, both comm...

Process Management Systems (PMSs, a.k.a. Workflow Management Systems - WfMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool to coordinate the enactment of processes. In real world scenarios, the environment may change in unexpected ways so as to prevent a process from being successfully carried out. In order to cope with these anomalous sit...

In the last years, the trade-off between exibility and support has become a leading issue in workow technology. In this paper we show how an imperative modeling approach used to define stable and well-understood processes can be complemented by a modeling approach that enables automatic process adaptation and exploits planning techniques to deal wi...

A home is smart when, being aware of its own state and that of its users, is capable of controlling itself in order to support the user wishes and thus improving their quality of life. This holds both for users with special needs and for those with ordinary domestic needs. In this paper, we overview the Smart Homes for All project which represents...

With organizations increasingly depending on Web services to build complex applications, security and privacy concerns including the protection of access control policies are becoming a serious issue. Ideally, service providers would like to make sure that clients have knowledge of only portions of the access control policy relevant to their intera...

Process Management Systems (PMSs, aka Workflow Management Systems – WfMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool to coordinate the enactment of processes. In real world scenarios, the environment may change in unexpected ways so as to prevent a process from being successfully carried out. In order to cope with these anomalous situat...

Process Management Systems (PMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool for cooperative processes in pervasive and highly dynamic situations, such as emergency situations or pervasive health-care. In these scenarios, the environment may change in a way that was not expected so as to prevent processes from being successfully carried...

In disaster scenarios, emergency operators/first responders need to collaborate in order to reach a common goal. The use of mobile devices and applications in these scenarios is very valuable as they can improve collaboration, coordination, and communication amongst team members. But there are also risks involved while using these mobile applicatio...

In complex emergency/disaster scenarios, persons from teams from various emergency-response organizations collaborate to achieve a common goal. In these scenarios, the use of smart mobile devices and applications can improve the collaboration dynamically. The lack of basic interaction principles can be dangerous, as it could increase the level of d...

Houses of tomorrow will be equipped with many sensors, actuators and devices, which collectively will expose services. Such services, composed in an automatic way, and invokable through adaptive user interfaces, can support human inhabitants in their daily activities. In this paper we present the approach and some results of the SM4All EU project (...

Artful processes are informal processes typically carried out by those people whose work is mental rather than physical (managers, professors, researchers, engineers, etc.), the so called "knowledge workers". In this paper we propose the MailOfMine approach to automatically build, on top of a collection of e-mail messages, a set of workflow models...

In this paper we report on a study concerning the redesign of the Web portal of the Italian Ministry of Health, jointly conducted by the ministry and Sapienza Universit̀a di Roma. In this project, a multidisciplinary team consisting of computer scientists and engineers, sociologists and experts in communication, doctors and experts in public health...

Home automation represents a growing market in the industrialized world. Today¿s systems are mainly based on ad hoc and proprietary solution, with little to no interoperability and smart integration. However, in a not so distant future, devices installed in our home will be able to smartly interact and integrate in order to offer complex services w...

MANETs (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks) are an example of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mobile networks in which security attacks, as black-hole ones, may cause serious dangers to the whole system. The watchdog is a well-known sensor usually adopted for detecting black-holes in such networks, but typical watchdogs are characterized by a relatively high number of fals...

Statistics on medical errors and their consequences has astonished, during the previous years, both healthcare professionals and ordinary people. Mass-media are becoming more and more sensitive to medical malpractices. This paper elaborates on the well-known ...

In pervasive (ubiquitous) computing an increasing amount of devices are embedded and interconnected in the user's environment, e.g., a smart house. The system needs to adapt to the user's varying contexts and goals. The aim is to provide transparent services, reacting to input from the users and to the state of the environment. As user's requiremen...

In recent years research on eGovernment has grown rapidly at both the quantitative and qualitative levels [104]. Besides this rapid development both practitioners and scholars have considered the results of solutions and initiatives deployed in the last 10 years in the different countries involved in eGovernment programs, showing that these latter...

Conceiving ICT projects is a highly creative activity, for which experience of previous projects is needed, together with an in-depth knowledge of available ICTs. However at a macro-level most relevant choices can be conducted and/or understood also by PA managers devoid of a specific skills in ICTs. This characteristic of operational planning is o...

Strategic planning is the most relevant phase of the eGovernment information system life cycle for achieving a clear understanding of the alignment between the political vision, the context of intervention, and the actual ICT goals, architectures, and infrastructures.

This chapter focuses on several initiatives carried out in Europe and in Italy in the last years; such initiatives are analyzed under the socio-economic point of view, providing quantitative measures that are behind the decisions previously described in the book.

This chapter presents some guidelines on how to specify a new administrative process (composite external service in the terminology of Chap. 10) in the eG4M methodology on the assumption of using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and related engineering approaches, techniques, and tools. In particular, the guidelines address the case in which a...

This chapter presents a possible reference technological architecture for eGovernment projects, based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm and related technologies and approaches. Such a reference architecture leverages the Italian experience called SPCoop (in Italian Sistema Pubblico di Cooperazione, possible English translation as...

In this chapter we discuss the step of the methodology which supports the definition of priority services and their quality value targets. As for the overall methodology, the general idea is that the choice should be driven by a clear understanding of

As we said in the preface, the eG4M methodology has been applied to eGovernment projects in the Mediterranean area. In this chapter we focus on the data governance part of the methodology that has been applied in the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture, in parallel with running initiatives on the reorganization of databases managed in the different ad...

The eG4M framework differs from traditional technology-driven approaches to eGovernment, considering both how ICTs affect organizations and how the social context and the organizations influence the use of technologies. Indeed, the conceptual framework underlying the methodology is based mainly on neo-institutionalism [80, 231] and social construc...

Nowadays, process-aware information systems (PAISs) are widely used for the management of “administrative” processes characterized by clear and well-defined structures. Besides those scenarios, PAISs can be used also in mobile and pervasive scenarios, where process participants can be only equipped with smart devices, such as PDAs. This paper illus...

In complex emergency/disaster scenarios teams from various emergency-response organizations collaborate with each other to achieve a common goal. In these scenarios the use of smart mobile devices and applications can improve the collaboration dynamically. The lack of basic interaction principles can be dangerous as it could increase the level of d...

The brain computer interface (BCI) technology allows a direct connection between brain and computer without any muscular activity required, and thus it offers a unique opportunity to enhance and/or to restore communication and actions into external word in people with severe motor disability. Here, we present the framework of the current research p...

The success of public sector investment in eGovernment initiatives strongly depends on effectively exploiting all aspects of ICT systems and infrastructures. The related objectives are hardly reachable without methodological frameworks that provide a holistic perspective and knowledge on the contexts of eGovernment initiatives. Yet public administr...

In many pervasive scenarios (e.g., emergency management or health care), operators need to exchange data and information and collaborate in order to carry on a collaborative job, but communication features can be lacking on the spot. Therefore, mobile ad-hoc networks are valuable solutions to let them coordinate. While executing some activities, no...

Embedded systems are specialized computers used in larger systems or machines to control equipments such as automobiles, home appliances, communication, control and office machines. Such pervasivity is particularly evident in immersive realities, i.e., scenarios in which invisible embedded systems need to continuously interact with human users, in...

In complex emergency/disaster scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. The use of smart mobile devices and applications in these scenarios can improve this collaboration dynamically; and poses interesting challenges, such as user' mental attention, small screen size, unavailabilit...

The vision of smart homes for all is taking shape as information technology advances. Our homes are starting to be aware of their state and can react upon events and user's needs, thanks to the readily availability of inter-networked, low power consuming and cheap embedded sensors. Actuators complete the picture, by allowing the home to change its...

This paper introduces the special issue on collaboration services and protocols for distributed collaboration in networked enterprises and e-science.

The design of interactive systems to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios, such as emergency management, requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailored for distributed architectures. In this paper, the methodology adopted in a successful research project is presented toget...

The increasing of bandwidth capacity and the rising of more active and more demanding Internet users motivate the research of the best solution in P2P multimedia streaming. This paper presents STREAMCOMPLETE, a new architecture and prototype system for mesh-based P2P live video streaming; it realizes a new concept of overlay network's management as...

Process Management Systems (PMSs) are nowadays more and more used as a supporting tool for cooperative processes in pervasive and highly dynamic situations, such as emergency situations, pervasive healthcare or domotics/home automation. But in all such situations, designed processes can be easily invalidated since the execution environment may chan...

Intra-scenario operator mobility is claimed to be a strong advantage when acquiring situational awareness within a robot tele-operation. This factor should not be discounted when seeking to build more effective Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems. In this pa-per, on the basis of extensive experimentation comparing a desktop-based interface wrt. a...

The brain computer interface (BCI) technology allows a direct connection between brain and computer without any muscular activity required, and thus it offers a unique opportunity to enhance and/or to restore communication and actions into external word in people with severe motor disability. Here we present a set of findings that confirm the feasi...