• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.19-49
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• 2011

The multifarious array of benefits to the e-Government systems research, from evaluative frameworks and conceptual models to guidelines for initiatives, adoption, and assimilation, evidences the requirement, both from the researcher's and the practitioner's standpoint, of sound theoretical foundations that can be applied directly in practice. Grounded upon structuration theory, this paper proposes a framework for e-Government systems assimilation through the structuration of its organizational factors. Upon this proposition, we map the factors of e-Government systems assimilation with the organizational meta-structures of signification, domination and legitimization. The framework is then tested for the case of one particular e-Government systems of Korean government. The juxtaposition of the theoretical position and the practical findings leads us to isolate the organizational, technological, and inter-organizational factors that shape the meta-structures for the assimilation of e-Government systems. This framework offers interesting possibilities to researchers in exploring the relationships and insights into the complex interactions that shape the relationships among government, people and technology. Thus, the paper's contribution lies on three axes: first, the furthering of a theoretical perspective of e-Government systems assimilation; second, a detailed exposition of the structuration theory and an illustration of its application to the issues of e-Government systems assimilation in the organizational context; and finally, developed framework through the isolation of a usable set of theoretically grounded factors affecting e-Government systems assimilation that can be applied in future research and practice.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.267-272
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• 2007

One of the roles of the Semantic Web services is to execute dynamic intra-organizational services including the integration and interoperation of business processes. Since different organizations design their processes differently, the retrieval of similar semantic business processes is necessary in order to support inter-organizational collaborations. Most approaches for finding services that have certain features and support certain business processes have relied on some type of logical reasoning and exact matching. This paper presents our approach of using imprecise matching fur expanding results from an exact matching engine to query the OWL MIT Process Handbook. In order to use the MIT Process Handbook for process retrieval experiments, we had to export it into an OWL-based format. We model the Process Handbook meta-model in OWL and export the processes in the Handbook as instances of the meta-model. Next, we need to find a sizable number of queries and their corresponding correct answers in the Process Handbook. We devise diverse similarity algorithms based on values of process attributes and structures of business processes. We perform retrieval experiments to compare the performance of the devised similarity algorithms.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.79-96
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• 2008

One of the roles of the Semantic Web services is to execute dynamic intra-organizational services including the integration and interoperation of business processes. Since different organizations design their processes differently, the retrieval of similar semantic business processes is necessary in order to support inter-organizational collaborations. Most approaches for finding services that have certain features and support certain business processes have relied on some type of logical reasoning and exact matching. This paper presents our approach of using imprecise matching for expanding results from an exact matching engine to query the OWL(Web Ontology Language) MIT Process Handbook. MIT Process Handbook is an electronic repository of best-practice business processes. The Handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesigning organizational processes, (2) inventing new processes, and (3) sharing ideas about organizational practices. In order to use the MIT Process Handbook for process retrieval experiments, we had to export it into an OWL-based format. We model the Process Handbook meta-model in OWL and export the processes in the Handbook as instances of the meta-model. Next, we need to find a sizable number of queries and their corresponding correct answers in the Process Handbook. Many previous studies devised artificial dataset composed of randomly generated numbers without real meaning and used subjective ratings for correct answers and similarity values between processes. To generate a semantic-preserving test data set, we create 20 variants for each target process that are syntactically different but semantically equivalent using mutation operators. These variants represent the correct answers of the target process. We devise diverse similarity algorithms based on values of process attributes and structures of business processes. We use simple similarity algorithms for text retrieval such as TF-IDF and Levenshtein edit distance to devise our approaches, and utilize tree edit distance measure because semantic processes are appeared to have a graph structure. Also, we design similarity algorithms considering similarity of process structure such as part process, goal, and exception. Since we can identify relationships between semantic process and its subcomponents, this information can be utilized for calculating similarities between processes. Dice's coefficient and Jaccard similarity measures are utilized to calculate portion of overlaps between processes in diverse ways. We perform retrieval experiments to compare the performance of the devised similarity algorithms. We measure the retrieval performance in terms of precision, recall and F measure? the harmonic mean of precision and recall. The tree edit distance shows the poorest performance in terms of all measures. TF-IDF and the method incorporating TF-IDF measure and Levenshtein edit distance show better performances than other devised methods. These two measures are focused on similarity between name and descriptions of process. In addition, we calculate rank correlation coefficient, Kendall's tau b, between the number of process mutations and ranking of similarity values among the mutation sets. In this experiment, similarity measures based on process structure, such as Dice's, Jaccard, and derivatives of these measures, show greater coefficient than measures based on values of process attributes. However, the Lev-TFIDF-JaccardAll measure considering process structure and attributes' values together shows reasonably better performances in these two experiments. For retrieving semantic process, we can think that it's better to consider diverse aspects of process similarity such as process structure and values of process attributes. We generate semantic process data and its dataset for retrieval experiment from MIT Process Handbook repository. We suggest imprecise query algorithms that expand retrieval results from exact matching engine such as SPARQL, and compare the retrieval performances of the similarity algorithms. For the limitations and future work, we need to perform experiments with other dataset from other domain. And, since there are many similarity values from diverse measures, we may find better ways to identify relevant processes by applying these values simultaneously.