Abstract. The increasing demands concerning the modifiability and connectivity of business processes cannot be met adequately anymore by relying on best practices only. There is an urgent need for a reference conceptual framework for studying, modeling, analyzing and designing business processes. The Language-Action Perspective (LAP), in particular Habermas ’ theory of Communicative Action offers a sound and rigid foundation for such a framework. In this paper, the DEMO-framework is presented. It builds on the LAP-based theoretical foundation of the DEMO methodology (Demo Engineering Methodology for Organizations). Several other LAP-based frameworks have been proposed in the past years. They are evaluated in a comparative review with the DEMO-framework. Several shortcomings of these frameworks are revealed and discussed. The practical applicability of the DEMO-framework is demonstrated using a small example.

Currently, standards for web services are being developed via three different initiatives (W3C, Semantic web services and ebXML). To the best of our knowledge, no theoretical perspectives underlie these standardization efforts. Without the benefit of a strong theoretical basis, the results, within and across these initiatives, have remained piecemeal. We suggest ‘Language-Action Theories ’ as a plausible perspective that can effectively define, assess and refine web services standards. In this paper, we first investigate the existing initiatives to identify commonalities that point to theories of ‘Language-Action ’ as an appropriate theoretical basis for web services standards. Next, we adapt work from these theories to develop a comprehensive reference framework for understanding web services standards. Finally, we use this reference framework to assess the three initiatives, and analyze the findings to provide insights for future development and refinement of web services standards. Keywords:

Semiotics is the formal doctrine of signs. Organizational Semiotics is a particular branch of Semiotics, concerned with understanding organizations as information systems. Information Systems ’ core concepts such as information and communication are very complex and ill-defined concepts, which should be analyzed in terms of more elementary notions such as semiotic signs. Business processes would then be seen as processes involving the creation, exchange and use of signs. Rejecting the existence of a totally objective reality, we adopt as our philosophical stance a radical relativistic model. In this model both human agents and artificial agents have a constructed knowledge about reality, which requires the agent active participation, and all knowledge is connected to a knowing agent. In this view, organizational activity becomes an information process based on the notion of responsible agent, and we propose a model that accommodates both the social dimension in organizational agents behavior and the relative autonomy that individual agents exhibit in organizations. The EDA (Epistemic-Deontic-Axiological) model, here proposed, enables the representation of agent informational states and simultaneously defines the conceptual communication framework. Agents use their knowledge (epistemic level) and take into account their obligations and authorizations (deontic level), which they may choose to accept or to violate, to decide what to do next, i.e. to define their goals. In the process they

In this paper, we summarize our work in the field of eGovernment. First, we identify a critical dual integration deficit in contemporary public administration. A new modus operandi is proposed to overcome the consequent problems. We try to implement and exploit these new business models using semantic technologies as the enabling technology infrastructure. For supporting this effort, we have conducted in depth domain analysis and modeling to create the necessary top-level reusable models for the overall eGovernment domain. We call this set of models Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA). GEA provides the knots for a reference eGovernment domain ontology.

We argue that the recent move to service-oriented computing as a dominant paradigm presents an opportunity to the Language-Action community. Service-oriented computing emphasizes communication among independent services as the basic composition unit for application development. This view maps well against the basic premise underlying the Language-Action perspective that the basic unit of a software application is a communicative act. This core mapping presents an opportunity for this community to contribute to mainstream application development practices and technology development while providing theoretical leadership. A prerequisite to exploiting this opportunity is providing bridges from work on business modeling done in this community against the technology stack being developed for services-oriented computing. In this paper we provide a preliminary mapping between the two which points to opportunities and problems for conducting research following the Language-Action perspective.

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This paper describes a normative multi-agent system architecture and a software system which implements that architecture. Our purpose is to provide a framework for designing agents with a social competence. We assume that this social competence in organizations is related to multi-agent co-ordination, which in turn involves information sharing, either dynamically (through communication) or statically (through institutions or culture), based on norms of various types (e.g. perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, evaluative). Since ‘information’ is an ill-defined word we prefer to adopt the semiotics framework, which uses the ‘sign ’ as the elementary concept. Information as a composition of signs is then analyzed at different levels, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the social level. Based on different properties of signs, found at different semiotic levels, we propose here a new agent model, designated by EDA (an acronym for its three component modules: Epistemic-Deontic-Axiological), to represent agent informational states and simultaneously define its conceptual communication framework. The EDA model components incorporate an explicit representation of the institutional roles the agent can play, where a role is defined as a set of services plus a set of policies. A service is represented by a procedural abstraction, whereas a policy is represented by a deontic statement, either specifying an obligation-to-do or an authorization-to-do.