View source for Artefact-centric Service Interoperation in the Flanders Research Information Space

{{Masterproject
|Student name=Jordi de Vos
|Project start date=2010/11/01
|Project end date=2011/06/01
|Supervisor=Pieter de Leenheer
|Second supervisor=Stijn Christiaens
|Second reader=Damian Tamburri
|Company=Collibra Belgium
|Thesis title=Artefact-centric Service Interoperation in the Flanders Research Information Space
|Finished=Yes
|Thesis=Thesis.pdf
|Poster=Media:Posternaam.pdf
}}
Business Rules can be defined and modelled using the SBVR standard. This thesis will research how SBVR can be used to model research-related knowledge (using the CERIF standard), so that it can be used as a basis for generating Business Entities with Lifecycle (also known as Business Artefacts)

{{Projectproposal
|Contact person=Pieter De Leenheer
|Master areas=Knowledge Technology and Intelligent Internet Applications, Internet and Web Technology, Information and Communication Technology, Information Sciences
|Fulfilled=Yes
}}
The Flanders Research and Information Services (FRIS) Portal is one of the main objectives of the Flemish Ministry of Economy, Science, and Innovation (EWI). Doing so they want to (i) accelerate the innovation value chain by efficient and fast access to research information for all stakeholders; (ii) offer improved customer services; and (iii) increase efficiency and effectiveness of the R&D policy.

Currently they already published a portal (www.researchportal.be <http://www.researchportal.be/>) where you can visually browse and extract information about researchers, projects, and the involved institutes in the Flanders Region. The information is structured according to the European CERIF standard which will allow to integrate with similar portals in the European Union. This is essential as research is increasingly funded and conducted on a European level, see for example CERN.

On top of this information infrastructure, EWI wants to build a service interoperation hub allowing various kinds of stakeholders from researchers to policy makers, and even publication editors and the media to collaborate. For example, when researchers for different transnational research institutes decide to write a research proposal, a valuable service would be the delivery of "boilerplate" content (like people profiles, average labour cost per country for budget calculation) extracted from diverse online sources (like www.academia.eu <http://www.academia.eu>) that can be automatically inserted into the proposal. This saves the proposal writers a lot of time. A more advanced service would act as a "personal assistant" that monitors the whole life-cycle of a proposal not only during writing the proposal, but the assessment of the proposal by evaluators, up to the follow-up and review of the project itself after the proposal is accepted.

The interoperation hubs will be structured around (IBM's) dynamic artifacts, also known as “business artifacts” or “business entities”. These provide an holistic marriage of data and processes, serving as the basic building block for modeling, specifying, and implementing services and business processes. Artifacts can give an end-to-end view of how key conceptual business entities evolve as they move through the business operations, in many cases across two or more silos. As a result, artifacts can substantially simplify the management or “hand-off” of data and processing between services and organizations. Examples are specific research projects, funding programs, researchers.

In this thesis you will adopt IBM's business artifact modeling paradigm to model the core business artefacts that form the basis for FRIS' interoperation hub (using IBM's tools). Next, for each business artefacts you will model its semantic context with OMG's standard SBVR (using Collibra tools). This semantic description you use to  map EWI's and other stakeholders' legacy data sources on the business artifacts. Based on a end-to-end run of the case study, you will make a critical assessment of the data transformations and the maintenance of the artifacts when goals change. you conclude with a set of requirements for future research.

In this thesis you will intensively collaborate virtually with people from IBM Research in Israel and from EWI in Brussels. Two or three times you will have to travel to Brussels (of course the costs are reimbursed).