Edward Lee and Stephen Neuendorffer EECS Department University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.

Actor-oriented components emphasize concurrency and temporal semantics and are used for modeling and designing embedded software and hardware. Actors interact with one another through ports via a messaging schema that can follow any of several concurrent semantics. Domainspecific actor-oriented languages and frameworks are common (Simulink, LabVIEW, SystemC, etc.). However, they lack many modularity and abstraction mechanisms that programmers have become accustomed to in object-oriented components, such as classes, inheritance, interfaces, and polymorphism, except as inherited from the host language. This paper shows a form that such mechanisms can take in actor-oriented components, gives a formal structure, and describes a prototype implementation. The mechanisms support actor-oriented class definitions, subclassing, inheritance, and overriding. The formal structure imposes structural constraints on a model (mainly the “derivation invariant”) that lead to a policy to govern inheritance. In particular, the structural constraints permit a disciplined form of multiple inheritance with unambiguous inheritance and overriding behavior. The policy is based formally on a generalized ultrametric space with some remarkable properties. In this space, inheritance is favored when actors are “closer” (in the generalized ultrametric), and we show that when inheritance can occur from multiple sources, one source is always unambiguously closer than the other.

Abstract: The design of effective indicators and indicator systems requires a profound understanding of the relevant business context. Numerous relations and dependencies within an indicator system exist, which need to be analysed thoroughly: Many relations are based on implicit assumptions or sometimes not known by the management at all. This is of particular relevance for business success, since improperly used indicator systems may lead to ‘dysfunctional effects ’ like opportunistic behaviour. This paper outlines a method for designing and utilising indicator systems. It fosters a convenient and consistent definition and interpretation of indicator systems. Furthermore, it serves as a conceptual foundation for related performance management systems, such as dashboard systems. 1. Motivation

Abstract: The paper at hand presents a research prototype for using a metamodelling tool in the context of business process modelling. The prototype has been part of an e-commerce-related project and implements the mapping of business process models to workflow schemata. A meta-modelling tool has been used for implementing a modelling tool and the mapping. The analysis of the mapping is based on finding equivalent concepts in the source (MEMO-OrgML) and the target language (XPDL). Features which are not available in the source language have been added using special language elements. The paper also presents the idea of a generic mapping approach. Mappings from business process models to other process-oriented representations can be realised. The realisation of these mappings is similar to our approach. We will extend our tool with respect to support different target languages like BPEL4WS. The meta-modelling tool MetaEdit+ has been used for the prototypes. 1

Models built using visual forms which are representations of the domain concepts are easier to be understood and expressed by the people who work in this domain. Many projects produce modeling environments that offer only the domain concepts to the user but with a single graphic view that the user has to be satisfied with. In this paper, we present our framework for producing domain-specific modeling tools. This framework is independent of the graphic view. So, it can associate for the same domain several graphic views. Without focusing on the modeling graphical interface itself, this article presents a solution to support the generation of such interfaces. In addition, this framework improves the potential re-usability of view and domain descriptions. 1

The task of visualization, as it applies to computing, includes by default the notion of pluralism and perspectivism since there is an explicit attempt at representing one, often textual, interface in terms of a more graphical one. This desire for alternate perspectives is consistent with art theory and practice, and even though rigor and formalism generally mean different things to artists and computer scientists, there is room for collaboration and connection by applying artistic aesthetics to computing, while maintaining that which makes computing a viable, usable field. This new area is called aesthetic computing. Within this area, there is an attempt to balance qualitative with quantitative representational aspects of visual computing, recognizing that aesthetics creates a dimension that is consistent with supporting numerous visual perspectives. I introduce one aspect of aesthetic computing, with specific examples from our research and teaching to illustrate the potential and possibilities associated with alternate representations. We show that by linking with aesthetics, we surface some important philosophical and cultural questions regarding notation, which turn out to be at least as important as the algorithmic and procedural means of achieving customized model component representations.