In real-time Business Analytics scenarios, like Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) or Operational Intelligence, speeding up ETL is fundamental to provide business users with up-to-date data in order to support decision-making process and to optimize business operations. Conventional ETL processes extract data from heterogeneous operational data sources, transform them according to some predefined semantic and syntactic rules, and finally load results into a new (relational or data warehouse) model, in order to be processed both for business monitoring or analysis. Usually the whole loading process is presented as a technical aspect, far from business facts. In real-time Business Analytics context the traditional ETL approach can still be valid, provided that ETL process has to be designed in a way that circumscribes individual business events and facts and makes them independent one from another. In this context we propose a control-flow-based approach to ETL process modeling, which starts from business facts identification, and represents ETL processes using BPMN notation, which is the foundation for machinereadable code. Our main contribution consists in a proposal for structuring ETL processes and related objects and in its application to a business case.

The paper presents Ma.Vi.C, a tool to visualize and manage contracts, and in particular Service Level Agreements (SLAs), in Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), in order to manage and visualize their composition in IT services chains scenarios. The model is also oriented to Service Networks, seen as a combination of participants, relations between them, service requests and offerings [1]. Services contracts and SLAs definition suffer from a lack of templates or standards that would allow providers accurately identifying elements to be inserted into the contract, and defining the correct form to express service specifications, obligations and so on. These aspects have a direct impact in the case of composition of services, because services choreography involves both functional and service levels aspects. We propose a framework, Ma.Vi.C, for designing and visualizing the composition of service contracts and to simplify contracts data handling. The framework is based on a set of model for modeling service contracts, topologies and rules, which are based on tree graph and XML.