Abstract. Business process modelling and analysis puts specific requirements on models used and the language for expressing those models. The models should be easily understandable and analysable. In this paper we study the requirements for such a language and introduce a language that satisfies those requirements to a large extent. It was developed in the Testbed project, which aims at developing a systematic approach to business process change. The language, called AMBER, has a graphical representation, and allows to model processes, data, and the organisation and people involved in a uniform and integrated way. On the basis of a formal foundation of the language, different analyses and tool support are available. We illustrate our approach with a realistic example.

The adoption of standards to improve interoperability in the automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding and other sectors could save billions. While interoperability standards have been created for a number of industries, problems persist, suggesting a lack of quality of the standards themselves. The issue of semantic standard quality is not often addressed. In this research we take a closer look at the quality of semantics standards, development processes, and survey the current state of the quality of semantic standards by means of a questionnaire that was sent to standards developers. This survey looked at 34 semantic standards, and it shows that the quality of semantic standards for inter-organizational interoperability can be improved. Improved standards may advance interoperability in networked business. Improvement of semantic standards requires transparency of their quality. Although many semantic standard development organisations already have quality assurance in place, this research shows that they could benefit from a quality measuring instrument.

This bibliography on parallel parsing and recognition of context-free languages covers most of the important publications in this area of computer science and natural language processing. The list of publications is preluded by an introduction which presents an overview of the field.

Abstract. This paper contains the results of a systematic literature review executed to determine the coverage of transaction standards in top information systems (IS) and management journals. Specifically, it aims to identify a research gap with respect to this topic. The top 25 journals are thoroughly searched and the selected publications are classified in order to make grounded statements. A moderate amount of literature found specifically aims at transaction standards. Hardly any research is found on quality aspects of transaction standards, which therefore counts as the research gap.

For business-driven service design and management, this paper outlines a reference framework called BHive that incorporates service, service contract, service architecture, and service portfolio life cycles, as well as service risk, service change, and service compliance management. BHive primarily serves as a map for identifying and positioning instruments for business-driven service design and management. BHive does not provide the level of detail and the sharpness of definitions that other frameworks do. However, BHive provides a level of holism that is not found in other frameworks. BHive can be perceived as a proposal to integrate existing frameworks in service design, management, and execution together with intra-organizational issues, inter-organizational issues, and functional and contractual aspects. KEYWORDSService design and management, Service life cycle, Standards and frameworks, Software services. 82 G.R. Gangadharan, Paul Oude Luttighuis